Fearless Fosdick
Typically, an anxious Abner would race frantically to the mailbox or to the train delivering the morning newspapers, to get a glimpse of the latest cliffhanger episode.
While oblivious to the surrounding "real" world (e.g., walking off a cliff or into the path of an oncoming train, or inadvertently ignoring one of Daisy Mae's perilous predicaments), Abner would be, as ever, fully engrossed in the Fosdick adventure.
Pimpleton, but Fosdick was directly responsible for one of the seminal events of the strip—the famous marriage of his biggest fan, Li'l Abner, to Daisy Mae in 1952.
(Ironically, Abner had previously told Daisy Mae that cartoonists often employ plot contrivances like dream sequences and impending weddings as sucker bait, to fool their gullible readers!)
He shoots people for their own good, is pure beyond imagining, and is fanatically loyal to a police department which exploits, starves and periodically fires him," Capp told Pageant magazine in May 1952.
All throughout Li'l Abner, the neglected Daisy Mae finds herself in the ironic position of being jealous of a "stoopid comical strip character!"
When Capp was asked (in a Playboy interview conducted by Alvin Toffler in 1965) about the specific gender makeup of his readers, he responded by using Fosdick as an example of the (perceived) inherent differences between the male and female sense of humor: Whether most of the readers are male or female depends on when the survey is taken ... During a Fearless Fosdick sequence, I lose 20 million women.
Men enjoy this sort of humor, but housewives don't seem to see anything funny about it!Although Fearless Fosdick began as a specific burlesque of Dick Tracy, it eventually grew beyond mere parody and developed its own distinctive, self-contained comic identity.
Mixing equal parts slapstick, black humor, irony, and biting social criticism, Fearless Fosdick provided a running commentary on, among other things: the lowly lives of policemen, the capriciousness of the general public, and the thankless role of society's "heroes"—as well as the superficiality of modern pop culture and the compulsive nature of its avid fans.
Fearless Fosdick soon developed its own regular supporting cast, separate from Li'l Abner and the rest of the Dogpatch characters.
Over the years, other nemeses included: Fosdick is so tough that on the rare occasions he isn't wearing his black suit, he pins his badge to his bare chest.
The impervious detective considers the gaping holes "minor scratches" or "mere flesh wounds" however, and always reports back in one piece for duty the next day.
Virtually indestructible, Fosdick's famous iron-jawed profile adorned both Consolidated B-24 Liberator and Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers during World War II, joining the other Li'l Abner-inspired wartime nose art mascots—Earthquake McGoon, Moonbeam McSwine, Daisy Mae, Lonesome Polecat, Hairless Joe, Silent Yokum, Sadie Hawkins and Wolf Gal.
Oblivious to more obvious felonies being committed in broad daylight in the background (such as murders, assaults and bank robberies), Fosdick would bypass them to shoot someone who walked on the grass or sold balloons without a license.
Gullible, dense and impossibly inept, public servant Fosdick is duty-bound and literal-minded to the point of being a menace to the citizens he is sworn to protect.
In the story, the ever-vigilant detective goes about town shooting anyone he sees eating "Old Faithful" brand beans in an attempt to prevent them from consuming a toxic can he knows to have been tampered with.
Gould was also probably less than enamored of his own unflattering portrayal in the character of Fosdick's "creator," the diminutive and occasionally mentally deranged cartoonist Lester Gooch.
"The greatest tribute paid to Chester Gould by another famous comic strip artist and storyteller and his creation was, of course, Al Capp's Fearless Fosdick," wrote author and Dick Tracy expert Garyn G. Roberts in 1993.
Besides Dick Tracy, Capp spoofed many other comic strips in Li'l Abner, including Steve Canyon, Superman (at least twice; first as "Jack Jawbreaker!"
[13] A puppet show based on Fosdick premiered on NBC-TV on Sunday afternoons, and even made the cover of TV Guide for the week of October 17, 1952.
(The TV show also sparked the permanent switch in the strip from Fosdick's early Dick Tracy yellow fedora to his later trademark bowler hat, when Capp felt the three-dimensional puppet looked too close for comfort to the genuine article.)
Created for television and directed by puppeteer Mary Chase,[14] Fearless Fosdick was written by Everett Crosby and voiced by John Griggs, Gilbert Mack, and Jean Carson.
Fosdick's image on tin signs and counter displays became a prominent fixture in barbershops across America in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, as well as in animated TV commercials.
A long-running series of print ads appeared in newspapers, national magazines (such as Life, Boys' Life, and Argosy), and comic books (including Archie Comics, Gang Busters, All-Star Western, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Mystery in Space, House of Mystery, All-American Men of War, and The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis).
Parallels between Li'l Abner and the early Mad are unmistakable: the incongruous use of mock-Yiddish slang terms, the nose-thumbing disdain for pop cultural icons, the rampant and pervasive sick humor, the pointedly subversive tone, the total disregard for sentiment and the extremely broad visual styling.
Even the trademark comic signs that clutter the backdrops of Will Elder's panels would seem to have a precedent in Li'l Abner, in the headquarters of Dogpatch entrepreneur Available Jones.
Elements of Fearless Fosdick can be gleaned in Bob Clampett's classic Warner Bros. cartoon The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946), as when avid "fan" Daffy Duck makes a panicked dash to the mailbox to retrieve the latest comic book, just like Li'l Abner often did.
Later, after Daffy portrays his alter ego "Duck Twacy" in a manic nightmare sequence (complete with bullet-riddled corpses and "impossible" villains with names like "Jukebox Jaw," "Pickle Puss," "88 Teeth" and "Neon Noodle"), he "wakes up" in a rural, Dogpatch-like setting—on a pig farm.
