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134 Donald Phelps “Over the Cliff” From Covering Ground: Essays for Now (New York: Croton Press Books, 1969), pp. 128–33. Reprinted by permission. In the decade since I wrote “Cliffhanger Comic”, about Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, the most crucial event by far in the Yokum saga has been Abner’s marriage to Daisy Mae. This occurred in 1951, as the result, I take it, of those “public pressures” which are so often misread, as they were in this case. For Abner’s implacable virginity was—next to Downwind Jaxon’s permanently averted face in Smilin’ Jack—the arch tease of the comic-strip world. Too, it was central to that secrecy which gave Li’l Abner its tone, its unity and—beyond the rather specious satire and fantasy—its fascination. The trouble was that obviously, for Al Capp, this permanent virginity conditioned Abner’s world: a world permanently suspended, a cliffhanger world, equally imperiled by the prospect over the cliff, or that of level ground. Capp, after considerable wobbling, settled for over-the cliff. I can only assume that he thus decided to take seriously the doowah long circulated about the “self-contained world” of Abner; than which a world less self-contained would be hard to find off the stage of the old Palace. Li’l Abner was all missing walls, open ends and breakaway chairs. Its glory was its two-dimensionality, not the cheesy fantastic-realism accorded it by academicians and other sentimentalists. Capp’s very imagination—I’m not talking about ingenuity—lacked one wall. Billy DeBeck, who divorced Barney Google with such brusque and jovial aplomb, might have met the challenges of marrying off Abner, assuming he’d have considered Abner worth his time. Capp, who built a career on making shift with his stunted and fractured inventive power, found his strength in mockery of his characters’ humanity. To make Abner’s marriage (a) funny, (b) humanly persuasive, would have entailed an imaginative coup of which he had never shown himself capable; not to mention a total refutation of his strip’s basic premise. His reaction was very nearly as interesting: he wrenched the typical parody of his strip into something more openly acrid and rancidly grotesque than had ever appeared theretofore. Those strips following Daisy Mae’s wedding with Abner are probably the strangest, most distasteful and most idiosyncratic comic strips to appear in America at that time. Immediately, on the honeymoon, Abner was entrusted by Mammy Yokum with an enormous phallus-shaped ham—the Family Ham—which, like the family pig, Salomey, was inviolate (one of Capp’s typically askew introductions of his Jewish background; another being that the Yokum family subsists on pork chops). Li’l Abner’s solicitude for this monstrous, vaguely animate (“I kin hear its heart beatin’!” he reassures himself, when the ham has been struck by the railroad engine) talisman, comes between and his bride in every respect including, of course, the most agonizing. The eerie, travestied sexuality of these episodes caused several panels to be banned by local papers. Like so many primitive societies, Dogpatch in upheaval was attended by all manner of prodigies and portents. Foremost among these: Mammy Yokum “gave birth” to a younger brother for Abner—a blonde, even more-lumpish near duplicate named Tiny. Mammy had produced Tiny while visiting a neighbor—then had absentmindedly left him, deeming the experience an attack of indigestion. Obviously, Capp, his jeune premier deposed, felt pressed to rush in a surrogate Li’l Abner. But the most striking feature of his ploy was the naked ugliness of its grotesquerie, and the bilious contempt implied in it. Mammy Yokum’s standard role, of course, had been emblem and (Capp’s usual jugglery) caricature of motherhood—as institution, not as biological process. But beyond that, the grotesquerie and scorn of the episode—neither element unfamiliar to Capp’s readers—took their heavy, mordant tone from the rawness of Capp’s importunity: he had to do this; and, for the first time, his desperation seemed remote from sport, from daredevil enterprise. The pressure which he had acknowledged by marrying off Abner was simply too hectoring, too obvious. And it was the pressure not of commercial expediency alone, but of biological reality: that reality which he had flouted so long. His sole retaliation against this triumphant reality was a snarling disconsolate mockery of marriage and birth. But that act of retaliation was many-sided. For Daisy Mae, for instance...

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