A place for Hillbilly humor, combined with Yiddish humor, combined with inventive fantasy, combined with satirical mimicry of capitalist greed during the Great Depression, Dogpatch residents are even worse off than you’ve ever been.
Little Abner Yokum perpetually 19 and simple minded isn’t little. Daisy Mae Scragg is hopelessly in love with Abner and it’s impossible to believe Abner could ever resist her. Salomey, the cute and adorable family pet, the last known 100% Hammus Alabammus and desired as an ingredient in “ecstasy sauce,” is smarter than Little Abner.
Fictional Abner Yokum reading the comic pages, was obsessed with the fictional detective Fearless Fosdick drawn by the fictional and mentally deranged cartoonist Lester Gooch, and distributed by the fictional Squeezeblood Comic Strip Syndicate, which was a parody of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, distributed by a parody of Capp’s distributer, United Feature Syndicate.
Occasionally, Al Capp turned his sharp wit from peeves and personal enemies to social and political targets: the susceptibility of capitalists to greed and of politicians to corruption and hypocrisy, attacking both right and left. Capp was a troubled person whose depredations were balanced by good works and whose predatory attacks on women should never have been tolerated.
Comics