Today, we look at how the world of Dogpatch in Al Capp's L'il Abner dealt with visits from Santa Claus.
It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries. This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and three Christmas-themed comics from that strip.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Now, Day 2 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHAT WAS L'IL ABNER ABOUT?
Al Capp, then still going by his birth name of Alfred Caplin, was an assistant to Ham Fisher on the comic strip, Joe Palooka, about a heavyweight champion boxer. During an extended sequence of the strip by Capp during one of Fisher's vacations, Palooka runs into some hillbilly characters, including the brutish "Big Leviticus." Capp was inspired by this sequence to pitch a whole comic strip based on the concept (over the years, Fisher would argue that he played a role in the creation of Big Leviticus, and thus the creation of L'il Abner, but Capp, of course, denied Fisher having any role in those early strips). In any event, the strip, titled L'il Abner (named after the lead character, a much nicer version of Big Leviticus), became a quick success.
The concept of the strip was to follow around the residents of Dogpatch, USA (at one point, Capp actually placed Dogpatch in Kentucky, but he later changed his mind to keep it more generic), specifically the leads, the Yokum family (the name being a combination of yokel and hokum), L'il Abner and his parents, Mammy and Pappy. Pappy was a lazy do-nothing, while Mammy was basically the head of all Dogpatch "sassiety."
So here's the fascinating thing about L'il Abner. The original concept of the series was to mock hillbillies. As critics have noted over the years, the initial appeal of the strip was for people suffering in the Great Depression to suddenly have some folks that they could laugh at that were worse off than them! Capp had hitchhiked through the Appalachian mountains as a youth, and he had a number of stories from his youth to translate into the strip. So that was the original idea (and that's also why Capp quickly pulled back from saying the name of the state that Dogpatch was in, as he didn't want to offend anyone from Kentucky), but the strip soon evolved.
Basically, so long as you don't hate your leads and, again, the leads of the series were very likable, it is almost impossible to NOT slowly move on from actively mocking them and instead just following their adventures. And that's precisely what happened to Capp with the people of Dogpatch. It started off as a mean-spirited look, but it slowly but surely became a celebration of these good-hearted, wacky people. Capp, too, slowly introduced more and more wacky people into the series, and the strip became a hilarious mixture of fun adventures mixed in with occasional satire. Capp left most of his original mean-spiritiedness to be used in parodies of other comic strips (not all of the parodies were mean-spiritied, of course, as the initial and most famous parody, Fearless Fosdick, was a good-natured parody of Chester Gould, a cartoonist Capp admired. Fearless Fosdick was pretty much its own side series within a series. However, it is important to note that Gould was already a star when Capp broke into comics, so that was different from cartoonists who became big AFTER Capp. Those cartoonists he tended to be a lot less good-natured in his parodies of them. Which is hilarious in retrospect, as the people we're talking about here are legends like Will Eisner and Charles Schulz).
Also, Al Capp, in his own personal life, was an awful person. He was so bad that there was a big newspaper takedown of Capp in the early 1970s that essentially ruined his reputation for the rest of his life (and what we've learned about him since he passed away in 1979 has not made him come off any better. Exposing himself to women, trying to force himself on women, he was basically Harvey Weinstein before Harvey Weinstein was Harvey Weinstein). So if you don't want to read Li'l Abner because he was such a bad person, then fair enough. You'll get no argument from me.
HOW DID L'IL ABNER HANDLE VISITS FROM SANTA CLAUS TO DOGPATCH?
In this first Christmas strip, we see the roles of everyone in the family well exemplified, as Abner and Pappy are foolish enough to still believe that Santa Claus will come visit them, something that Mammy fosters in them, even as we see that it is Mammy who has to take care of Christmas single-handedly.
However, her family WERE nice guys, all in all, and so she was happy with her lot in life.
Click here to enlarge this first strip.
What's amusing is that after having that be an early concept in the strip, Capp then had Pappy MEET Santa Claus in the next year!
You could easily argue that this was part of the general evolution of the strip from one that was strictly, "What morons these people are" into a more fantastical comic strip.
Click here to enlarge this second strip.
Finally, we see the slowly expanded supporting cast, as we meet other residents of Dogpatch, including Hairless Joe, who assaults Santa Claus!
But don't worry, it was just a misunderstanding!
Click here to enlarge this third strip.
