Press: Mr. Dogpatch

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Al Capp, 1909-79

Their names were enough to make most Americans guffaw: Moonbeam McSwine, Fearless Fosdick, Lonesome Polecat, Joe Btfsplk (pronounced Btfsplk). For 43 years they frolicked across the funny pages lampooning the foibles of the high and mighty and mouthing the pungent politics of their raspy-voiced creator, Al Capp. He called his hillbilly vaudeville Li'l Abner, and it made him a wealthy man, though not an especially happy one. Racked by emphysema and distressed by the social changes he saw around him, Capp abruptly retired in 1977. He took up a reclusive life in Cambridge, Mass., where he died last week at age 70.

Capp's Dogpatch was home not only for wide-eyed, molasses-brained Abner Yokum, but for his scrappy, pipe-smoking Mammy, his Pappy and his wonderfully curvaceous inamorata, Daisy Mae.

Their amoozin' but confoozin' antics were eventually syndicated in 900 newspapers with an estimated readership of 90 million. Li'l Abner inspired a Broadway musical, two movies and a television show, earned Capp $500,000 a year at its peak and introduced Sadie Hawkins Day, the Schmoo, Kickapoo Joy Juice and Lower Slobbovia into the American lexicon.

In the 1960s Capp soured on his liberal friends. Said he: "They seemed to me smug and sanctimonious." He traded in his old Establishment targets, like the baby-kissing Senator Jack S. Phogbound, and replaced them with the likes of Radical Folk Singer Joanie Phoanie, who sang of protest between mouthfuls of caviar, and S.W.I.N.E.—Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything. A favorite target of campus hecklers, Capp received notoriety during a lecture tour in 1971, pleading guilty to attempted adultery after a woman student accused him of making indecent advances. As Capp became more conservative, Li'l Abner's popularity waned, and he was down to 400 subscribing papers at the end. Admitted Capp: "If you have any sense of humor about your strip, and I had a sense of humor about mine, you knew that for three or four years Abner was wrong. Oh hell, it's like a fighter retiring. I stayed on longer than I should have." But by then, his reputation as the Mark Twain Li'l Abner of cartoonists was secure.