Ham Fisher - Feud With Al Capp

Feud With Al Capp

Searching for assistants to work on the strip, Fisher hired (among others) Al Capp, who later achieved fame as the writer-cartoonist of Li'l Abner. While ghosting on Joe Palooka, Capp created a storyline about a stupid musclebound hillbilly named “Big Leviticus”, who was an obvious prototype for the Li'l Abner character. When Capp quit Joe Palooka in 1934 to launch his own strip, Fisher badmouthed him to colleagues and editors, claiming that Capp had stolen his idea. For years, Fisher would bring the characters back to his strip, billing them as “the Original Hillbilly Characters” and advising readers not to be “fooled by imitations”.

The Capp-Fisher feud was well known in cartooning circles, and it became personal and vitriolic as Capp's strip eclipsed Joe Palooka in popularity. In the 1930s, to replace Capp, Fisher hired away Capp's top assistant, Moe Leff, along with Phil Boyle and a letterer. All three continued to work for Fisher for two decades. Fisher, Leff and Boyle all collaborated on the art, with Leff drawing the figures and Fisher doing the heads. Leff also contributed to scripting the strip.

After Fisher underwent plastic surgery, Capp once included a racehorse in L'il Abner named Ham's Nose Bob. Traveling in the same social circles, the two men engaged in a 20-year mutual vendetta, as described in 1998 by Jay Maeder in the Daily News: “They crossed paths often, in the midtown watering holes and at National Cartoonists Society banquets, and the city's gossip columns were full of their snarling public donnybrooks.”

In 1950, Capp wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled “I Remember Monster”. The article recounted Capp's days working for an unnamed “benefactor” with a miserly, swinish personality, who Capp claimed was a neverending source of inspiration when it came time to create a new unregenerate villain for his comic strip.