"After (and in spite of) sleeping with the entire judicial committee, Frank won the coveted Best College Cartoonist Award for 1994. This eventually led to an offer from the Creators Syndicate, and a fat sloppy kiss from Mr. Richard Simmons."

-- from Cho's "hilarious" biography page on the Insight Studio website

Is Liberty Meadows #1 an "outstanding work that challenges popular notions of what comics can achieve, both as an art form and as a means of personal expression"?

Only if there's a popular notion that comics can't ameliorate Berke Breathed's reputation.

My introduction to Frank Cho's work was a friend's copy of Meadows #1 that I read a week or two after it was released. At the time, I was amazed by how the punchlines defied the laws of physics by sucking and blowing at the same time. I marveled at the shameless Bloom County impersonation. I still don't know how he did it, but Cho raised my opinion of Breathed almost to the level it was at before I read Doonesbury for the first time. And man, can Cho draw one good looking Lola Granola.

I put Meadows #1 back on my friend's coffee table and promptly forgot about it until Cho won the Ignatzes he was (self-)nominated for. I decided to check the book out, since this Cho guy must be just as Outstanding an Artist as 1997 and 98 winners Seth and Dave Sim, right? And Liberty Meadows #1 has to be just as Outstanding a Comic as Eightball #17 and Acme Novelty Library #9, right?

Having read it again for the first time, I can only imagine the majority of Ignatz voters were:

a) still mourning the loss of Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes
b) drunk
c) showing their collective contempt for awards by choosing this piece of inconsequential art to be considered the best art comic of the year.
d) locals who just wanted their hometown boy to win a couple of them bricks
e) all of the above

An aside or two: Thus far, the apologists for this year's Ignatz results have couched their comments in terms of, "Well, that's what/who the people liked this year." As part of [what I fear is] SPX's continuing drift away from art comics towards the populist middle of the funnybook road, SPX's pre-show coverage ran in The Comics Buyer's Guide. So it's rather fitting that the Ignatz award results read less like a recognition of artistic achievement and more like a low-rent version of the 15th annual CBG Fan Awards. Don "a favorite is a favorite -- and you don't have to make any apologies for your own taste, background or emotions" Thompson would have been proud. And, since it's so difficult for geniuses like Cho to find a handful of diamonds in a pile of shit, perhaps the Outstanding Minicomic award should be replaced with the Phil Seuling Award For Favorite Direct-Sale-Only Title for next year's awards. But I digress.

Liberty Meadows is the Bloom Boarding House recast as an animal sanctuary, which, while being a less whimsical setting, is a less suspended-disbelief straining construct for funny animal/human interaction. It's a rare improvement on County. Dean the fratboy pig is a slightly more articulate version of Bill the Cat, and Ralph & Leslie are Portnoy & Hodge Podge doppelgangers. Brandy (the main human character) plays a Bobbi Harlow role to the group of funny animals, except when Frank the veterinarian (who resembles a grown up Milo Bloom) plays Opus to her Lola Granola. And man, can Cho draw one good looking Lola Granola.

Meadows' biggest strength lies in its artwork. As current newspaper comics go, Cho's fine linework is technically impressive; not the quality of the drawing itself, but that it somehow prints legibly on the ever-shrinking newspaper page. The most notable aspect of the actual art is the conspicuous lack of detail; With the exception of the occasional stylized forest panel (no understanding of perspective needed) and an unconvincingly drawn front door at the end of the Brandy & Frank date sequence, there is nary a background to be seen in Meadows #1.

The realistic rendering of Lola Grano -- uh, Brandy clashes with the cartoony supporting cast and makes for a jarring read, which would be fine if there was an underlying aesthetic reasoning for it. I suspect Cho just enjoys drawing babes and critters. He's pretty good at it, especially that good looking Lola Granola. The figures interact in a vacuum, with only the occasional prop added if one's needed for that day's gag or when Cho occasionally remembers establishing a sense of setting might be a good idea. Now, I'm as big a fan of negative space as the next guy, but where's this brilliant draftsmanship I've heard so much about?

The writing in Meadows is atrocious. The gags are lame (references to Hootie and The Blowfish, the Macarena, Toy Story and the theme song to Cops make for lousy punchlines) his panel-to-panel continuity is erratic, and his attempts at writing a continuing story run out of steam by the third day.

The nadir of Cho's writing would be found in the "Brandy and Frank's date" sequence: After the incredibly trite "Guy asks girl out-girl agrees-guy is surprised since girls usually don't agree" and "guy is so happy he almost forgets to ask where girl lives" opening strips, we find the couple at a restaurant, y'know? It's got to be a restaurant because they're sitting at a table each holding a folder that reads "MENU" in big letters, y'know? And Brandy is looking at the "MENU" trying to decide what to order and she's focusing on the fat content of the entrees, because she's a woman and they worry about stuff like that, y'know? Anyway, the next strip reveals that the restaurant must be really swanky, because the waiter is a well dressed, snooty jerk who calls Frank "Sir," y'know? So far, their date has gone as well as Steve Dallas and Bobbi Harlow's first date and then Brandy's hulking ex-boyfriend appears out of nowhere, y'know? So a fight breaks out between Frank and the ex-boyfriend and Brandy's freaking out and shit, so she tries to find someone to call the fuzz before Frank gets killed, y'know? But here's the best part- they're suddenly in a supermarket! It's got to be a supermarket because one of the people Brandy asks is a cashier who's standing at a cash register for the "10 items or less" express lane (there's an overhead sign that says so), y'know? And the cashier announces "Clean-up on aisle Four" over the PA system, a joke that hasn't that hasn't tickled the public's funnybone since George Wendt bashed Michael Keaton into a potato chip display in Ron Howard's Gung Ho, y'know?

Any cartoonist this lazy and/or incompetent, especially if s/he has reached for Cho's level of commercial success, should be forced to wear a scarlet LL (for "Lucky Loser") on hir shirt in public.

From the second strip's homage (read: swiped but acknowledged) to Jeff Smith's Bone to the back cover's fucknuckled swipe of a Looney Tunes Robin Hood joke, nearly every idea in Meadows #1 can be traced to the lesser works of a better artist. When not pilfering second-rate material from Warner Brothers cartoons -- he wrings two weeks of strips (the "Winged Avenger" and "Ralph the Flying Bear" sequences) from twenty seconds of a Roadrunner cartoon -- Cho borrows most of Breathed's favorite devices, like using photocopied images of celebrities (Cho even uses Sam Donaldson, one of Breathed's favorites) for big laffs, and interrupting a strip with a news bulletin and having the characters react to the interruption.

Cho's excessive use of photocopied panels (a part of his Breathed impersonation and it must be physically draining to draw two figures against a blank background four times a day) draws attention to his biggest weaknesses: his feeble writing and meager artwork. Breathed could use photocopies of a panel instead of drawing the same scene three times and not look like a slacker because his writing was strong enough to carry the strip to a suitable payoff and he drew enough visual information (little things, like backgrounds) in the original panel that it wasn't obvious at first glance that the other three panels were copies.

To be fair, since these are his first strips and he may have needed time to mature and find his own unique voice, I decided to check out Cho's most recent strips at his website. I guess he needs another two years to continue looking. Stop me if you've heard this one: A good looking, career-minded single person has trouble with hir nosy mother who's visiting from out of town. Mom criticizes her child's life, home, etc., and ignores her child's snappy retorts. Hilarity (in theory) ensues. This formula was worn out by the time Breathed used it on Steve Dallas, but that won't keep Cho from driving it into the ground. No siree. How about this one: A funny animal tries a pick-up line on a female human in a bar. Hilarity (again, in theory) ensues. Last panel, the woman has beaten the crap out of the funny animal. Lame and hackneyed as that gag is, Cho uses it repeatedly.

Since no analysis of Liberty Meadows is complete without mention of Cho's troubles with his syndicate: Almost from the beginning of the strip's run, there has been much ado about how Da Man (Cho's term for his syndicate bosses/editors) "censors" the strip. Most of this ado comes from Cho himself, in the form of his newsletter, which details all of the changes Da Man makes to water down his artistic expression. Having read a few of the newsletters, I can't praise them enough; they are Cho's funniest work. Not that the descriptions of the unedited strips are funny themselves, mind you -- the difference between a competently rendered lame gag that's crass, lame and stupid and one that's just lame and stupid isn't that noticeable -- it's that Cho apparently finds the original funny and exerts so much effort to keep his fans updated on his trailblazing efforts to make the funny papers safe for beaver double entendres and nose-picking funny animals. Cho and his apologists insist that this editorial interference is the cause of his weaker punchlines. The problem with this defense is the jokes in Cho's University2 (which collects his self-edited college work) and Liberty Meadows #1 (where Cho is able to run the strips in their original, unedited form) are just as milkwarm as the "censored" strips.

His troubles with his syndicate spill over into the packaging of the reprints as well: Cho claims the reason Liberty Meadows is being reprinted as a bimonthly pamphlet and not a much larger, more standard book sized format is because Da Man won't let him. It makes no sense to me either.

If what Cho claims about the "censored" strips is true, there are some pusillanimous pussies running Creators Syndicate. A work on par with Liberty Meadows in nearly any other medium -- say, a bottom of the barrel UPN family sitcom, albeit one filmed by an above average cinematographer -- would have no trouble running the sort of material cut from Meadows. Of course, the show would be badly written and unevenly directed offal with or without the crass-but-lame jokes.

Compared to the strips it shares space with in the funnypapers, Meadows is (to borrow a phrase from Paul Schrader) "a dwarf among midgets": insipid but slightly less awful than its neighbors. Sad to say, but it is a welcome addition to the newspaper comics section, both for its refreshingly fine lines and because it finally fills the gap in the funnypapers left by the near-disappearance of Flash Gordon as one of the few comic strips men too cheap to buy pornography can read one-handed. There's an advert on Cho's Studio website for Liberty Meadows that ends with the line "EVERY BATHROOM DESERVES A COPY!"

Insight, indeed. Man, can he draw one good looking Lola Granola.

And, as a former devotee of Bloom County who lost most of his respect for Breathed when I discovered most of the good things about the strip were filched from a better cartoonist's work, I wouldn't be surprised to discover the only person who finds Meadows as funny as Cho believes it is would be Garry Trudeau. No one this side of O. Henry could think up a more delicious irony than a daily newspaper that carries Liberty Meadows delivered to the front step of Breathed's Glass Condo.

In his attempt to justify his self-nomination -- which, appropriately enough, reads like a weak, dimwitted and inarticulate imitation of Breathed's "No one said I couldn't enter my work, and most of my peers suck anyway" defense of his 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning -- Cho told the Journal that, "It was hard to find four or five quality books to nominate in some of the categories. It seems like anyone who can do thick brush lines is a hip, alternative creator. There are a lot of artists out there who can't draw worth a damn."

Cho can draw one good looking, thin technical pen-lined Lola Granola worth a damn. That's about it. 32 pages of a comic strip only marginally better than Cathy simply does not deserve an award named after George Herriman's immortal creation.

Al Capp created the first American comic strip that intellectuals could talk seriously about in polite company, and for most of his career, Capp got to have his cake and eat it too.

In an essay first published in Life magazine in 1965 called “My Life as an Immortal Myth” (and reprinted in a posthumous collection of Capp’s essay My Well-Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg), he recounts how he was seduced into flying to Italy to attend the First International Conference of the Comics by the French movie director, Alain Resnais. “All I know of storytelling I have learned from my study of your immortal myth,” Resnais supposedly gushed to Capp. “Look — I’m the one who does Li’l Abner,” Capp tried to explain, perhaps blushing and scuffing his feet on the carpet. “America’s one immortal myth,” Resnais continued, “and the dominating artistic influence of my life.”

In a role much like one he would have devised for Abner himself, Capp flies to Italy, where he finds that Resnais has similarly roped a whole host of other American cartoonists into attending. On the eve of his return, however, Capp nearly capitulates — or pretends to, anyway — before the ardor and scholarly attention of his European fans.

“Do you suppose it’ll ever reach our country?” he asks. “Just think! To be treated as the equal of real writers and artists! To have each new story in Li’l Abner reviewed by the New York Times — same as each new story by, say, Robert Ruark! To have my daily square full of cartoons discussed in the Art Review, as reverently as Rothko’s empty squares! It would do a lot for me with my grandchildren.”

Capp laughs off such lofty ambitions, of course, once his native American common sense is restored, and ends his story with a tip of his hat to his real fans — as opposed to those intellectuals gullible enough to be duped by such poseurs as Ruark and Mark Rothko — the “sixty million people from age seven to 70 take us seriously enough to have read us every day for 30 years.”

The story illustrates the tightrope Capp walked for most of his professional life, a cartoonist able to enjoy rare respectability and influence far beyond the comics pages, a political idealogue whose stock-in-trade was deriding politics and politicians as bunk, the well-spring of tons of Li’l Abner-related merchandising junk who loved to poke fun at consumer culture — all the while sharing a wink with his red-blooded American readers who prided themselves on recognizing hokum when they saw it. It was a neat trick, and he worked the illusion almost to the end of his life.

Capp was born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven in 1909, and had had intensive fine arts training before he took over an Associated Press strip called Mr. Gilfeather in 1932. Later that year he went to work as an assistant to Ham Fisher on the Joe Palooka strip.

There are differing accounts of whence came Capp’s brainstorm for a hillbilly strip. He claimed it came from a boyhood trip to Appalachia; his wife maintained it was found in a vaudeville act the couple saw in Columbus Circle in New York City (in general, Depression-era America was fascinated by tales of rural depravity; Erskine Caldwell, for instance, became a best-selling author on the strength of his scandalous Tobacco Road in 1931). Whatever his inspiration, Capp drew some decidedly charmless hillbillies into a Joe Palooka story while Fisher was on vacation. The two later feuded over who came up with the idea of a hillbilly strip first (as they did about most everything else that transpired between them), but Capp’s claim stuck.

United Features Syndicate debuted Li’l Abner in 1934, and the strip ran until shortly before Capp’s death in 1979. In 1960, Li’l Abner was appearing in 900 U.S. daily and Sunday newspapers, 100 more overseas in 28 countries, and boasted a readership of 60,000,000 people. In discussing Li’l Abner, we’re not just talking popular culture. We’re talking enormously popular culture. Clearly, there was a day when Al Capp and Li’l Abner were not to be trifled with.

Arthur Asa Berger’s book about Capp’s ground-breaking strip, Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire, was ground-breaking in its own right when it was published in 1970. Never before had anyone in this country spent much time dissecting a single comic strip. That you happen to be reading about the reissue of Berger’s book in an entire journal dedicated to comic art is a measure of how far the idiom has come in the years since. In 1970, as Berger reminds us throughout the book (and as Capp noted in the passage quoted above), comics were a certifiably bastard stepchild to real literature. That, of course, only makes Capp’s achievement all the more remarkable. There is truly no comparable analogy in post-modern America to illustrate the impact of Li’l Abner on 1940s and ’50s culture.

But if Capp is past due for critical re-appraisal, readers won’t find much illumination in Berger’s book. Berger makes little attempt to relate the consistent topicality of Li’l Abner to much of anything beyond the panels of the strip itself, as if Capp operated in a cultural and political vacuum. Berger’s unflinchingly academic tone can perhaps be traced to the incredulous reception he received when he first proposed doing his dissertation on a comic strip (which appears to have been the basis for the book). Berger clearly loves Li’l Abner, but it’s as if he received the go-ahead to begin on the condition that he refrain from any outward appearance of having fun in doing so. Berger adroitly traces Abner’s roots in the Southwestern school of humor that swept the country in the 19th Century, examines Capp’s graphic and narrative technique (strictly qua technique), and spends an inordinate amount of space comparing Li’l Abner with Italian comics. But only rarely does Berger divulge anything that casts light on how or why the strip works.

And perhaps the most conspicuous question of all about Capp isn’t even asked, although it floats throughout the book (and throughout posthumous readings of even Capp’s most innocuous early strips) like a bad smell: Just what was it that prompted Capp to abandon his ties to liberalism in order to align himself with the very worst of Vietnam-era reactionary conservatism? What was he really so angry about?

Capp’s voice was heard in plenty of other venues besides his strip. He wrote a syndicated newspaper column for a while, achieved some notoriety as a radio commentator, and by the late ’60s, when Berger was researching his book, Capp was spouting from innumerable podia on college campuses where he seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time deliberately trying to piss people off. Capp, in fact, bore a striking resemblance, physically and otherwise, to Republican presidential aspirate Pat Buchanan. But Capp paid a price for this kind of celebrity. Where once he had been toasted by John Steinbeck, the foremost middle-brow literary figure of his era, as “very possibly… the best writer in the world today,” by 1971 Capp had become marginalized to the point where it wasn’t necessarily a bad career move to allow himself to be anthologized in The Hardhat’s Bedtime Book. Where once he had modeled robust characters after Fiorello LaGuardia and even George Bernard Shaw, Capp’s thinly-veiled late period screeds against “liberal young snots” featured the likes of Joanie Phonie, a clear and gratuitous caricature of, of all people, Joan Baez. Not surprisingly, this kind of storytelling usually failed to elicit the desired response from his readers. Capp had shifted from a pessimistic New Deal Liberal to a full-blown right-wing crank, and his career went in the toilet.

Capp, of course, as a bona fide celebrity, was asked plenty of time for explanations for the sea change, and, not surprisingly, his explanations were as broad and simplistic and mythic in nature as those he would dream up to neatly resolve a convoluted plot line in the final frame of a Li’l Abner strip. In the 1978 introduction to The Best of Li’l Abner, he tells of a “lady liberal” photographer who asks him to provide captions for a book of photographs. All goes well until Capp sees the last photo in the series, which depicts a group of teenagers smoking and drinking on a trash-lined city street: “The caption, I said, should be, ‘Get up off your asses and clean up your street!’ The lady stormed out. I guess that was when I began leaving what liberalism had become.”

Berger doesn’t touch upon anything that might have brought about Capp’s shift, and no biographer has yet taken up the task of documenting the cartoonist’s life and what made him tick, so we have to fend for ourselves.

Even a cursory examination of Capp’s career suggests he was something less than the fearless iconoclast he liked to believe he was. Despite his brilliance as an artist and writer, as a satirist Capp was timid. It’s the privilege of the satirist to look at things from a peculiarly Olympian elevation that the rest of us seldom get to enjoy, and it could be argued that Capp just picked his fights carefully. But that begs the question: Which fights did he back away from, and why?

Like all prominent cartoonists in that era, Capp contributed mightily to the war effort during World War II. He drew promotional strips, plugged war bonds and urged readers to support the USO. But Capp steered Abner as far around the War as possible. True, the revelations from Europe were perhaps too gruesome to provide fodder for the type of satire at which Capp excelled; Capp was far too smart to set up any sight gags in which Abner might have beat the tar out of Hitler.

But Capp tellingly beat a similar satiric retreat in the post-War years as well, the years in which he was not only at his creative peak, but also enjoying a degree of commercial success that perhaps no other cartoonist has enjoyed before or since.

For starters, consider the shmoo. The shmoo has long since gone the way of all pop ephemera, but it must have made millions for Capp. Shmoos were small white squash-shaped creatures “with two tiny legs, a pair of eyes and wispy mustache hairs.” Their sole reason for existence was to make humans happy. Shmoos laid eggs, gave milk, were in inexhaustible supply and “died of ecstasy if you looked at it with hunger in your eyes.” Al Capp’s invention was embraced by the merchandising world in the late-’40s as surely as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in our own day, and some 75 consumer items were marketed in the shape of or emblazoned with their image at the height of the shmoo craze.

But shmoos weren’t Capp’s only crossover success in those glory years. Li’l Abner became the basis of a movie (albeit not a very good one) for which Capp ostensibly wrote the script, and, a few years later, of a hit Broadway musical. These were also the years in which Capp insinuated himself into the American lexicon. Dogpatch, the name Capp gave to Abner’s mythical Kentucky home, quickly became — and is still — synonymous with any rural community obviously below the poverty line. Sadie Hawkins Day, the one day of the year in Dogpatch when women were permitted to reverse the presumed natural order of things and chase the menfolks and marry ‘em if they caught ‘em, likewise became a part of America’s pseudo-folklore.

No one can deny Capp’s contribution to American popular culture. But Li’l Abner never purported to be mere entertainment, despite Capp’s disingenuous protests to the contrary. The strip’s hallmark was what was generally assumed to be its satiric bent, and while Capp liked to hang his hat on any number of convenient artistic posts, he clearly reveled in his reputation as the level-headed no-bullshit kind of guy who sees through the sham that permeates modern life.

The early ’50s were banner years in a long series of them for Capp. The marriage of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae, which had provoked at least as much conversation around American breakfast tables as the Michael Jackson/Lisa Marie Presley nuptials, was commemorated on the cover of Life magazine. Shmoos were still selling briskly. Capp was trading compliments in print with such notables as Steinbeck and Charles Chaplin. Life was pretty sweet, and you might think there was nothing for a died-in-the-wool satirist to rip the lid off of in those halcyon days. But Capp himself revealed otherwise in a New Yorker interview, years later.

“McCarthy was coming to power when I created shmoos, and those were inconceivably terrible times,” he said. “They got worse and worse, until the only satire possible and permissible in this democracy of ours [italics mine] was broad, weak, domestic comedy. That’s why I married off Li’l Abner and began to concentrate on him again…”

Just as the nation was falling under the sway of anti-Communist hysteria, in other words, Capp decided it was an opportune time for Abner and Daisy Mae to get hitched. It probably didn’t alienate any readers, but Capp missed the satirical opportunity of a lifetime.

Capp’s explanation for shying away from McCarthyism overlooks a lot — Walt Kelly’s fearless Pogo strips from the McCarthy era for one, and the scores of artists and writers who watched their careers nosedive after refusing to name names in the televised Senate Subcommittee hearings headed by the Wisconsin Senator that Kelly caricatured as Simple J. Malarkey. Capp was hardly alone in his decision to abandon even a nominally political agenda for the safer waters of “broad, weak domestic comedy,” but that decision casts a long shadow over his later role as right-wing demagogue — much like those post-Vietnam apologists for the military who spent the war safe and sound in law school. It doesn’t help that Capp appeared to relish that role as much as he did.

“I’m a registered Independent,” Capp later insisted, perhaps a little too vehemently. “I worked for Jack Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson. But I’ve always preferred to remain Independent and attack any side that’s gone crazy. I am confident… that the American talent for sniffing out frauds will reject the excesses of Liberalism and examine again the derided and despised decencies of Conservatism.”

That last sort of neat Agnew-like alliteration was very much in vogue for a while, you may recall. Blame it on the Liberal Media if you like (Capp certainly did), but as Li’l Abner became more strident, its popularity declined until Capp had the good sense to bring the strip to an end in 1977, two years before his death.

Capp was reportedly often disappointed in the failure of his critics to take the vagaries of his life into account when dissecting Li’l Abner. One incident in particular haunted him all his days. When Capp was nine, he lost a leg, falling from an ice wagon into the path of a streetcar. In My Well-Balanced Life, Capp writes extensively and often comically of living with a prosthesis, but even when the topic is ostensibly something else, the missing leg or the clumsy wooden substitute turn up as phantom characters. I’m not suggesting that Capp’s missing leg is the Grail that will allow us to make easy sense of a brilliant cartoonist’s decline into crankdom, but the fact that he was still steamed about the incident 60 years after the fact does remind us that Al Capp was indeed very human.

Undeniably and frustratingly human, in fact. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to ferret out a wealth of Capp’s own aspirations and anxieties in the pages of his strip. Abner himself, that picture of guileless (albeit brainless) virility, was obviously a kind of idealized and whole portrait of the artist, but significantly, Abner was also virtually the only handsome male creature ever to appear in the comic universe that sprang from Capp’s imagination. The rest of Dogpatch is peopled largely with grotesques, and something else that gives Capp a measure of the humility that he sought so strenuously to avoid in his later years is not the resemblance between Capp’s strapping hero and his younger self (which is only poignant), but the similarities between Capp and some of his grotesques, particularly as Capp’s later self-portraits veered into a kind of self-loathing caricature. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, lies the real Al Capp, a man almost certainly more complicated than either his fans or his targets might have guessed.

A lot happened in the years between the strip’s inception during the Depression and its ignoble end. America emerged righteous and triumphant from the Second World War and then began a decline. Kennedy was shot. America lumbered into Vietnam and failed to lumber out again in time to avert a lot of psychic damage. Blacks and women won some measure of civil rights (Capp, to his credit, rallied to the support of the former, but cringed from the latter, preferring purely decorative and conspicuously long-limbed cheesecake to the likes of Joanie Phonie). Nixon, whom Capp championed from all of those campus podia, resigned in disgrace, and morals, as they have been doing non-stop since the dawn of recorded history, continued en route to hell in a handbasket. Perhaps it’s as simple as this: In the end, what happened to Al Capp is what happens to most of us if we’re lucky. He got old and tired, and it got harder and harder to make sense of the world.

Backing down from the onslaught of McCarthyism couldn’t have been an easy thing for Capp to do, even if it was the wrong one. It was the sort of decision that could trouble a public figure — especially a satirist like Capp — for a lifetime. And people who get as angry about politics as Capp did, of course, usually aren’t really talking about politics at all. All of this, I think, cast the later Capp in a more sympathetic light. Given all things he did brilliantly, we can well afford to be charitable, even if its not hard to imagine him, if he were alive today, railing against the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A lot of American history and American character — and more of Al Capp than we may ever know — is encapsulated in Li’l Abner, much of which has been made available again in Kitchen Sink Press’s methodical re-publication of 43 years of daily strips. If the re-issue of Berger’s book prompts renewed attention to one of the most masterful comic strips of the century, then we’ll have a lot to thank him for. On its own hook, however, the book does little more than remind us that comics scholarship is, like satire in the funny pages, less timid than it used to be.

This small (5" X 7") tome, from the equally small Workman Publishing imprint Algonquin, is worth picking up for you R. Crumb completists out there. Robertson uses several Crumb illustrations from the artist’s series of portraits of blues musicians, and despite a hazy, two-tone printing, the power and style of Crumb’s art comes through.

It’s not a bad book, either. Robertson has assembled dozens of anecdotes, short biographies, trivia and, most notably, song snippets from blues muscians from Robert Johnson to Sippie Wallace. Except maybe for the bits that the author takes from his own songwriting, the material collected is first-rate, and Robertson succeeds in giving the reader a sense of the collected wisdom found in the music, the musicians, and the culture surrounding both. The end results is that Little Blues Book has a much greater impact than most of what you’ll find in your book store’s novelty or gift-books section for which this seems to have been packaged. Like Crumb’s work, the stories and lyrics are undeniably authentic, and speak to a tradition in art that’s slowly passing away.

For perhaps the first time, the tiresome rejoinder “It’s all just lines on paper, folks!” does not apply. Shane Simmons’ Longshot Comics is a tale told in dots, full of humor and sharp dialogue, signifying… well, not nothing, and although it’s not exactly Kafka either, who says it has to be? This unique work is an intensely interesting comics reading experience if only for its usage of tiny, tiny panels (160 per page — this guy outpanels cartoon diary period Joe Matt!) and characters who are merely dots.

One might expect a simple story to result from such an endeavor because — let’s not kid ourselves — what kind of meaningful interaction can dots engage in? Generally, dots are the province of dirty humor or hack-slash types of comic stories. And they’re never used for 24 consecutive pages in 3840 panels. With this comic, however, Simmons demonstrates that dots are indeed people too, even if they are slightly more abstract than the usual “lines on paper” comic book characters.

Longshot Comics could be termed a “mini-epic.” It chronicles the life of Victorian everyman Roland Gethers as he grows up, sweeps floors for ten years, gets married, has children, fights in a few wars, and experiences all the other little things that make up a life.

The key to this story, though, is the hilarious dialogue, which is by turns subtle and over-the-top, yet well-paced so as to not engender a dull feeling of familiarity or complacency in the reader.

Longshot Comics scores a resounding victory for the minimalist school of comics and an even bigger win for comics in general with its witty brand of storytelling and innovative form. It’s definitely worth three bucks and the three hours it’s going to take you to wade through it.

In 1993, Jules Feiffer’s children’s book The Man in the Ceiling was published in hardback. Harper Trophy has now published a very affordable paperback, and if you missed it in hardback, I highly recommend you buy a copy now. The Man in the Ceiling may be aimed at younger readers, but grownups will find it extremely funny and touching.

The protagonist, Jimmy Jibbett, is a very able young cartoonist. However, he is a failure at all other boyish activities, especially baseball. His father doesn’t know quite what to make of him, his mother is far too busy to be bothered with him, and while his sisters appreciate his storytelling talent, they are otherwise pests. The only people who seem to understand Jimmy are Charley Beemer (the most popular boy in school - and an excellent baseball player) and his uncle Lester, a songwriter. Lester understands Jimmy’s struggles with learning to draw and gaining acceptance for his art and encourages him. But Lester has his own problems, and at the end of the book, Jimmy finds himself in the position of having to help Lester the way Lester helped him.

In some ways, The Man in the Ceiling works just like any other illustrated book for older children - mostly text, punctuated here and there with a lively illustration. But Feiffer also incorporates Jimmy’s own crudely-drawn comics into the story in an extremely creative way. These typically are self-contained comics stories. While they tend to be either Indiana Jones-style adventures or superhero stories, they subtly echo the “real life” situations that Jimmy finds himself in. Feiffer’s own illustrations are wonderful, and it’s great to see him use wash so masterfully. But “Jimmy’s” drawings are what make this such delightful, moving book. As usual, Feiffer makes something miraculous look easy.