The Gray Area

Saturday Surprise Day.

Bakc from my holidays I have some fresh goodies. Here is a four week parody of Little Orphan Annie in the little Abner Sundays by Al Capp, who strangly chose to parody Milton Caniff's name for it instead of the actual artist. I was aware of Capp's earlier Superman parody and his later parodies of Mary Worth and Steve Canyon. But this one escaped me. If there is anyone with actual Sunday color copies of these, I would love to know.

 And here is the color version, as sent to me by Albo Aquilugo.

 

It's Not Legal!

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Fearless Fossdick was one of the most ingenious creations of Al Capp. Billed as Li'l Abner's gavorite comic strip character, it was in fact a parody of Dick Tracy, that took over the strip for whole stretches at the time. Fossdick also had his own strip, a series of one tier ad gags for Wildroot hair tonic. It's as wild as anything Capp (and his associates) would make. You can see how Capps's humor influenced even the young Harvey Kurtzman, who did similar parodies and gags in his own creation, Mad.

I don't know how many of these strips were made, but you see them all through the fifties in newspapers and magazines. I got a couple that I was able to scan myself, the rest come from online microfiche sources (and are a but more grey). No one has ever made a ,ist of them, so consider this a start.

Cream of the Crop

Saturday Leftover day.

These Li'l Abner Cream of Wheat pop up in so many magazines, that I never scanned them or tried to see how many different ones were made. So I started amending that and will scan them from now on. I suspect there may be more than one would suspect.

My Favorite Spoof

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Fearless Fosdick was one of the earliest comic strip imitations, done by Al Capp in his regular strip Li'l Abner. Fossdck was Abner's favorite hero and became so popular that he often had his own adventures. He also became the face of Wildroot hair tonic for a while, which gave him his own adventures outside of Abner. I don't thnk these have ever been proberly collected or even recorded. I wouldn't know how long they ran or when they began or even how involved Al Capp himself was with these - but they sure look perty.

Clean As A Thistle

Wednesday Advertising Day.

In addition to the Li'l Abner pages I showed last week, here are some of the ads Al Capp did (or at least his studio).

Li'l Friz

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

A couple of years ago Dark Horse published a full color version of all the Li'l Abner Sunday pages that were (at least partially) pencilled by Frank Frazetta between 1955 and 1962 for the Al Capp studios. They are wonderfuly annotated by Denis Kitchen and I recommend them highly, but unfortunately, they had to use printed samples and as you can see here the quality of the samples wasn't always as good from week to week. That is the hard aprt about reprint books these days. To find the best possibly copies sometimes can take years> Fantagraphics had to postpone their Pogo reprint series several times (they are up to book three now) and I could suggest many book projects, but do not have the complete runs necessary for them. That makes the excellent work Dean Mulhanny is doing at IDW all the more exceptional. All their books are beautifully restored and they combine the best of the old material and the new computer techniques.

Fortunately, for online publication the standards are a bot lower. Here are a couple of Frazetta's later pages. Some in better condition than the ones in the Dark Horse book, others about the same.