Burton Lane and Lerner were working on a musical about Li ' l Abner.

Alfred Gerald Caplin ( September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979 ), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip Li ' l Abner.

" I do Li ' l Abner!

!," a self-portrait by Al Capp, excerpted from theApril 16 – 17, 1951 Li ' l Abner strips.

( 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.

Also during this period, Capp was working at night on samples for the strip that would eventually become Li ' l Abner.

) Leaving Joe Palooka, Capp sold Li ' l Abner to United Feature Syndicate ( now known as United Media ).

Featuring vividly outlandish characters, bizarre situations, and equal parts suspense, slapstick, irony, satire, black humor and biting social commentary, Li ' l Abner is considered a classic of the genre.

The comic strip stars Li ' l Abner Yokum — the simple-minded, loutish but good-natured and eternally innocent hayseed who lives with his parents — scrawny but superhuman Mammy Yokum, and shiftless, childlike Pappy Yokum.

" Indeed, Li ' l Abner incorporates such a panoply of characters and ideas that it defies summary ," according to cultural historian Anthony Harkins.

At its peak, Li ' l Abner was read daily by 70 million Americans ( the U. S. population at the time was only 180 million ), with adult readers far outnumbering children.

Li ' l Abner has one odd design quirk that has puzzled readers for decades: the part in his hair always faces the viewer, no matter which direction Abner is facing.

In response to the question “ Which side does Abner part his hair on ?," Capp would answer, “ Both .” Capp said he finally found the right " look " for Li ' l Abner with Henry Fonda's character Dave Tolliver, in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine ( 1936 ).

Li ' l Abner also features a comic strip-within-the-strip: Fearless Fosdick is a parody of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy.

Besides Dick Tracy, Capp parodied many other comic strips in Li ' l Abner — including Steve Canyon, Superman ( at least twice ; first as " Jack Jawbreaker " in 1947, and again in 1966 as " Chickensouperman "), Mary Worth, Peanuts, Rex Morgan, M. D., Little Annie Rooney and Little Orphan Annie ( in which Punjab became " Punjbag ," an oleaginous slob ).

Capp was just as likely to parody himself ; his self-caricature made frequent, tongue-in-cheek appearances in Li ' l Abner.

" Just about anything could be a target for Capp's satire — in one storyline Li ' l Abner is revealed to be the missing link between ape and man.

In addition to creating Li ' l Abner, Capp also co-created two other newspaper strips: Abbie an ' Slats with magazine illustrator Raeburn van Buren in 1937, and Long Sam with cartoonist Bob Lubbers in 1954, as well as the Sunday " topper " strips Washable Jones, Small Fry ( aka Small Change ), and Advice fo ' Chillun.

According to comics historian Coulton Waugh, a 1947 poll of newspaper readers who claimed they ignored the comics page altogether revealed that many confessed to making a single exception: Li ' l Abner.

" When Li ' l Abner made its debut in 1934, the vast majority of comic strips were designed chiefly to amuse or thrill their readers.

Capp turned that world upside-down by routinely injecting politics and social commentary into Li ' l Abner.

According to Marschall, Li ' l Abner gradually evolved into a broad satire of human nature.

Over the years, Li ' l Abner has been adapted to radio, animated cartoons, stage production, motion pictures and television.

" John Updike, comparing Abner to a “ hillbilly Candide ,” added that the strip ’ s “ richness of social and philosophical commentary approached the Voltairean .” Charlie Chaplin, William F. Buckley, Al Hirschfeld, Harpo Marx, Russ Meyer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Bakshi, Shel Silverstein, Hugh Downs, Gene Shalit, Frank Cho, Daniel Clowes and ( reportedly ) even Queen Elizabeth have confessed to being fans of Li ' l Abner.

Li ' l Abner was also the subject of the first book-length, scholarly assessment of an American comic strip ever published.

* Homer, B. L., C. Li, K. H. Berry, N. D. Denslow, E. R. Jacobson, R. H. Sawyer, and J. E. Williams.

Homer decides to take Marge to the Police seized-property auction and while there, he buys Snake's car ' Li ' l Bandit '.

Meanwhile, Snake walks out of the minimum security prison and, after failing at an attempt to decapitate Homer with a wire hung across two trees ( though he does manage to dismember Kirk van Houten ), he jumps into ' Li ' l Bandit ' to get the car back from Homer.

This work was collected by Dark Horse Comics in a four-volume hardcover series entitled Al Capp's Li ' l Abner: The Frazetta Years.

At the San Diego Comic Con in July 2009, IDW announced the upcoming publication of Al Capp's Li ' l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays as part of their ongoing Library of American Comics project.

* Capp, Al, Al Capp's Li ' l Abner: The Frazetta Years — 4 volumes ( 2003 – 2004 ) Dark Horse Comics

* Inge, M. Thomas, " Li ' l Abner, Snuffy and Friends " from Comics and the U. S. South, pp. 3 – 27 ( 2012 ) Univ.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has also seen domestic releases in Italy by Star Comics, in France by J ' ai Lu and Tonkam, Taiwan by Da Ran Culture Enterprise and Tong Li Publishing, and in Malaysia by Comics House.

Li ' l Wolf debuted in his own self-titled series, beginning in the comic book Walt Disney's Comics and Stories # 52 ( 1945 ).

Li ' l Wolf returned to Comics and Stories in 1961, after which he continued to appear there frequently through 2008.

Li ' l Wolf has in fact starred in more issues of Comics and Stories than any other character except for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Apart from Comics and Stories and Mickey Mouse, Li ' l Wolf has also appeared in many different Disney anthology comic books, including a number of giant-size specials and a series of one-page text stories in Donald Duck.

Through Li ' l Abner, the American comic strip achieved unprecedented relevance in the postwar years, attracting new readers who were more intellectual, more informed on current events, and less likely to read the comics ( according to Coulton Waugh, author of The Comics, 1947 ).

Li ' l Abner was also parodied in 1954 ( as " Li ' l Melvin " by " Ol ' Hatt ") in the pages of EC Comics ' humor comic, Panic, edited by Al Feldstein.

Charlton published the short-lived Hillbilly Comics by Art Gates in 1955, featuring " Gumbo Galahad ," who was a dead ringer for Li ' l Abner, as was Pokey Oakey by Don Dean, which ran in MLJ's Top-Notch Laugh and Pep Comics.

* Li ' l Abner ( 1947 ) 9 issues ( Harvey Comics )

More recently, Dark Horse Comics reprinted the limited series Al Capp's Li ' l Abner: The Frazetta Years, in four full-color volumes covering the Sunday pages from 1954 – 1961.

* Capp, Al, Al Capp's Li ' l Abner: The Frazetta Years — 4 volumes ( 2003 – 2004 ) Dark Horse Comics

* Inge, M. Thomas, " Li ' l Abner, Snuffy and Friends " from Comics and the U. S. South, pp. 3 – 27 ( 2012 ) Univ.

There was also a separate line of comic books, Al Capp's Shmoo Comics ( featuring Washable Jones ), published by the Capp family-owned Toby Press. Comics historian and Li ' l Abner expert Denis Kitchen recently edited a complete collection of all five original Shmoo Comics, from 1949 and 1950.

* Capp, Al, Al Capp's Li ' l Abner: The Frazetta Years-4 volumes ( 2003, 2004 ) Dark Horse Comics

The series is also licensed for regional language releases in Dutch by Glénat Benelux, French by Glénat, Italian by Star Comics, German by Carlsen Comics, Simplified Chinese by Chuang Yi, and traditional Chinese by Tong Li Publishing.