The term " Skunk Works " came from Al Capp's satirical, hillbilly comic strip Li ’ l Abner, which was immensely popular in the 1940s and ' 50s.

Situations often take the characters to other destinations, including New York City, Washington, D. C., Hollywood, tropical islands, the Moon, Mars, and some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's invention.

" Yet though Capp's storylines often wandered far afield, his hillbilly setting remained a central touchstone, serving both as a microcosm and a distorting carnival mirror of broader American society.

The gag was often at his own expense, as in the above 1951 sequence showing Capp's interaction with " fans " ( see excerpt ), or in his 1955 Disneyland parody, " Hal Yappland.

" Frazetta's freewheeling description typifies the many conflicting firsthand accounts of Capp's complex personality.

( 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.

" 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.

Li ' l Abner: A Study in American Satire by Arthur Asa Berger ( Twayne, 1969 ) contained serious analyses of Capp's narrative technique, his use of dialogue, self-caricature and grotesquerie, the place of Li ' l Abner in American satire, and the significance of social criticism and the graphic image.

" One of the few strips ever taken seriously by students of American culture ," wrote Professor Berger, " Li ' l Abner is worth studying ... because of Capp's imagination and artistry, and because of the strip's very obvious social relevance.

Fisher submitted examples of Li ' l Abner to Capp's syndicate and to the New York courts, in which Fisher had identified pornographic images that were hidden in the background art.

Capp's persona has long since eclipsed his work, complicating critical analysis and objective assessment of Li ' l Abner to this day.

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

After about 40 years, however, Capp's interest in Abner waned, and this showed in the strip itself ," according to Don Markstein's Toonopedia.

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

The fictional Elbonia has some visual and thematic similarities to the fictional country of Lower Slobbovia in Al Capp's long-running strip Li ' l Abner, where the impoverished citizens, who suffered under corrupt government, were perpetually seen in waist-deep snow.

With Ben Oakland and Milton Drake, Berle wrote the title song for the RKO Radio Pictures release Li ' l Abner ( 1940 ), an adaptation of Al Capp's comic strip, featuring Buster Keaton as Lonesome Polecat.

The name was taken from Al Capp's comic strip Li ' l Abner.

From a recommendation, writer Jerry Caplin, a. k. a. Jerry Capp, brother of Li ' l Abner creator Al Capp, invited Adams to draw samples for Capp's proposed Ben Casey comic strip, based on the popular television medical-drama series.

Li ' l Abner Yokum: The star of Capp's classic comic strip was hardly " little.

Part of a virtual goon squad of comic mobsters that inhabited Li ' l Abner and Fearless Fosdick, the oafish Stanislouse alternated with other all-purpose underworld thugs, including " the Boys from the Syndicate " — Capp's euphemism for The Mob.

Conceptually based on Siberia, or perhaps specifically on Birobidzhan, Capp's icy hellhole made its first appearance in Li ' l Abner in April 1946.

Capp's surviving preliminary sketches of the kigmies make this apparent, as detailed in the introductory notes to Li ' l Abner Dailies 1949: Volume 15, Kitchen Sink Press, 1992 ).

Li ' l Abner: A Study in American Satire by Arthur Asa Berger ( Twayne, 1969 ) contained serious analyses of Capp's narrative technique, his use of dialogue, self-caricature and grotesquerie, the strip's overall place in American satire, and the significance of social criticism and the graphic image.

" One of the few strips ever taken seriously by students of American culture ," wrote Professor Berger, " Li ' l Abner is worth studying ... because of Capp's imagination and artistry, and because of the strip's very obvious social relevance.

Supposedly done in retaliation for Capp's " Mary Worm " parody in Li ' l Abner ( 1956 ), a media-fed " feud " commenced briefly between the rival strips.

Drawn by cartoonist Steve Stiles, the new Abner was approved by Capp's widow and brother, Elliott Caplin, but Al Capp's daughter, Julie Capp, objected at the last minute and permission was withdrawn.

" It was the prevailing opinion among his friends that Capp's Swiftian satire was, to some degree, a creatively channeled, compensatory response to his disability.

But in 1952, when General Motors president Charles E. Wilson, nominated for a cabinet post, told Congress "... what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa ," he inspired one of Capp's greatest satires — the introduction of General Bullmoose, the robust, ruthless, and ageless business tycoon.

It was Capp's finely tuned sense of the absurd, his ability to milk an outrageous situation for every laugh in it and then, impossibly, to squeeze even more laughs from it, that found such favor with the public ," ( from Don Markstein's Toonopedia ).

The Capp-Fisher feud was well known in cartooning circles, and it grew more personal as Capp's strip eclipsed Joe Palooka in popularity.

" The article recounted Capp's days working for an unnamed " benefactor " with a miserly, swinish personality, who Capp claimed was a never-ending source of inspiration when it came time to create a new unregenerate villain for his comic strip.

Allen Saunders, the creator of the Mary Worth strip, returned Capp's fire with the introduction of the character " Hal Rapp ," a foul-tempered, ill-mannered, and ( ironically ) inebriated cartoonist, ( Capp was a teetotaler ).

Although Capp's endorsement activities never rivaled Li ' l Abner's or Fearless Fosdick's, he was a celebrity spokesman in print ads for Sheaffer Snorkel fountain pens ( along with colleagues and close friends Milton Caniff and Walt Kelly ), and — with an irony that would become apparent later — a brand of cigarettes, ( Chesterfield ).

" Nixon was worried about the allegations, fearing that Capp's very close links to the White House would become embarrassingly public ," Hersh wrote.

The first prototype of Pong, one of the first arcade videogames, was installed in Sunnyvale in September 1972, in a bar named Andy Capp's Tavern, now Rooster T. Feathers.

Daisy Mae ( née Scragg ) Yokum: Beautiful Daisy Mae was hopelessly in love with Dogpatch's most prominent resident throughout the entire 43-year run of Al Capp's comic strip.

Though his uncle Tiny was perpetually frozen at 15½ " y ' ars " old, Honest Abe gradually grew from infant to grade school age, and became a dead ringer for Washable Jones — the star of Capp's early " topper " strip.

The senator was satirist Al Capp's parody of a blustering anti-New Deal Dixiecrat.

One of Capp's more popular villains, Wolf Gal was briefly merchandised in the fifties with her own comic book, doll, handpuppet, and even a latex Halloween mask.

Joanie was Capp's notorious parody of protest singer / songwriter Joan Baez.

In Al Capp's own words, Dogpatch was " an average stone-age community nestled in a bleak valley, between two cheap and uninteresting hills somewhere.