Two Tribes

First there was radio. Then there was television. Lastly, there was the Internet. All three of these technologies have chipped away at the prominence of newspapers over the years. Where a big city might have once had seven or eight daily newspapers, most places are down to one or two, and even those are struggling. Radio and TV can get critical news out to people much faster than newspapers can, and the Internet has not only made much of the newspapers’ content available for free, sites like eBay and Craigslist have gutted newspapers’ once hugely profitable classified ad sections.

At times, it seems like the only thing newspapers are good for these days are the comic strips. But even these are available online, and the low cost of online publishing means that there are more strips published now than ever before. So it might seem hard to believe, but there was once a time when the few cartoonists printed nationally were held in high regard. Everyone read the newspaper every day – in many cases, people read more than one. And comic strips were not just amusing content, they were a commentary on the times. Just as people of today tune in to The Daily Show for “zeitgeist humor”, people in the early 20th century turned to comic strips.

That’s what makes the feud between Ham Fisher and Al Capp – creators of two of the most popular comic strips in American history – so remarkable. It was, in a very real sense, like two tribes going to war.

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Ham Fisher was, by all accounts, a highly motivated individual. By the age of 20, Fisher had already been a soldier, held public office, and was an editor for a small-town newspaper in Pennsylvania. But Fisher’s first love was comic strips. He created several of his own strips during his teenage years, most of which are lost to history. But one of Fisher’s characters – a simple but virtuous boxer named Joe Palooka, based on a drinking buddy in his hometown of Wilkes-Barre – seemed to hold some promise. Unfortunately, none of the newspapers Fisher contacted were interested in the strip.

But Fisher wasn’t one to take rejection to heart. In 1927 he moved to New York City and got a job at the New York Daily selling features to newspapers across the country. Although the job also required him to sell advice, recipe and gossip columns, he truly excelled at selling comic strips. In fact, in 1928 he was able to get a new strip called Show Girl into thirty newspapers in forty days – a sales record at the time. Fisher’s bosses were so impressed that they made him a sales manager, a position which gave him the power to get Joe Palooka into twenty newspapers (including the national New York Mirror) in a mere three weeks.

Joe Palooka became an instant hit. The strip rapidly expanded to hundreds of newspapers, and the lead character quickly became an American icon. Joe became the first comic book character to be made into a movie (for the record, Palooka was also one of the first talking motion pictures, too). Eleven other movies would follow Palooka, as well as a series of short films (1936-1937), a radio show (1932) and a television series (1954). Fisher, ever the salesman, also licensed the Joe Palooka characters to toy and lunchbox manufacturers, as well as dozens of other enterprises. As you might guess, this all made Fisher filthy rich. In fact, Fisher became the first millionaire cartoonist.

Like a lot of newly-rich people, Fisher let all that money go to his head. By 1932, he decided that chasing women and hobnobbing with celebrities was more important than drawing Joe Palooka, so he hired assistants to do most of the work. Fisher created the storylines, but his assistants drew everything but the character’s faces, which he would fill in later.

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It was during this time that Fisher met a man named Al Capp. As the legend goes, Fisher was driving around New York City when he spotted a young man carrying an stack of blue papers under his arm. Fisher, knowing that the blue papers were the same type used in rejection letters from newspapers, bet his chauffeur $5 that the man was a cartoonist. The car pulled over, and Fisher found out that young Al was indeed a struggling cartoonist, and that the papers were, in fact, rejection letters from newspapers all over the city.

Fisher liked Capp’s work, so he hired him as an assistant for Palooka. Capp, who had inherited his love of comics from his illustrator father, couldn’t believe his luck. He had created a one-panel comic strip called Col. Gilfeather that had been syndicated to a few papers, but had given it up to try his luck in the “Big City”. And now fate had dropped him right into the hands of America’s most famous cartoonist! It looked like serendipity had shined on Capp.

If only he knew! Fisher, who was making millions from Palooka, gave Capp a tiny, dingy office and paid him peanuts for his work. As time passed, Fisher seemed to care less and less about the strip, and eventually he let Capp come up with storylines of his own, and complete the drawings himself. So while Fisher was pulling in thousands of dollars from Joe Palooka every month, Capp was doing all the actual work. Fisher began taking extended vacations throughout the world, while Capp was expected to get by on a $100 a month salary (which is around $1500/month in 2007 dollars).

It was while Fisher was on an extended vacation in Europe that Capp and his wife saw a musical comedy about (of all things) singing hillbillies. The comedy reminded Capp of his own travels through Appalachia as a teenager, and was so taken with the play that he added a hillbilly character named “Big Leviticus” to Joe Palooka. Capp was delighted to find that that readers loved the surly hillbilly, and so he quietly started work on a new hillbilly-centric strip that would eventually become Lil’ Abner, one of the most popular comic strips in American history.

When Fisher returned from Europe, Capp immediately quit. This infuriated Fisher, as it left him without an assistant to do all the work. Fisher’s anger increased on Monday, August 13, 1934, the day Lil’ Abner debuted in eight newspapers. And when Lil’ Abner became an overnight success, Fisher found that he could barely contain his rage.

He badmouthed Capp to anyone that would listen. The two would get into shouting matches at bars in Midtown Manhattan or at industry events. Fisher hired away Capp’s assistant, Moe Leff, not because he really needed him, but just because he wanted to piss off Capp. Fisher would also occasionally bring Big Leviticus back to Joe Palooka under the banner “the original hillbilly characters”, even though there had been several hillbilly characters in comic strips before (and not just Capp’s strips, either).

He also repeatedly threatened to take Capp to court over ownership of his “hillbilly characters”. It says a lot about Fisher that his lawyers always talked him out of it… not just because Capp had actually created the characters, but mainly because Fisher was so abrasive and unlikable that the lawyers felt that Fisher would lose no matter what that facts of the case were.

Capp, for his part, was hardly an angel, either. He felt that Fisher had exploited him for years, and in a 1950 article in The Atlantic magazine entitled “I Remember Monster”, he wrote:

“It was my privilege, as a boy, to be associated with a certain treasure-trove of lousiness, who, in the normal course of a day, managed to be, in dazzling succession, every conceivable kind of heel. It was an advantage few young cartoonists have enjoyed — or survived.”

Although Capp never mentioned Fisher by name, everyone in the newspaper or comics industry knew exactly who he was talking about. Shortly after the magazine hit newsstands, Fisher underwent plastic surgery, leading Capp to create a racehorse called “Ham’s Nose-Bob” in a Lil’ Abner strip. Capp even went so far as to create a “greedy cartoonist” character called “Happy Vermin” – a blatant caricature of Fisher. Things became so tense between the two that eventually the comics syndicate called them in and made them agree to a truce.

Fisher had one last trick up his sleeve, however. He made photocopies of some of Capp’s strips and drew some “hidden” pornographic imagery into the background. He then circled the “naughty bits” in red ink and submitted them to Capp’s syndicate and to the New York courts, in order to have Capp branded a pervert (this was the 1950s, after all). Capp’s attorneys fought back by simply providing the court with a stack of newspapers with the original strips, as well as Capp’s original drawings. The charges against Capp were almost instantly dropped.

In 1954, Capp applied to the FCC for a broadcast license. While his application was under review, the agency received an anonymous packet of pornographic Lil’ Abner images, all allegedly “signed” by Capp. These were quickly found to be forgeries created by Fisher, and this time, the powers that be had had enough. The National Cartoonists Society (a trade group Fisher had helped create) convened an ethics meeting about the incident, and Fisher was expelled from the organization. Coincidentally, Fisher’s main home – a giant mansion in Wisconsin – was destroyed by a storm at almost the same time.

Fisher, now a pariah in the cartoonist community, was a completely broken man. Joe Palooka‘s readership had been in decline for years as Capp’s Lil’ Abner became the most popular strip in the United States. And now that he was effectively banned from the industry he loved so much, he just couldn’t take it any more. On September 7, 1955 Fisher committed suicide in his studio. The man who once traveled the world and drank champagne with movie stars was so isolated at this point that his body wasn’t found until December 27.

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Capp would continue writing Lil’ Abner until 1977, two years before his death. The strip ran for an amazing 44 years and not only inspired countless Lil’ Abner lunchboxes and toys, it also spawned a Dogpatch USA theme park in Arkansas. Such was Capp’s influence that a few of his phrases like “skunk works” and “double whammy” entered into everyday language. Capp also popularized other words like “druthers”, “schmooze” and “nogoodnik”. In fact, the 1950s mania for adding “-nik” to words came from Lil’ Abner, not beatniks or Sputnik. America loved the strip so much that people even created an unofficial holiday – Sadie Hawkins Day – in his honor,  after the famous spinster in Lil’ Abner.

But Capp wasn’t without controversy, either. He was seen as a “bedwetting liberal” in the conservative 1950s, only to become a “hellfire and brimstone” conservative in the more liberal 1960s. Capp went on speaking tours at college campuses and reportedly relished the opportunity to argue with hecklers. Where Lil’ Abner had traditionally poked fun at right-wing caricatures, Capp started slipping in parodies of famous left-wingers such as “Joanie Phoanie” (Joan Baez) and “Senator O. Noble McGesture” (Ted Kennedy), as well as the various militant hippie organizations – which Capp collectively referred to as “S.W.I.N.E. (Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything!)”. Capp even visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their “Bed-In for Peace”; their “testy exchange” can be seen in the documentary film Imagine.

In 1971, columnists Jack Anderson and Brit Hume (yes, the same Brit Hume seen today on Fox News) published an article accusing Capp of sexually harassing several female students on his speaking tours. Capp soon “confirmed” the charges by getting himself arrested in Wisconsin for propositioning a married student (which was, and still is, a felony in that state). Capp pleaded nolo contendere to “attempted adultery” and was fined $500. This led to many papers dropping his strip; as Capp’s health was already failing, he took the opportunity to withdraw from public speaking.

Years later, allegations that Capp had sexually propositioned Grace Kelly, Goldie Hawn, and Edie Adams came to light. By this time, however, Capp had already died of emphysema. The allegations didn’t seem to hurt Capp’s posthumous image, however: in 1995, the United States Postal Service prominently featured Lil’ Abner in a series of “Comic Book Classics” stamps, along with Blondie, Dick Tracy, The Katzenjammer Kids, Brenda Starr and Popeye.

As fate would have it, Joe Palooka didn’t make the cut.