This was the birth of one of the most popular and original strips of the twentieth century about the life of Li'l Abner Yokem, an innocent hayseed, living with his family in the backwater hamlet of Dogpatch, Kentucky. A year later he was working on his first single panel "Colonel Gilfeather." In 19 Capp worked for Ham Fisher as a ghost artist on "Joe Palooka." It was during this period he worked at night on samples for a strip based on mountain-dwellers he met hitchhiking through West Virginia and Cumberland Valley as a teen. In 1932 he moved to Greenwich Village and worked turning out advertising scripts. Having never received a high school diploma, Capp attended three art schools, only to be thrown out of each one for inability to pay the tuition - the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Designers Art School in Boston. Capp's notably dark, sardonic humor, as compared to his contemporaries, was likely, largely influenced by the young tragedy. "I was indignant as hell about that leg," he'd say years later. He'd been in a coma and awoke to discover his leg removed. Alfred Gerald Caplin (Al Capp) was born in New Haven, Connecticut, where, at the age of nine, he was struck by a trolley car, requiring his left leg be amputated. It is, of course, Dogpatch County, Kentucky, home of Li'l Abner. An early strip by Capp, this features Hattie Haggle,"richest woman in New York," having her nurse randomly picking a county directory to find someone to spitefully give her money away to. A tremendous association between two of the most beloved and prolific comic strip artists of the twentieth century. It'll Do - Plenty!" and "6-25" in blue holograph pencil under first panel. INSCRIBED to fellow cartoonist Ed Dodd in holograph ink on bottom margin: "To Ed Dodd / with good wishes / Al Capp." Manuscript notation in pencil along top margin: "4. Original four-panel artwork by Al Capp, dated June 25, 1936, of his seminal comic strip Li'l Abner.
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