Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years vol. 1 1954-55

Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years #1

by Al Capp, Frank Frazetta (Illustrator), Denis Kitchen (Editor)

Before legendary artist Frank Frazetta became an American institution for his lush paintings, he was drawing muscular hillbillies and scantily clad women for an earlier American institution: the comic strip L'il Abner, which boasted 60 million readers daily.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Humor

128 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 2003

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.]

I am not Al Capp's biggest fan based almost solely on most years of his daily strip. I find the endless repetition of certain plot points and the mocking of those living in poverty troublesome and tiresome, and while cartoonists who know more about cartooning that I venerate Capp as a draftsman, a certain stiffness in his figures brings him down in my estimation. There are times, however, that Capp overcomes the writing problems and produced some delightful and very clever work, at least for a story or two. The Sunday pages in this collection transcend most dailies in multiple ways. The stories are much shorter, escaping the tedium I often find in the extended daily sequences, they seldom trade on the tired familiar Capp motifs, and the writing is consistently clever. It may be sacrilege to say so, but I prefer Frank Frazetta's art to Capp's. The stiffness already mentioned is not there at all. He draws in a fine faux-Capp style, and certainly is as good a visual storyteller. This rates as one of the better Li'l Abner books I have read.