After Milt Gross my favorite comic strip artist was Al Capp, and my very favorite Capp is "Fearless Fostick," a comic strip within a strip, inside of "L'il Abner. " Every once in a while Abner just had to stop what he was doing in his own story, sit under a tree, and read the latest goings-on of his favorite detective, Fearless Fostick. Click to enlarge.
Of course, Fosdick was a takeoff of Dick Tracy. Imagine that, a strip that made fun of another strip! Capp even made fun of Chester Gould by creating a cartoonist character who was always being fired from the syndicate, named Lester Gooch.Somebody who knew Gould is supposed to have said that Gould had had enough of Fostick. "Enough is enough!", he was supposed to have said. Someone else quoted Gould as saying that he loved Fostick because everytime Capp did a Fostick strip a couple more papers would pick up Dick Tracy.
Fostick was immensely popular in its day. If anybody ever complained about the violence it never reached my kid ears.
Fostick was a goldmine for Wildroot Cream-Oil. When I was a kid I used to use Wildroot just because Fostick used it. You trusted Fostick. If he said a product was OK that was all the argument that you needed.
Fostick was immensely popular in its day. If anybody ever complained about the violence it never reached my kid ears. Fostick was a goldmine for Wildroot Cream-Oil. When I was a kid I used to use Wildroot just because Fostick used it. You trusted Fostick. If he said a product was OK that was all the argument that you needed. 
Just for the heck of it, here's a picture Capp drew of himself. And, by the way, the sample pages above are taken from three different stories. If you couldn't figure out what the story was, that's why.
22 comments:
Whats really gross is how all these classic strips are being drawn by random guys today. My paper still prints "Bringing up father" and Blondie!
http://comicspage.com/ Tribune syndicate seems to be responsible for a lot of this creative graverobbing, King Features is really bad for it too, of course all the syndicates are dinosaurs
awesome
Beautiful, thanks Eddie!
Thanks again, Eddie!
Al Capp was brilliant. I love the way he caricatures Gould's humorlessness. I want to go home & copy his drawings a la JohnK.
Does King Features still own Popeye? I wish they'd do something with him, (tho' if they did I might wish they hadn't.)
This is one of the things i thank Mike Fontanelli for. He re-introduced me to Capp's work when we were back at Warners.
And honestly, i think he my have put you up to this post Eddie.
Ken: Mike sure is a booster for L'il Abner! He did a lot to make me realize how much I like Capp and I'm very grateful for that.
Fostick is another thing. I've been a huge fan of Fostick since I was a kid. that's the only strip that I used to cut out and save in a desk drawer. I'd have saved Milt Gross too but my papers didn't carry him and his best work was before my time.
(1) Yes, King Features still owns Popeye. The fact that the recent Popeye DVD release came only just recently was because of a large-scale wrangle with them over rights. They've been aggressive in merchandising Popeye. Would that they'd put more into the comic strip (getting rid of Bobby London was a mistake).
(2) Capp was indeed brilliant, though his later (right-wing) politics got him into trouble. Ironically, both he and Gould would have seen eye to eye on politics.
(3) The guying of Dick Tracy, down to the labels and character designs, was brilliant -- and in a peverse way, loving, because Capp obviously dug deep to understand what made the original tick.
Fearless Fosdick is probably one of the funniest comics I have ever read in my life! Humorous violence is my favorite thing about being alive, and Fosdick does it the best!
Thanks for this post, Eddie!
This stuff is great! Is there a compilation book of it?
Nice pics Uncle Eddie!, is that a paperback or something? They look great.
"Dick Tracy" wasn't the only comic strip Capp parodied in "Li'l Abner"; he also savaged (and I DO mean "savage") "Little Orphan Annie" (Little orphan Goniff); "Mary Worth" (Mary Worm---Allen Saunders did a payback parody of Capp as "Hal Rapp", a drunken, letcherous slob); "Rex Morgan M.D." (Rex Moonlight---you have to see this one to belive it!); and a dead-on parody of his best friend Milton Caniff's "Steve Canyon" (as "Steve Cantor", down to the lettering and inking style), as well as at least THREE different take-offs on "Superman" ("The Flying Avenger" in 1941, "Jack Jawbreaker" in '47, and "Mewlvin the Flying Martian" in 1953), all side-splittingly hilarious.
i like your blog a lot. Are there books of Fosdick strips?
Joe: Unbelievable!!!! I had no idea he had so many parodies going. Now I want to read them all! Thanks for bringing that up!
Eric: Yeah, it seems like Capp began the now universal practice of putting politics into comic strips, which is a mistake in my opinion. Comedy is already subversive, all by itself. It doesn't need topical references.
Ridiculing real people in the news makes an artist lazy. It's too easy to get a laugh that way.
Mood: Glad you asked! Kitchen Sink put out two books. One is just called "Fearless Fostick." I don't know if they're still in print. I wonder if there's any others I don't know about. It sounds like all the parodies Joe mentioned would make a great book.
wow!
violence is used really funny in those strips.
and now i'm dying to get in "Jack Jawbreaker", now that I've heard of it.
Comic strip parodies can be great. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to flip thru some old MAD issues...
Man, that is funny.
I love the understatement in those parodies. I think if you really want to savage something you should try to recreate it exactly only slightly exxagerating elements you want to mock.
I find that the best impressionists tend to exxagerate minor details like odd speech patterns and vocal inflections.
There was a multi-volume collection of Lil' Abner Sundays released about a year ago under the name "Lil' Abner: the Frazetta Years". You can find the Mary Worm and Steve Canyon parodies in there.
Al Capp sounds like he was a real character. Ironically, it seems as he was kind of like Ham Fisher himself.
What kills the late Lil Abner political satire (compared even to his earlier work) is that it's so cruel, so misunderstanding. Walt Kelly could be even more specific with political humor but he had much more compassion.
Actually, Harold Gray started the political commentary in "Little Orphan Annie" during the 30s, against Roosevelt's "New Deal" policies; Capp didn't start to do overt politcal commentary until the late 40s...before that, his satire was directed towards the more mundane cultural idiosyncransies of the day, i.e. zoot suits, movie stars, big business, advertising, radio, other comics,etc., and quite savagely, too.
The "Jack Jawbreaker" storyline was a veiled recounting of the copyright woes that was plaguing Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of "Superman", who at the time were trying (unsuccessfully) to get a bigger piece of the pie from DC, as well as a backhanded slap to Capp's own syndicate, who was keeping the lion's share of the profits from "Li'l Abner" (he would later successfully sue United feature Syndicate for the ownership of his strip that year). Jack Jawbreaker himself was the ultimate super-hero parody, a disembodied muscular arm with a propeller growing out of the shoulder, that brutally decimnated evil-doers while shouting the battle-cry "JACK JAWBREAKER FIGHTS CRIME!!". The story was reprinted in Li'l Abner #79 (Nov. 1950), published by Capp's own comic book company, Toby Press, which he founded with the money he made after winning back the rights of his creation.
Hey Eddie - It's FOSDICK, not "Fostick", for cryin' out loud!
(If anyone should Google it, your otherwise excellent post won't come up - because you've managed to mispell the character's name every time!)
Hey Ken - don't forget that you got me started again on Jack Benny and Rat Fink!
Hey Joe - Capp decimated Superman in the pages of Li'l Abner one last time in 1966, in a perverse and typically hilarious storyline called "Chicken Soup-erman"
I have that continuity complete. I'll bring it to ASIFA to scan and post, so everyone can enjoy it.
It's worth it, it's brilliant...
Cool, Mike...I can't wait to see it!!
MIKE: Holy Cow, I did spell it wrong, and the book was on the table beside me when I wrote!
Joe: Jack Jawbreaker? I gotta look that up!
Al Capp did use assistants however, some rather famous ones at certain times (Frank Frazetta). So was that always Al Capp aping Chester Gould. or was it sometimes someone else aping Al Capp aping Gould?
I miss Dick Tracy, but never could handle even the best intentions to keep it going after Gould.
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