Attending three of them in rapid succession, the impoverished Capp was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition — the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Designers Art School in Boston — the latter before launching his amazing career.

In 1954, when Capp was applying for a Boston television license, the Federal Communications Commission ( FCC ) received an anonymous packet of pornographic Li ' l Abner drawings.

According to the Boston Globe ( as reported on May 18, 2010 ), the town has renamed its amphitheater in the artist's honor, and is looking to develop an Al Capp Museum.

According to the Boston Globe ( as reported on May 18, 2010 ), the town has renamed its amphitheater in the artist's honor, and is looking to develop an Al Capp Museum.

Capp was accused of propositioning a married woman in his hotel room.

Al Capp's son Colin Capp worked at the park that year, and met and married Vicki Cox, the actress portraying Moonbeam McSwine.

Capp designed her in caricature of his wife Catherine ( minus the dirt ), who had also suggested Daisy Mae's name.

Al Capp ( 1909 — 1979 ) used to joke that Dogpatch was based on Seabrook, New Hampshire, where he would vacation with his wife, Catherine.

" My mother and father had been brought to this country from Russia when they were infants ," wrote Capp in 1978.

Capp had already decided to become a cartoonist.

Capp had it changed legally in 1949.

Whatever energy Abner had went into evading the marital goals of Daisy Mae Scragg, his sexy, well-endowed ( but virtuous ) girlfriend — until Capp finally gave in to reader pressure and allowed the couple to marry.

( Siegel and Shuster had earlier poked fun at Capp in a Superman story in Action Comics # 55, December 1942, in which a cartoonist named " Al Hatt " invents a comic strip featuring the hillbilly " Tiny Rufe.

Following his close friend Milton Caniff's lead ( with Steve Canyon ), Capp had recently fought a successful battle with the syndicate to gain complete ownership of his feature when the Shmoos debuted.

Capp had often parodied corporate greed — pork tycoon J. Roaringham Fatback had figured prominently in wiping out the Shmoos.

After Capp quit his ghosting job on Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka in 1934 to launch his own strip, Fisher badmouthed him to colleagues and editors, claiming that Capp had " stolen " his idea.

) According to a November 1950 Time article, " Capp parted from Fisher with a definite impression, ( to put it mildly ) that he had been underpaid and unappreciated.

" In 1950, Capp introduced a cartoonist character named " Happy Vermin "— a caricature of Fisher — who hired Abner to draw his comic strip in a dimly lit closet, ( after sacking his previous " temporary " assistant of 20 years, who had been cut off from all his friends in the process ).

Later, it was revealed to be a collaborative hoax that Capp and his longtime pal Saunders had cooked up together.

The Capp-Saunders " feud " fooled both editors and readers, generated plenty of free publicity for both strips — and Capp and Saunders had a good laugh when all was revealed.

No matter how much help he had, Capp insisted on drawing and inking the characters ' faces and hands — especially of Abner and Daisy Mae — himself, and his distinctive touch is often discernible.

" He had the touch ," Frazetta said of Capp in 2008.

He served as chairman of the Cartoonists ' Committee in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's People-to-People program in 1954 ( although Capp had actually supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956 ), which was organized to promote Savings bonds for the U. S. Treasury.

Capp had earlier provided the Shmoo for a special Children's Savings Bond in 1949, accompanying President Harry S. Truman at the bond's unveiling ceremony.

During the Soviet Union's blockade of West Berlin in 1948, the commanders of the Berlin airlift had cabled Capp, requesting inflatable shmoos as part of " Operation: Little Vittles.

He published a column (" Wrong Turn Onto Sesame Street ") challenging federally funded Public Television endowments in favor of educational comics — which, according to Capp, " didn't cost a dime in taxes and never had.

" ( Both Capp and Pyne had wooden legs.

Anderson and his associate Brit Hume confirmed that Capp was shown out of town by university police, but that the incident had been hushed up by the university to avoid negative publicity.

In a December 1992 article for The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reported that President Richard Nixon and Charles Colson had repeatedly discussed the Capp case in Oval Office recordings that had recently been made available by the National Archives.

An attempt to transfer Andy Capp to television in 1988 met with little success.

During most of his tenure with Capp, Frazetta's primary responsibility — along with various specialty art, such as a series of Li ' l Abner greeting cards — was tight-penciling the Sunday pages from studio roughs.

Capp portrayed himself in a cameo role in the Bob Hope film That Certain Feeling, ( for which he also provided promotional art ).

" Comics ,” wrote Capp in 1970, “ can be a combination of the highest quality of art and text, and many of them are .” Capp would produce many giveaway educational comic books and public services pamphlets, spanning several decades, for the Red Cross, the Department of Civil Defense, the Department of the Navy, the U. S. Army, the Anti-Defamation League, the Department of Labor, Community Chest ( a forerunner of United Way ), and the Job Corps.

The album features his interaction with students at Fresno State College ( now California State University, Fresno ) on such topics as " sensitivity training ," " humanitarianism ," " abstract art " ( Capp hated it ), and of course, " student protest.

He did general assignment art for several months, drawing the strips Dickie Dare and The Gay Thirties, then inherited a panel cartoon called Mister Gilfeather in September 1932 when Al Capp left the feature.

Among Fleener's influences are ancient Egyptian art and the works of Chester Gould ( Dick Tracy ), Otto Soglow ( The Little King ) and Al Capp ( Li ' l Abner ).

In British popular culture the flat cap has been associated with older working class men, especially those in northern England, and the west country, as personified by Fred Dibnah and comic strip anti-hero Andy Capp.

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.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut of Russian Jewish heritage, Capp was the eldest child of Otto Philip and Matilda ( Davidson ) Caplin.

" The Caplins were dirt poor, and Capp later recalled stories of his mother going out in the night to sift through ash barrels for reusable bits of coal.

In August 1919, at the age of nine, Capp lost his left leg in a trolley accident.

This childhood tragedy likely helped shape Capp ’ s cynical worldview, which, funny as it was, was certainly darker and more sardonic than that of the average newspaper cartoonist.

" The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else ," Capp philosophically wrote ( in Life magazine on May 23, 1960 ), " was to be indifferent to that difference.

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

At about this same time, Capp became a voracious reader.

Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut without receiving a diploma.

" I heard that Bud Fisher ( creator of Mutt and Jeff ) got $ 3, 000 a week and was constantly marrying French countesses ," Capp said.

In early 1932, Capp hitchhiked to New York City.

By March 1932, Capp was drawing Colonel Gilfeather, a single-panel, AP-owned property created in 1930 by Dick Dorgan.

Capp changed the focus and title to Mister Gilfeather, but soon grew to hate the feature.

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

Alfred G. Caplin eventually became " Al Capp " because the syndicate felt the original would not fit in a cartoon frame.

" Yokum " was a combination of yokel and hokum, although Capp established a deeper meaning for the name during a series of visits around 1965 – 1970 with comics historians George E. Turner and Michael H. Price.

“ It ’ s phonetic Hebrew — that ’ s what it is, all right — and that ’ s what I was getting at with the name Yokum, more so than any attempt to sound hickish ," said Capp.