Capp takes his distinct brand of satire to new heights as he tackles two of the biggest icons of 1944, Frank Sinatra and Dick Tracy. This tenth volume reprints the 1944 daily strips and includes an introduction to Fearless Fosdick by Dick Tracy writer Max Allan Collins. Also included is an article that puts the strip into the historical context of 1944.
Alfred Gerald Caplin (1909-1979), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist. He is best known as the creator, writer and artist of the satirical comic strip Li'l Abner, which run for 43 years from 1934 to 1977.
Capp was born in 1909 in New Haven, Connecticut, of a poor family of East European Jewish heritage. His childhood was scared by a serious accident: after being run over by a trolley car, nine years old Alfred had his left leg partially amputated. This early trauma possibly had an impact on Capp's cynical humour, as later represented in his strips. His father, Otto Philip Caplin, a failed businessman and an amateur cartoonist, is credited for introducing Al and his two brothers to making comics. After some training in art schools in New England, in 1932 Al Capp moved to New York with the intent of becoming a newspaper cartoonist. The same year he married Catherine Wingate Cameron. In the first couple of years of his career Capp worked as an assistant/ghost artist on Ham Fischer's strip 'Joe Palooka', while preparing to pitch his own comic strips to the newspaper syndicate. His strip Li'l Abner was launched on Monday, August 13, 1934, in eight American newspapers to immediate success. The comic started as an hillibilly slapstick, then shifted over the year in the direction of satire, black humor and social commentary. The strip run until 1977, written and mostly drawn by Capp. A lifelong chain smoker, All Capp died in 1979 from emphysema at his home in South Hampton, New Hampshire.
I am still bored to contriving stupid people then mocking them for being stupid, and that applies to every character in this book. On the plus side, the stories are not all the same. Certainly, some are and many pieces of the story construction are familiar, but Capp introduces badly needed elements of sci-fi, horror, and mystery into these strips. I am not sure sci-fi and horror are right for a hillbilly strip, but in this case they make a welcome change from the repetition.