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.

It was later reprinted in The World of Li ' l Abner ( 1953 ).

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.

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.

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

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 ).

Neither the strip's shifting political leanings nor the slide of its final few years had any bearing on its status as a classic, and in 1995 Li ' l Abner was recognized as such by the United States Postal Service.

Li ' l Abner was one of 20 classic American comic strips honored with a USPS commemorative postage stamp.

Early descriptions of the production process and glazing techniques used for bricks can be found in the Song Dynasty carpenter's manual Yingzao Fashi, published in 1103 by the government official Li Jie, who was put in charge of overseeing public works for the central government's construction agency.

Li ' l Abner was censored in September 1947 and was pulled from papers by Scripps-Howard.

A year later, the couple had their first child, Kong Li ( 孔鯉 ), both of whom Confucius was to abandon to develop his ideologies.

Administered by Li Guoqiao at the Tropical Medicine Institute, the program relies on hybrid Artemisia annua of hybrid ancestry, which was used for a drug regimen by which all residents of the island, whether or not visibly ill, took two doses at a 40-day interval.

When asked about Artemisia exports, Li was quoted, " We want to grow them in China and whatever we export depends on bilateral relationships.

Wang Jingwei's National Government was weak militarily, and was soon ended by Chiang with the support of a local warlord, ( Li Zongren of Guangxi ).

Chiang's right hand man, the secret police Chief Dai Li, was both anti-American and anti-Communist.

* Li ' l Abner was censored for the first, but not the last time in September 1947, and was pulled from papers by Scripps-Howard.

Li has put his support behind a number of creative projects that might otherwise have been censored by the government.