Capp v. Fisher

In the fanciful world of comic strips, Cartoonist Al (Li'l Abner) Capp and Ham (Joe Palooka) Fisher have at least one very real sentiment in common. They despise each other. On public platforms and to newspaper editors all over the U.S.. Fisher has long charged that Capp is a purveyor of pornography. To back up his charge, Fisher has carted about huge reproductions of Capp's cartoons with the supposed pornography marked. Bluff, rollicking Cartoonist Capp, who started out as Fisher's apprentice 22 years ago, also gets off some free-handed statements. In an Atlantic Monthly article titled "I Remember Monster.'' Capp wrote that one of his early bosses was "a certain treasure trove of lousiness, who, in the normal course of each day of his life, managed to be. in dazzling succession, every conceivable kind of a heel."

Dirty Pictures. Last week the feud erupted again before a Washington hearing of the Federal Communications Commission, considering applications for a Boston TV franchise. One of the applicants was the Boston Herald-Traveler's station WHDH; another was Massachusetts Bay Telecasters. in which Capp is both a small stockholder (less than 2%) and co-chairman of the proposed station's Public Affairs Committee. Lawyers for WHDH challenged Capp's fitness on the ground that he draws dirty pictures: therefore, he and his associates (including Novelist J. P. Marquand and Atlantic Monthly Editor Edward Weeks) should not get the TV permit.

When Capp took the witness stand to answer the charge, the lawyers confronted him with their evidence. They asked Capp about a New Yorker profile by E. J. Kahn Jr. in which Capp was quoted as admitting that when "I was just a kid from the country ... I became an expert on pornography." The profile also said that Capp's cartoons have "bits of Rabelaisian humor, often . . . adroitly covered up." Unruffled, Capp answered that both he and New Yorker Writer Kahn were professional "humorists" who used "exaggerated humor." The "method of The New Yorker," he added, "is different from other magazines. Mr. Kahn simply listens; he does not take notes." (Replies Kahn: "Of course I took notes, and I still have them.")

Recognizable Photostats. Then station WHDH's lawyers introduced the report of the 1951 New York State Joint Legislative Committee on comics. In the record were eight pages of photostats of Capp cartoons under the heading: "Sexually suggestive cartoons and in some instances semihidden pornography." Capp had no trouble recognizing the photostats as the same ones Fisher has been passing around. Exploded Capp: "These are forgeries . . . We conducted an investigation of the source of the forgeries. We are in the last stage of finding the forger." Furthermore, the exhibits were not taken from his newspaper strip, but from comic books over which he had no control.

Capp's lawyers made it plain who had given the pictures to the legislative com mittee. The photostats, they said, were "supplied by Ham Fisher." But when the lawyers for Capp tried to introduce affidavits from document and handwriting experts to prove that the drawings had been doctored, the FCC said no. The matter of the cartoons was closed so that the hearings could get back to the main business.

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