Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years 1954-1955

I bought this volume (and volumes 2-4) for my Dad for Christmas because he was such a big L'il Abner fan when I was a kid in the 60's. When they arrived I just had to sit down and read them all before wrapping them up! L'il Abner is a lens focused on it's own era in time, totally tongue-in-cheek! For rollicking fun and biting satire these comics can't be beat!

These are Sunday Li'l Abner pages, penciled by comics legend Frank Frazetta. In my opinion, Li'l Abner was the greatest comic stip of all time. The strip was fantastic during the 1950s, so you can't go wrong here. It seems like this was released because of the Frazetta connection, but the art looks pretty much like all other Li'l Abner art. Frazetta was clearly drawing as close as he could to Al Capp's style. But any excuse to have Li'l Abner strips released works for me. Highly recommended.

Denis Kitchen said he hoped to bring out a collection of the Li'l Abner Sundays when he printed the dailies under his own publishing company several years ago. He has finally been able to achieve this with the help of Dark Horse. This is a classic strip, sharply written, beautifully rendered, superior to most anything on the funny pages today. Please note this book is hardcover like a european album, not softcover as listed in the description. Also Mac Raboy has nothing to do with it. This must be a mix up from the Flash Gordon book currently available. The reproduction can be a bit muddy since it was scanned from newsprint tear sheets and can only be as good as the source. A great bargain price to boot! You can't go wrong.

Finally! Although one may quibble over some technical details ( the strips might have been printed a bit larger, and the color is a bit muddy in spots, ) there's no denying that publisher Denis Kitchen is performing a service to mankind by making these historic strips available again - for the first time in almost 50 years. Al Capp was at a creative peak in the 1950's, the heyday of his uber cool American satiric masterpiece: LI'L ABNER, and these classic Sunday page sequences don't disappoint. For many people, this was their first exposure to Frank Frazetta's work, and he managed to capture Capp's idiosyncratic style with the greatest of ease, adding many brilliant, characteristic nuances of his own along the way. With the demise of the late, lamented Kitchen Sink Press a few years back, I despaired of ever seeing this classic material back in print again - but here it is! It's impossible for gen X-ers weaned on tripe like Dilbert and Foxtrot to even begin to imagine what a rich source of art and humor the American comic strip used to be in the 30's, 40's and 50's. For anyone interested in re-visiting a Golden Age of this uniquely American art form, you couldn't ask for a better place to start than this. Hopefully the series will be continued before and beyond the Frazetta years - into the forties and sixties. And while we're at it, how about a color POGO Sundays collection, Mr. Kitchen?