Li'l Abner

http://lil-abner.com/

Only found out about this comic strip recently..wish I found it sooner lol. It's pretty funny and of course, artistically appealing. Apparently the strip was so popular back in the day, the creator Al Capp was a celebrity! Jesus. I doubt that would happen now. Since majority of comic strips are immature-looking and unfunny :/

anyway, thougts on this strip?

edited 22nd Nov '14 7:10:55 AM by teddy

One of the classics of newspaper comic writing. I've barely read it, but I have some books that feature examples of it and I do want to see more.

There's an exceedingly bright line separating people who can remember that strip from people who can't—somewhere around the age of 50, at this point. (Even though the strip ran until 1977, its cultural moment had seemingly passed far earlier, and by the '70s very few papers printed it.)

To hear tell, it was as big as Peanuts in its day, but unlike Schulz's creations, it had no real afterlife or tenacity in cultural memory. Capp's politics might have had something to do with that—he was unfashionably pro-Vietnam War, and the tastemakers turned on him furiously in the late '60s. He's gotten an odd mix of the memory-hole treatment, combined with (sometimes oddly constrained) nostalgia.

It was big enough that a Broadway musical was adapted from the strip.

A lot of the classics of newspaper comics are pretty much forgotten unless you're into that - name me one person on this forum who knows about Pogo or Krazy Kat. Even in the case of, say, Dick Tracy or Little Orphan Annie, we only know about them from adaptations.

That and the fact that a lot of the classic comics ran for so long they rarely get reprinted.

edited 24th Nov '14 9:01:16 AM by Aldo930

I'm VERY familiar with this strip. I discovered it in a collection at my local library, and years later got a number of the excellent Kitchen Sink collections of the strip. The strip started out in 1934 as very much a comic soap opera with a lot of social and political commentary. It became much less of a soap opera as time went on and much more of a direct parody of then-current events. Frank Frazetta famously worked on the strip in the early 50's.

Sadly, Li'l Abner's quality started to fade in it's last years. Al Capp, the strip's creator, became more and more conservative as time went on, and in the 70's Li'l Abner's tone reflected that. The later stuff isn't nearly as much fun to read.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I know about Pogo and Krazy Kat.

edited 14th Dec '14 3:19:30 PM by Robbery

I'm familiar with Pogo, less so with Krazy Kat (although I do know of it and the general themes involving bricks and whatnot), and know Li'l Abner reasonably well, thanks to my dad being a fan- I bought him collections as gifts for several years running.

... and I'll see your Pogo and Krazy Kat and raise you Alley Oop and Little Nemo

I am reasonably familiar with Little Nemo and have been meaning to see more Alley Oop (most of what I know is, well, the song).