![]() In adult life, he claimed that he kept failing his geometry class. Capp attended Bridgeport High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but never gained a high school diploma. Capp studied the art styles of the illustrator Phil May, and the then-popular comic strip cartoonists Billy DeBeck, Rudolph Dirks, Tad Dorgan, Rube Goldberg, Milt Gross, George McManus, Fred Opper, and Cliff Sterrett. Capp's father was an amateur cartoonist, and introduced his son to drawing as a form of therapy. His childhood tragedy reportedly led him to develop a darker worldview, and a more sardonic sense of humor than other cartoonists of his time. Capp was eventually given a prosthetic leg, and adopted a slow way of walking. He had his left leg amputated above the knee, and awoke from a days-long coma to discover that he was missing a limb. In August 1919, Capp was run down by a trolley car. His brothers Elliot and Jerome went on their own careers as cartoonists, while his sister Madeline became a publicist. ![]() Capp grew up in poverty, and had several younger siblings. Their respective families had migrated from Latvia to the United States in the 1880s, in order to escape pogroms in the Russian Empire. His parents were Otto Philip Caplin (1885-1964) and his wife Matilda Davidson (1884-1948). In 1909, Capp was born in New Haven, Connecticut to a family of Latvian Jews. He posthumously won their 1979 Elzie Segar Award, for his "unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning". Capp won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year. At its prime the strip had 60 million readers in more than 900 American newspapers, and was also reprinted in 28 foreign countries. He is primarily known for creating the comic strip "Li'l Abner" (1934-1977), which depicted the lives of a fictional clan of hillbillies in an impoverished mountain village. ![]() Al Capp (born Alfred Gerald Caplin) was an American cartoonist and humorist from New Haven, Connecticut.
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