YMMV / Li'l Abner

• Anvilicious: The strip was quite shameless about hammering out Al Capp's various views. This got worse as Al aged and became more aggressively conservative, which led to the strip's sharp decline in popularity.
• Seasonal Rot: The strip fell into this pretty hard. For a couple of decades (40s-60s), it was the most popular comic strip in America by a mile, with an estimated daily readership of 70 million in the US alone (back when the country's population was ~180 million.) The strip produced omnipresent merchandise and even a few live-action films. Al Capp was called the modern-day Mark Twain. Characters from the strip, such as Daisy Mae, Sadie Hawkins, and Lena the Hyena were part of the Small Reference Pools. It also spawned an extremely successful spinoff character, the Shmoo, which was a cultural phenomenon in its own right. The main reason it died off in popularity was because of its complete alienation of the baby boomer generation. Al Capp became increasingly conservative in his later years, and the strip started taking regular potshots at the civil rights movement^note Although Capp had a mixed relationship with the movement. On one hand, Capp supported civil rights for African-Americans in 1949 publicly and even protested the National Cartoonists Society disallowing women. His studio also helped create Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. But he didn't necessarily support groups asking him for support, once claiming a group concerned with white violence on black people wasn't doing enough to stop the whole issue., hippies, and anti-war protesters, including an infamous feud with John Lennon. Perhaps even worse, in 1971, Al Capp got caught in multiple near-simultaneous sex scandals that led to many newspapers dropping the strip out of protest. Due to these two factors, the strip's popularity plummeted in the 70s, until it finally ended in 1977 by Capp himself.

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