The Ballad of John & Abner, Pt. II: Battlin' Baez

As you might have surmised from my previous entry on here, I've been compiling a collection of Li'l Abner strips, attempting to get the complete run in my always-expanding digital comics stash-- and I've been working my way through the later years recently. I hadn't seen a whole lot of this latter-period material prior to all of this, namely because... well, things went downhill, quality-wise, as Al Capp grew progressively more interested in merely using his allotted space within the funny pages to do little more then whine about The Kids These Days. 

You might be wondering why I'm doing all this, despite being so critical of Capp the man-- I believe that in its heyday, Li'l Abner was one of the finest comic strips ever produced. And while the late 1960s-onward were certainly its downswing, there are some glimmers of what the strip once was here and there, some laugh-out-loud funny moments that remind you this used to be some of the best comedic writing of its time. Hence why I wish to put the comic's entire run under my technological belt, rather than solely its golden-age material (also, I have diagnosed OCD and it compels me to do time-consuming completionist stuff like this any time I'm interested in something).

Here are a couple of strips I've just stumbled across, that can serve as supplementary material of sorts to The Ballad of John & Abner: more Beatles mentions in the strip! This time our comics come from 1967, arguably the height of the Fabs' power. The fabled Summer of Love was in full swing, and Sgt. Pepper taught his band to play during it, resulting in the Beatles producing the definitive document of the times. Shortly after, they were then chosen to represent all of Britain in the monumental Our World broadcast, the first multi-satellite telecast that was shown live throughout a good chunk of the planet. For the occasion they penned one of the most popular anthems of the psychedelic era, All You Need is Love. It was John, Paul, George and Ringo's world, and we were just living in it (I mean, I wasn't, by virtue of being incredibly-not-alive. My parents hadn't even been born yet).

Sgt. Pepper's came out in May, and so too did this handful of Li'l Abner strips that kicked off a larger storyline. 

(As always, click on each image for a significantly-better look.)

Like the "I Wanna Hold Your Ham" storyline we looked at in Part One, the Beatles' presence is rather fleeting, merely the impetus for a larger narrative. Naturally, we must over-analyze it. 

For starters, this is the first time in Li'l Abner history that the Beatles were mentioned by name. In Abner's two prior brushes with Beatlemania, Ringo was referred to as "Him" and the other three merited no specific mention at all. There was a quote (that I can't find right now) from, I believe, Fred Hembeck, that was to the effect of "all the old-guard celebrities seemed to know about the Beatles was that they said 'yeah yeah yeah' and one of them was called 'Ringo'". His adage seems to ring true in the AbnerVerse-- in the prior Beatle storyline, Ringo was the only one to get a specific caricature (two others are shown from behind); John, Paul and George have been upgraded to that status this time around, but Ringo is seemingly depicted as their leader.

While syndication deadlines mean Capp certainly could not have been directly reacting to Sgt. Pepper here (newspaper comic strips are submitted several weeks before date of publication), the writing was certainly on the wall: whenever he was devising these strips, they were poised to become even bigger than ever. The mammoth Ed Sullivan shows that had launched them into superstardom had aired just over two years prior, and their legend had only seemed to snowball from there, rather than show any signs of waning (the most recent Beatles album, by this point in the timeline, had been Revolver, for a frame of reference). 

So what I'm getting at is that it seems all this finally forced Al Capp to learn their names.

While 1967 was a year of artistic progress for the Beatles, it was a year of regression for Li'l Abner. The vast majority of the storylines were thinly-veiled soapboxes for Al Capp to rant about his ever-growing hatred of the times' youth. He had seemingly successfully completed his transition from "sharp, biting satirist of society" to "guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn". The year's inaugural storyline-- as well as quite possibly the most infamous one of this era of Abner-- is emblematic of the change. 

We are introduced to Joanie Phoanie (technically, we were introduced to her on New Year's Eve of 1966), an unkempt, long-haired female folk singer. It was a very unsubtle parody of Joan Baez, despite not looking very much like her (a factor Capp would try to use to his advantage before long). Several other figureheads of the countercultural movement appear in cartoon form throughout the proceedings as well. The sole joke that is repeated ad nauseum during this (fairly long!) series is "they criticize capitalism yet they make money from their songs! Hypocrites!!" Capp, via his omniscience over the tale, repeatedly suggests Joanie donate her money to the vaguely-defined "poor" (orphans? Let's say orphans. Sure, why not), possibly forgetting that he was almost certainly worth significantly more than Baez by that point in time, and didn't seem particularly inclined to follow his own advice. 

Looks like Dylan has joined the fold-- one would have expected him to have been the primary target of such a series, right? Again, it was 1967!

This storyline might not have been all that noteworthy, had Joan Baez herself not taken notice of it:

“The whole thing is disgusting. He can say anything about me-- that is his right and privilege-- but he takes a jab at the whole protest movement, students and everyone he can get his hands on... Either out of ignorance or malice, he has made being against the war and for peace equal to being for communism, the Viet Cong and narcotics.”

This seemed to be just what Capp wanted-- a fight! A chance to play the provocateur once more like in the old days, and score some publicity out of it while he was there. For his reaction, I shall quote liberally from Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen's Al Capp: A Life To The Contrary, the definitive biography of all things Capp and Abner:

Asked for his response, Capp shrugged off Baez’s statements. He had never listened to her records, he claimed, and he had no idea what she looked like. Joanie Phoanie was grotesque—six feet tall and large-boned, with long, straight blond hair; she wore a perpetually dazed expression, as if she were lost in the corridors of her own ego. If Baez remotely resembled Joanie Phoanie, Capp said, he felt sorry for her.

“I’ve never seen Joan Baez but I understand that she’s a rather slight brunette, and Joanie Phoanie is a big, virile blonde,” Capp told Newsweek magazine. “If Joanie Phoanie looks like any singer, she looks like Nelson Eddy.”

In its coverage, Time magazine ridiculed Baez’s sensitivity, quoting Capp’s counterpunch to her objections to the strip—“She should remember that protest singers don’t own protest. When she protests about others’ rights to protest, she is killing the whole racket”—and noting that, like Joanie Phoanie, Baez was earning a bundle of money plying her trade. Time claimed she was earning $8,500 at each of her stops on her current tour of Japan; Baez countered that it was $5,000 an appearance.

Like most satire, Capp’s was fueled by anger, resentment, and even sorrow. Behind his savage commentary lay contempt for antiwar activists that grew with the escalation of the war itself. Capp supported the war effort, and he was damned if he was going to remain silent while young Americans lost their lives in defense of the very rights the protesters were demanding.

His own son was of draft age. Kim, much more liberal than his father, had no enthusiasm for joining the fighting but, as he would later remember, Capp “told me he wouldn’t do a damn thing to get me out of it.” He had no objection, he said, to Kim’s staying out of Vietnam, as long as he did so legally.
Capp’s ridicule of Baez was consistent with his scorn for all young people who demanded the benefits of a free country as if it were their birthright.

“Joan Baez refuses to pay her taxes because of the war effort,” he pointed out, “but she travels all over the world guarded by a passport which means something because the armed might of this country is behind it. A helluva lot of kids are in uniform so Joan Baez can travel on that passport."

The Joanie Phoanie story ran to its conclusion, without retraction, though the syndicate did convince Capp to soften his originals in five of the daily strips, taking a slight edge off his commentary.

Baez, who would say that she never really intended to sue Al Capp, dropped the issue. Capp moved on as well, though he continued to take occasional potshots at her long after the Joanie Phoanie continuity had faded from readers’ memories. She was, he quipped, “the greatest war-time singer since Tokyo Rose” and “in the same Olympic league as such thinkers as Jane Fonda.”

Capp took the ball Baez lobbed in his direction and ran with it, repeatedly offering his views on things she had said and done, while claiming he had little-to-no knowledge of who she was. It sounds as though he never truly got over this feud-- brief in reality, but seemingly one that lasted to the end of Capp's days in his mind (he would pass in 1979).

Thanks for including this helpful note from yourself, Al!