Page "Al Capp" Paragraph 8

Leaving his new wife with her parents in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he subsequently returned to New York in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression.

" I was 23, I carried a mass of drawings, and I had nearly five dollars in my pocket.

People were sleeping in alleys then, willing to work at anything.

" There he met Ham Fisher, who hired him to ghost on Joe Palooka.

During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's Joe Palooka story arc introduced a stupid, coarse, oafish mountaineer named " Big Leviticus ," a crude prototype.

( Leviticus was actually much closer to Capp's later villains Lem and Luke Scragg, than to the much more appealing and innocent Li ' l Abner.