Seuss for an upcoming anthology about famous cartoonists. And he recently finished a comics style mini-bio of Dr. Speaking of which, Denis’s latest exhibitions are “The Art of Harvey Kurtzman,” which opens this Friday, March 8th at the Museum of American Illustration in New York, and a show of underground comix art, opening next week in Lucerne, Switzerland. Oh, and he still draws comics, and curates on the side. Today he’s simultaneously an art, literary, and merchandising agent (he represents the estates of Capp, Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and others), a book packager, and a writer. He founded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and oversaw it for 18 years. Capp referred to Fisher in a 1950 Atlantic Monthly essay as a “monster,” and boasted that his death in 1955 was “a personal victory,” and “that driving Fisher to suicide was his greatest accomplishment.”ĭenis Kitchen, the book’s co-author, good-humoredly refers to himself as “a very confused man who can’t seem to pick a career and stick with it.” He began as an underground cartoonist in the late 1960s and was a publisher for 30 years: back in the ’90s his Kitchen Sink Press released 27 volumes of Abner daily strips from 1934 to 1961. The book describes his intense, 20 year feud with his former boss, Joe Palooka‘s Ham Fisher-who he caricatured as Happy Vermin, a fat, ruthless, mercenary cartoonist-in often chilling detail.
He ruthlessly raged against fellow professionals, with real life maliciousness as well as in print, if he felt they had wronged him or that their popularity threatened to overshadow his own. But all too often such attacks were driven by personal vindictiveness and bitter quests for revenge. His “Mary Worm,” a battle-axe busybody, supposedly provoked Mary Worth writer Allen Saunders, who was actually his friend, to retaliate with a plotline about “Hal Rapp,” an egotistical cad. It could also be a calculated publicity hoax along the lines of the Jack Benny – Fred Allen radio feud: His parodies of popular funnies- Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Steve Canyon, etc.-often prefigure Harvey Kurtzman’s iconic mid-1950s Mad comic book satires in both style and sensibility.Ĭapp’s mockery could target corporate injustices against comic book creators, as with DC Comics’ exploitation of Superman‘s Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
shows, movie stars, and generations of pop singers from Sinatra to Elvis to the Beatles and, most notoriously, Joan Baez. It also details Capp’s many spoofs: of books (author Margaret Mitchell threatened him and his syndicate with a lawsuit for his lampoon of Gone with the Wind), plays, movies, T.V. Steven Heller describes the book as “spicy,” a word that also applies to the strips themselves, always bursting with provocatively erotic females.
I am sure that he is the best satirist since Laurence Sterne.” Capp was at his peak through the 1940s and ’50s, entertaining tens of millions of newspaper readers.Īnd with IDW’s new release of the fifth volume in its series of Abner dailies and color Sundays, this one featuring Fearless Fosdick, his work continues to delight fans of classic quality comics.Īnd now, both his dark and light sides are chronicled in Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, a valuable, thorough, and sensitive 300-page biography of this contradictory and deeply troubled individual, written by Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen. My copy of a 1953 paperback collection has a foreword by Charlie Chaplin and an intro by John Steinbeck, who writes, “I think Capp may very possibly be the best writer in the world today. At its best, it ridiculed the powerful and pompous in politics and culture with shrewd insight, rollicking humor, and a distinctly lush, elegant drawing style.Ībner rapidly gained unprecedented popularity and ran for 40-plus years. It began in 1934, the Depression era, and was centered around the fictional, dirt-poor Appalachian town inhabited mostly by innocent yokels and conniving scoundrels. Capp also created Li’l Abner, once one of America’s most acclaimed comic strips. And, as the interview below suggests, there may be more.
Most disgraceful was his attempted rape of a number of women, from college co-eds to Grace Kelly. No doubt about it: Al Capp engaged in depraved behavior.