Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary - Hardcover

Schumacher, Michael; Kitchen, Lind & Associates, LLC

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1608196232 ISBN 13: 9781608196234

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2013

Synopsis

More than thirty years have passed since Al Capp's death, and he may no longer be a household name. But at the height of his career, his groundbreaking comic strip, Li'l Abner, reached ninety million readers. The strip ran for forty-three years, spawned two movies and a Broadway musical, and originated such expressions as "hogwash" and "double-whammy." Capp himself was a familiar personality on TV and radio; as a satirist, he was frequently compared to Mark Twain.

Though Li'l Abner brought millions joy, the man behind the strip was a complicated and often unpleasant person. A childhood accident cost him a leg-leading him to art as a means of distinguishing himself. His apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, started a twenty-year feud that ended in Fisher's suicide. Capp enjoyed outsized publicity for a cartoonist, but his status abetted sexual misconduct and protected him from the severest repercussions. Late in life, his politics became extremely conservative; he counted Richard Nixon as a friend, and his gift for satire was redirected at targets like John Lennon, Joan Baez, and anti-war protesters on campuses across the country.

With unprecedented access to Capp's archives and a wealth of new material, Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen have written a probing biography. Capp's story is one of incredible highs and lows, of popularity and villainy, of success and failure-told here with authority and heart.

About this title

About the Author:

Denis Kitchen created Mom's Homemade Comics in 1968 as a self-published underground cartoonist in Milwaukee. A year later, he formed Krupp Comic Works, Inc., a hippie comix empire. Kitchen is also the founder of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Since the '70s, he has been both an agent for and publisher of comics and books. He lives in Shutesbury, Massachusetts.

Michael Schumacher has written biographies of Allen Ginsberg, Eric Clapton, Phil Ochs, Francis Ford Coppola, George Mikan, and, most recently, comics pioneer Will Eisner. His other recent books include Wreck of the Carl D. and Mighty Fitz. He lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Schumacher, author of Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics (2010), and Kitchen, the influential cartoonist and underground publisher, join forces for this sterling biography of the creator of Li’l Abner. Capp, who died in 1979, is little known today, but he was once a media superstar. Li’l Abner, the newspaper comic strip about hillbillies in the fictional southern town of Dogpatch, ran from 1934 to 1977, taking the world by storm with its larger-than-life comic characters, its eccentric dialect, and its increasingly outrageous (and controversial) satire on social trends, politics, movies, music, and other targets of its creator’s ire. Capp started out in the days when hit comic strips could drive newspaper sales, and the strips’ creators could assume movie-star-like status. Capp was a fascinating fellow: a savvy writer but a merely talented artist (he was great with faces, weaker with everything else); sexually adventurous (in later life, his peccadilloes would destroy his professional career); almost gleefully cantankerous (he seemed to enjoy the controversy his outspoken right-wing views brought him)—a man whose tales of a fictional clan of hillbillies almost immediately made him a household name and who spent the rest of his life trying to maintain his celebrity status. In this detailed and insightful biography, the authors do an excellent job of bringing Capp back from obscurity and reminding us how influential and popular the daily comics used to be. --David Pitt

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1608196232
• ISBN 13: 9781608196234
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320