The cover to Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years, Volume One, 1954-1955 (Dark Horse) puts its marketing agenda up front: posed on the front cover, showing off her bodacious figger is series regular Moonbeam McSwine. Titular hero of the strip, Abner Yokum, is nowhere to be seen, not even in the red-tinged strips that are used as background. We don't buy a collection of Frazetta art to look at buff Dogpatch boys; it's the babes that bring in the fanboys.
Packaging considerations aside, it's great to see a fresh collection of Capp's classic comic strip. Back in the 90's, Dennis Kitchen's Kitchen Sink Press had taken on the Promethean task of reprinting the long-running strip's dailies; Kitchen got up to 27 volumes (covering 1934 - 61) before the company crashed. Most Capp fans despaired of ever seeing future reprints; now, Dennis has found another publishing outlet for one of his long-standing fannish obsessions - and good for him!
Figures that the only way he could sell Capp's work to another comic publisher, though, was to focus on the work featuring fan-favorite Frank Frazetta. The popular fantasy illustrator was an assistant to Capp for seven years, starting out on the dailies (see Volume 20 of the Kitchen Sink reprint series - if you can find a copy) where he initially both penciled and inked the strip until bosses at the syndicate reportedly began complaining about how different it all looked. Frazetta moved to penciling Sunday strips instead, with a separate Capp assistant inking to downplay his distinctive sinuous linework (full Frazetta made the characters so explicitly sexual that the risque jokes Capp had long imbedded in the strip became even more obvious). This he continued to do until 1961, when Capp's refusal to give the artist a raise led to Frazetta leaving the strip to pursue a career in book and magazine illustration that'd ultimately prove more rewarding.
Unlike the daily strip, which tended to feature prolonged continuities, "Li'l Abner" Sundays mixed single entry and two- or three-part stories with slightly longer fare. Volume One shows Frazetta coming on board mid-continuity in a fifteen-week strip about "The Wrecker," appropriate since the storyline concerns one of Capp's dangerous women: a seemingly innocent girl whose mere walking presence is enough to ruin any marriage by driving the men who see her insane with desire. Frazetta's propensity for rendering pulchritudinous women was put on display from the get-go - and where better to show it off than on the color Sunday strips?
The first volume, edited and annotated by Kitchen, presents 106 Sundays in color reproduction that emphasizes the strip's humble pulp newsprint origins. Instead of recoloring or prettifying the strips (much as DC and Marvel have done with their archival reprints of old comic book series), Dark Horse has chosen to reprint 'em on lightly tanned paper from old repro-ed news pages. The end results come closer to the experience of reading a paper from 1954 - even the newspaper headings and headlines for each Sunday are reproduced, which can amusing by themselves ("Struggles of Lonely Girl on Broadway - See Magazine Supplement," sez one heading) - though at times the reproduction can be a bit too close, particularly when it comes to copying the era's sometimes slapdash color printing.
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