Between the demise of Krazy Kat and the onset of Pogo, what comic strip other than Li’l Abner could be said to contain irony or to provide intellectual pleasure? The adventure-comic strips of the period generally presented a wooden superman—Mandrake the Magician, the Phantom, Smilin’ Jack, Joe Palooka—left over from a simpler time, an era of stark myths and inflexible draughtsmanship. Capp, with his rollicking abundance of fanciful grotesques and topical allusions, broke this mold, and until near the end, when the strip did seem to careen listlessly out of control, he dizzy-ingly worked on the edge of what was possible in a lowbrow art form...

We learn a fair amount about Al Capp in these memoirs. His father was an ineffective schemer, who should have been a cartoonist, and his maternal grandfather was a grand rabbi. The sketch of the marrying-off of Aunt Mildred reveals a family pride (and a happy escape from it) that qualifies his portrait of himself as a Bridgeport, Connecticut, ragamuffin.