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.

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 ).

A story that ran for several weeks in the Sunday comics of Li ' l Abner during 1967 concerned the creation of a joke, never actually revealed, that was so funny that anyone who heard it immediately died laughing.

Sima was the only person to defend Li Ling, who had never been his friend but whom he respected.

In the oldest version of the story, Mulan uses her father's name Li and she was never discovered as a girl, unlike the film.

Li Hongzhang refused on the grounds that Taiwan had never been a battlefield during the first Sino-Japan War between 1894 and 1895.

Since the Tangut's founding father, Li Deming, was not a very conservative ruler, the Tangut people began to absorb more and more of the Chinese culture that surrounded them, but never lost their actual identity, as is proven by the vast amount of literature which survived the Tangut state itself.

Notably, Li ' l Bad Wolf and April, May and June Duck, who had appeared very often in Disney comic books but never before in an animated cartoon, finally made their animated debuts on House of Mouse.

After consuming this tablet, Li Tieh-Kuai was never hungry nor ill. Lao Tzu again tempts Li Tieh-Kuai with money.

Cao Kun, who never liked Xu, pressured him out of office and restored Li Yuanhong.

However, this version never materialized, and over the next several years, various authors and composers sought to musicalize Li ' l Abner, including writers Arnold Horwitt and Josh Logan.

Although work was supposed to continue on on the Lane – Lerner Li ' l Abner, this version never appeared, and My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of Pygmalion, opened in 1956, becoming the hit musical of the decade.

Ian Johnson points out that during the greatest period of Falun Gong book sales in China, Li Hongzhi never received any royalties because all publications were bootleg.

Another discrepancy is that Li Erlang had never appeared in any of the tales related to stopping the Min River.

But without any power, resources, and support, Zhang never held any important positions afterwards and only did research on the CPC for Dai Li.

Yuan could never fully trust Li because he wasn't a protégé within the Beiyang Army's inner circle and because of his past association with the revolutionaries.

Valley of the Damned could be construed as a bloated, Spinal Tap-style tribute to early -' 80s fantasy-metal, and in many ways it is ; however, it's so well played and so joyously executed that it could very well reignite the entire genre ... From the epic title track to the fist-pumping closer, " Heart of a Dragon ," the guitar pyrotechnics of Herman Li and Sam Totman light up the sky like a third world war, bending riffs into melodic submission while never overplaying.

Ge ( Li ) crystals could never be allowed to warm up, as the lithium would drift out of the crystal, ruining the detector.

Unlike Li Mochou, Xiaolongnü had never left the tomb and grows up to be an innocent, seemingly vulnerable great beauty with inborn calmness, coldness ( to the point of being unsociable ), apathetic and emotionless characteristics.

During the interview with Li, he stated that he was unhappy that the studios wanted to turn him into a Bruce Lee marketing gimmick, saying " I could act like him but I could never be him.

* you can never have too many suites ( 2008 ): de Falla Suite of Spanish Folk Songs, Shostakovich Four Preludes, Kreisler Liebesfreud, Schön Rosmarin & Syncopation, Yang Wong Luo Bin Suite of Folksongs & Dances, Tang New Face of my Motherland, and Li Ci Li Flower.

The review stated that though there may never be absolute corroboration of the book and its many anecdotes, its contents are supported by the numerous pictures of Li with Mao on his many trips, as well as the consistency of the details with the information known by specialists of Chinese history and politics.

therefore believe that the debate between Mao and Deng that Li was referring to simply never happened.