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mygif

This is excellent. I’m also struck by how far Lil’ Abner has fallen out of the public consciousness despite being a monster hit for decades.

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mygif

@Dan Wallace, what happened was that the Sixties – where his New Deal-liberalism clashed with the far left counterculture – weren’t very kind to Capp.

In some ways, the whole genre of affectionate mocking of the hillbilly culture went out of fashion (is Hee-Haw still on?) somewhere between the movie release of Deliverance and the Jimmy Carter administration.

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Scavenger said on April 13th, 2010 at 10:56 am

Y’know, I’d never read this…but I know the story from an episode of MASH where Col. Potter reads the events over the camp loudspeaker.

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Badficwriter said on April 13th, 2010 at 12:06 pm

Wow. This sort of thing sets off my Feminist Rage(TM), generally, but it’s actually kind of cute. Probably because he’s SUCH an idiot.

And, Pimpleton is an *awful* last name. That poor girl would’ve married anybody.

And, and, those kids look like Popeye.

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mygif

Lil’ Abner is an absolutely awesome strip, both for writing and for art (at this point I believe it was being ghost-drawn by Frank Frazetta) and it deserves to make a resurgence, even if Capp did become a bloviating asshole in his later years. (Look up his confrontation with John Lennon during the “In Bed For Peace” business). I always pair Abner up with Pogo in my mind–both strips were similar in spirit and artwork, but with opposing political viewpoints. In fact, I believe Capp and Kelly were constantly responding to each other in comics form.

One thing about this story I’m surprised you left out: Daisy Mae’s constant run-ins with death after they get married, which must have been pretty nerve-wracking to the same savvy readers who had deduced that Abner “couldn’t” stay married. There’s one whole strip, I think, which is just a wide shot of Daisy, toting around a gigantic ham (for reasons too complicated to get into here, but suffice to to say, it’s not exactly a subtle metaphor) as a truck bears down on her. In 1952, it probably looked like that was it for Daisy. Capp was a sadistic bastard.

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mygif

D’oh, silly me, you linked to the whole story–people can see the business with the ham and the truck for themselves. My point still stands.

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mygif

Meh. I have always been a Pogo partisan, and have never seen the appeal of Li’l Abner.

But it’s interesting to read the wedding sequence; thank you for posting about it.

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Mary Warner said on April 13th, 2010 at 3:27 pm

What, there’s no divorce in Dogpatch? Abner could’ve gotten out of it if he really tried.
My Feminist Rage (TM) is always triggered by this sort of thing, as well. It’s always annoyed me that girls were so marriage-obsessed in fiction back then (and even now). But so what? This story is a classic, and it’s great to see how it actually happened. (I always assumed that she got him on Sadie Hawkins’ Day. I guess I was wrong. By the way, Sadie Hawkins is the one major contribution to popular culture from this strip that has truly lasted.)
Did she really say ‘I does’, as was mentioned on M*A*S*H? I really wanted to see that part.

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mygif

Jesus, either write about real comics or don’t use the word “comics” in the title of your blog post.

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Lister Sage said on April 13th, 2010 at 5:21 pm

Mary Warner: Not to incurr your Feminist Rage(TM), but women in general are still marriage obsessed. As a college professor once told my class: “I’ve been in the college mail room. I’ve seen all the bridal magazines they get.” I’ve got a friend who wants to get married, not because she really wants to, but because she thinks its social awkward that a woman not be married.

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mygif

the social pressure regarding getting married is on both genders. My family and friends keep confronting me on my lack of a family of my own…

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mygif

Okay, so… question- When did Capp decide to have L’il Abner make a deal with the Devil to unmake the marriage, to get Abner back to his swingin’ single glory days?

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mygif

I’ve never read much Li’l Abner, but Daisy’s pulchritude is not surprising — I’d been told about it a number of times. What I wasn’t prepared for was Abner himself looking like a Tom of Finland subject.

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mygif

@Prankster Frazetta started working on Li’l Abner in 1954, so he didn’t do this story. I’m not sure who Capp’s assistants were at this time.

@zach Comic strips are comics. Mind-blowingly, Li’l Abner collected Fearless Fosdick in both strip and book form!

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solid snake said on April 13th, 2010 at 9:04 pm

Nobody’s going to comment on Abner’s job as a “matress tester” for the Little Wonder matress company later on in the strip?

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mygif

The rightie loon that Capp became is as sad as the Dave Sim story, and my politics have always been notably more sympathetic to Kelly’s, but I’ve always been more amused and entertained by Li’l Abner than Pogo.

It’s also true, as an earlier poster noted, that it’s kind of striking how much this strip has faded from public consciousness; I’ve been waiting for the last few of weeks of the whole Sandra Bullock media frenzy for comedians and talk show hosts to make some crack about Jesse James being involved with third-string female Li’l Abner characters (“Bombshell McGee” is a Capp name if ever there was one).

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mygif

Neither Sim’s nor Capp’s politics diminish the remarkable quality of their work. I’ve gotta wonder, though, when Capp was told by an actual southerner, “Uh, Al, ‘yo’ is how we say ‘your,’ not ‘you.’ ” It couldn’t have been so very long after the strip reached national acclaim, but Capp must have figured he was stuck with how he did things.

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Mary Warner said on April 14th, 2010 at 12:48 am

Where exactly in the South is Dogpatch anyway? The accents vary quite a bit. I know that in a lot of the ‘Hill’ places, they say ‘yorr’ for ‘your’, and ‘you’ can be ‘ya’ or ‘yew’.
(Capp’s Southern dialect looks pretty bad at times, but I have seen much worse. I’ve read several Marvel comics that have Southerners using y’all in the singular, which makes no sense at all.)

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mygif

“Where exactly in the South is Dogpatch anyway? The accents vary quite a bit. I know that in a lot of the ‘Hill’ places, they say ‘yorr’ for ‘your’, and ‘you’ can be ‘ya’ or ‘yew’.”

According to Wikipedia, Dogpatch was originally in Kentucky (as a lifelong resident, this amuses me), but its location has varied over the years. I think the accents were whatever Capp thought was funny at the time.

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mygif

Part of its departure from the public consciousness is that, nothing significant has been done with the property in decades. An entire generation has grown up with this being, at best, a footnote.

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mygif

According to Wiki, they planned a revival in the early 90s, but his daughter vetoed it.

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mygif

Dogpatch was supposed to be in the Ozarks, which is the classic “hillbilly” territory.

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mygif

Just a quick note to PaulW:

If you seriously think that social pressure to marry is a strong for men as for women, you are deluding yourself. While I’m sure many men are pressured by their families to marry, I don’t really see ANY societal pressure for men to marry, and certainly not on a scale that women are generally faced with (i.e. a woman’s worth often hinges on her ability to land a good husband).

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Snorre M said on April 15th, 2010 at 6:35 am

Happy news: a reprinting of the complete Li’l Abner (dailies AND sundays) is starting off this spring. Hopefully this will get it somewhat back into public consciousness.

By the way, I’m 20 years old, starting reading it some ten years back as I stumbled across a book whose cover consisted of Daisy Mae (need I tell more?), but now read it basically because I find it to be one of the most hilarious strips ever. Few comics make me laugh REAL hard, but Li’l Abner is one of them. Capp was a genius.

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mygif

Hah I’m actually the first comment to your great read!?

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