Behind all the mirth and bile, who was Al Capp? This is the question Alexander Theroux wrestles with in this curious, illuminating, and finally unsatisfying little book. (Full disclosure obliges me to note that I sometimes deal with its publisher, Fantagraphics Books, over printing some of its comics in the Weekly.) Theroux looks deep and wide into Capp's life and cartoons for the source of his reactionary bitterness and finds many roots: the pain, and shame, of being crippled since age 9 (when he lost a leg under a streetcar); ferocious, boyish sexual preoccupations, which literally burst out in his cartoons, packed with more buxom babes (their scant hillbilly rags always on the verge of total decomposition) than a Playboy of the same period; and a broad sympathy for the underdog and scorn for elites, which often turned to what Theroux calls "an almost roosterish defensiveness." ,...

The Enigma of Al Capp left me filling in many interpretive blanks where Theroux seems to shirk from venturing. That reticence is one of two main faults that keeps this from being a wonderful book. (The other is a text that reads too often like an unedited draft, as in, "It was the comic strip alone that gave Al Capp his sole identity." Blue pencil, please.) Still, Theroux delivers a load of telling anecdote and useful context.

The Enigma of Al Capp is a sloppy piece of work, a little light writing packaged for light reading. As if not to offend the writer, the editorial corps seems to have refrained from correcting obvious lapses in continuity and style, let alone from challenging Theroux to establish what was so enigmatic about the creator of Li'l Abner...

The world of comics needs serious criticism from outside the field. In a way, though, the Capp book is the worst kind of treacherous lip service, emblematic of an inferiority complex Fantagraphics should repudiate. Let's get a big name author to write a monograph about a famous cartoonist, so we can stake out some critical respectability! When the big shot turns in garbage, do you accept it and pretend everything's fine, or do you hold him to the same standards of quality you enforce for every other person who submits work to you, the standards that made you what you are?

Lil' Abner worked both as an almost universally appealing gag strip and a freewheeling satire of whatever subjects about which Capp chose to address his ire. These began as fat-cat capitalists and McCarthyites and ended as hippies and welfare mothers. In the slender book The Enigma Of Al Capp—it might better be called an extended essay—Alexander Theroux addresses Capp's career with a special emphasis on this shift. Did a lifetime of frustration from having only one leg catch up with Capp, or did it have something to do with the sexual discontent evinced by his late-in-life prosecution for sexual harassment, before that term had been properly defined? Or was he a little bit right all along? Did the Left move away from its original vision? Theroux doesn't offer many, or really any, answers, but his thoughts on Capp make for interesting reading, if only because he takes seriously a man whose vision of society reached so many, however much his ideals changed over time.