And Then I Read: LI'L ABNER Volume 1

Images © Capp Enterprises, Inc.

"Li'l Abner" is a comic strip I grew up reading, the Sunday pages at least, and thought it was pretty good stuff. At around age 12 I found the Capp trade paperback, "The Life and Times of the Shmoo," and I loved everything about it, from the humor to the social commentary to the cartooning. In the mid 1960s I grew disillusioned with Capp when he began attacking left-wing figures like Joan Baez in the strip. I felt somewhat betrayed, and stopped reading the...