Review by Win Wiacek
Al Capp’s Li’l Abner is rightly considered one of the greatest comic strips ever created, a devastatingly satirical, superbly illustrated, downright brilliant comedic masterwork that lampooned anything and everything America held dear and reshaped their popular culture.
Apart from the satirical and funny bits you can say pretty much the same about Chester Gould’s legendary lawman Dick Tracy – a landmark creation that has influenced all popular fiction, not simply comics. Baroque villains, outrageous crimes and fiendish death-traps have pollinated the work of numerous strips, shows and movies since then/ As impressive is Tracy’s studied use – and startlingly accurate predictions – of crime fighting technology and techniques, giving the world a taste of cop thrillers, police procedurals and forensic mysteries such as CSI decades before our current fascination took hold.
In August 1942 Alfred Gerald Caplin, as he didn’t prefer to be known, took a studied potshot at the cartooning game, joyously biting the hand that fed him (grudgingly and far from enough) when he introduced a frantic, barbed parody of Tracy into Li’l Abner.
As depicted by cartoonist-within-a-cartoon “Lester Gooch”, Fearless Fosdick is a deadpan, compulsively honest, straight-laced cop who works for a pittance in a corrupt, venal crime-plagued city, controlled by shifty, ungrateful authorities – i.e. typical bosses. Fosdick slavishly follows the exact letter of the law, if not the spirit: always over-reacting, and often shooting litterbugs or jaywalkers whilst letting bandits and murderers escape.
The extended gag began as a sly poke at strip cartoonists and syndicates whom Capp portrayed as slavering maniacs and befuddled psychotics manipulated by ruthless, shameless, rapacious exploiters. It became so popular on its own admittedly bizarre merits that Fosdick’s sporadic appearances quickly generated licensed toys and games, a TV puppet show and a phenomenally popular advertising deal for Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic.
In 1956 Simon and Schuster published Al Capp’s Fearless Fosdick: His Life and Deaths which forms the basis of the classy Kitchen Sink softcover under review here.
Prefaced with an absorbing and informative introduction by award-winning crime and comics writer Max Allan Collins, who took over Dick Tracy when Gould retired, this outrageous tome relates five of the very best felonious fiascos and forensic farces. It begins with ‘Introducing: AnyFace!’ from 1947, wherein Abner is hired to protect cartoonist Lester Gooch as he crafts the tale of a crook with a plastic face. The fiend is un-catchable since he can mimic anybody, constantly fooling Fosdick into shooting the wrong guy. Eventually the cop starts killing people pre-emptively – just in case – but in the “real” world as Abner gets more engrossed in the serial, Gooch, always as bonkers as a bag of badgers (because only certified loons create comics strips), is suddenly cured, casting the conclusion into desperate doubt! Confused? Good: that’s the point!
Madcap, cynical and hilariously ultra-violent, these eccentric yarns are credited with inspiring Harvey Kurtzman to create Mad and the magazine it became. Capp’s creations clearly shaped decades of American comics comedy. Fosdick kept on turning up until 1972, leavening all the hillbilly high-jinks, satire and social commentary and defanging Capp’s increasingly reactionary stance and declining popularity with healthy, recreational slapstick slaughter, justifiable homicides and anticipatory cold-case clean-up. Moreover, if you’re British, you will see quite a few antecedents of our own utterly rational and reasonable supercop Judge Dredd.
If you have a taste for over-the-top hilarity and stunning draughtsmanship this is a book you must track down. Consider it a constabulary duty to be done. A second volume titled The Hole Story follows.
