Li'l Abner: 1953 Volume 19

Li'l Abner Dailies #19

by Al Capp

Abner joins an all ladies' wrestling league and he and his new bride Daisy Mae welcome into the world their very own bundle of joy, "Mysterious" Yokum. This nineteenth volume reprints the 1953 daily strips and includes an illustrated introduction by Tom Andrae detailing the history of the long-lost Fearless Fosdick television series.

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1994

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Michael P. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am not much of a LI'L ABNER fan. Too much repetition of a few plot elements, to reliant of laughing at stupid people, and not usually as clever as the strip's fans think it is. There were a couple of good years with less repetition, the characters seemed a little less stupid, and there were some very clever concepts and jokes. This volume comes after those years. Daisy Mae nearly marries the wrong person-again, Abner is dumber than before, and except for a brief sequence involving the character Tyrone Showers near the end, there is little clever about this sad little volume.