Stefan Kanfer has a fascinating article over at City Journal about a man who has always been (in an ambivalent sort of way) one of my personal heroes—the cartoonist Al Capp, creator of Li’l Abner (thanks to Daniel Crandall of The American Culture for the tip).

Back in its heyday, during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Fifties, Li’l Abner occupied a place in the American consciousness for which it’s hard to find an analog in today’s world. Back then everybody—except members of the most extreme religious communities—read the daily comics. Comic strips were what network TV used to be (but also is no more). If there were a page on the internet that everybody in the country visited every day, that would be something like what Li’l Abner was back then. When Abner finally gave up his fight to remain a bachelor and married Daisy Mae, the nation rejoiced (or grieved, depending on their point of view).

The whole Li’l Abner/Daisy Mae dynamic was characteristic of Capp’s broad, shameless approach to telling a funny story. Big, dumb, goodhearted Li’l Abner has the love of a girl of such beauty, sweetness, and pulchritude that any sane, heterosexual man would be inclined to follow her around like a dog, trying to get her attention, plying her with gifts and flowers. But Abner is a parody of a) the stereotype of southerners as too lazy to do anything (even procreation) with any energy, and b) the stereotype of the All American Boy, who rejoices in wholesome recreation and has no time for girls (like B Movie cowboys). So he ignores her, considering her a nuisance, breaking her heart again and again. It’s all in good fun, and no meanness is intended (I never heard of a southerner who took offense. The exaggeration was too broad). Every man in America envied Li’l Abner, and felt superior to him.

I used to see Al Capp on TV, and hear him on radio, and his humor pleased me. Although I was a Democrat in those days, I did not like the antiwar activists, and Al Capp was merciless with them. He was one of those who didn’t leave the Democratic party, but watched it move out from under his feet. He stopped getting invited to the best parties, but he didn’t care. He told the truth as he saw it.

Sadly, he was an early victim of the emerging Nuclear Option of the Left—if you defend traditional values in any way, we will find your point of hypocrisy (pretty much everybody has one) and stuff it down your throat as we draw and quarter you publicly.

Capp’s hypocrisy was easy to find. He seems to have been a serial adulterer. Although he was never a campaigner for what we now call “family values” (some people thought his comic strip soft porn; it certainly belonged in the realm of pin-up art), his defense of traditional American civic values was enough to mark him as a hypocrite, and therefore a man whose opinion no longer counted in any way.

I once read an interview with an actress (I won’t say who) who claimed that she’d once auditioned for a part in a Broadway play based on Li’l Abner, and Capp had promised her a part in return for sexual favors. This was far from unheard-of behavior in show business, but even in those benighted, pre-feminist days it was the act of a cad. If the story is true, it lowers my estimation of the man considerably.

But it doesn’t change the fact that he was a genius who delighted a nation for generations, and was his own man to the end.