The wizard of dogpatch: the wretched life and amazing art of cartoonist Al Capp.

• Author: Bagge, Peter
• Position: Biography

Everything about the life and art of Al Capp, creator of the mid-century comic strip masterpiece Li'l Abner, was brash and over the top. Even the way he lost his left leg at the age of 9 was right out of a Warner Brothers cartoon: He got run over by a streetcar. As one might expect, that traumatic event affected the rest of Capp's life for good and for ill. It inspired him to become good at something not requiring the use of two legs, but it also compounded his innate and profound self-loathing. The lifelong pain and embarrassment it caused him (Capp always walked with an awkward, comical gait) contributed to his negative, curmudgeonly psyche.

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Even before the accident, Capp had a tough row to hoe, as biographer Michael Schumacher and former underground comics publisher Denis Kitchen reveal in their fine new biography Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary. Born Alfred Caplin in New Haven in 1909 to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Capp quickly exhibited the traits that defined his life: ambition, creativity, and a wicked sense of humor, along with an explosive, hair-trigger temper. His lovable yet ne'er-do-well father dragged the family from city to city, starting one failed business after another, while his stoic, no-nonsense mother occasionally had to rummage through the neighbors' trash at night looking for something to feed her children the next morning. As a young man in the 1930s, Capp had to drop out of school just to feed himself, while cunningly sneaking into one art school after another and disappearing before the tuition payment was due. As with many Depression survivors, these hardscrabble beginnings eventually turned Capp into a money-obsessed miser who by the 1960s grew to despise the younger generation for having it so easy.

Debuting in 1934, Li'l Abner was a unique mix: bawdy, burlesque humor, featuring the musclebound yet child-like Abner Yokum and his backwoods clan. It quickly transcended this hillbilly setting, taking on a strong satirical tone. Capp used his strip to spoof not just other comic strips (most famously with Fearless Fosdick, his send-up of Dick Tracy) but also theater, movies, and politicians. He was doing what Mad magazine became famous for a full decade before Mad existed. His strip was intricately well-crafted: simultaneously and in equal measures loud, gaudy, sexy, and detailed. It was a masterful blend of high and low humor, "pretty" and "ugly" art. The strip clearly was not for...