Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays, Vol. 1: 1934-1936
Its place in the pop-culture landscape has faded, but in its mid-twentieth-century heyday, Li'l Abner was a huge cultural phenomenon, spreading from the funny pages to films and Broadway and making creator Al Capp a celebrity. The strip's family of hillbillies dwelling in comedic squalor in the misbegotten town of Dogpatch was a newspaper mainstay for more than four decades. The artwork may be a bit rough in these earliest installments—the easy balance between cartoonishness and realism that Capp would later achieve here appears tilted more towards the latter—and Capp hadn't yet added the element of satire that would come to distinguish the strip. But the key characters are in place from the very beginning: bighearted, lunkheaded Abner; his loving parents, domineering Mammy and diminutive Pappy; and the alluring Daisy Mae, hopelessly in love with Abner despite his dimwitted indifference. The additional cast of colorful supporting characters is yet to come, but the appealing humor of these initial exploits of the principals clearly points the way to Abner's subsequent and enduring popularity. --Gordon Flagg