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.
Still, the book remains a treat for anyone who enjoys author Capp's unmatched blend of soap opera cliches, cornball dialect humor and broad-swiped satire. I'm one of 'em, though in general I prefer the more convoluted dailies to the majority of the Sundays, so it's no accident that I find the best sequences here to be the three longest: the aforementioned Wrecker continuity, a twelve-week series featuring grasping capitalist General Bullmoose and Capp's mock communist country Lower Slobbovia, plus a nine-episode surrounding one of the strip's trademark strange foods, Druthers. In the first, we get to see the women of Dogpatch struggling to fend off the approaching Wrecker, keeping their menfolk away from the sight of this mysterious marriage-wrecking creature (though why the girl is considered more dangerous than the male-paralyzing Stupefyin' Jones - who was allowed to wander around Dogpatch for decades before the townswomen neutralized her - is not explained). In the second, General Bullmoose brings the entire country of Slobbovia to the "Hew-Hess-Hay" just so he'll have a ready market for a line of dog food so awful even American dogs won't eat it.
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