Fearless Fosdick - Setting and Themes

Setting and Themes

Fearless Fosdick is set in an unnamed, crime-infested American metropolis similar to Chicago. Its urban setting stands in stark contrast with Li'l Abner's rural Dogpatch. Fosdick lives in squalor at the dilapidated boarding house run by his dour, pitiless landlady, Mrs. Flintnose. He never married his own long-suffering fiancée Prudence (ugh!) Pimpleton, but Fosdick was directly responsible for one of the seminal events of the strip—the famous marriage of his biggest fan, Li'l Abner, to Daisy Mae in 1952.

As the only grownup member of the local Fearless Fosdick kiddie fan club, Abner had unwittingly vowed to do everything Fosdick does, not realizing that Fosdick's comic strip marriage was only a dream. (Ironically, Abner had previously told Daisy Mae that cartoonists often employ plot contrivances like dream sequences and impending weddings as sucker bait, to fool their gullible readers!)

In addition to being fearless, Fosdick is "pure, underpaid and purposeful," according to his creator. "Fearless is without doubt the world's most idiotic detective. He shoots people for their own good, is pure beyond imagining, and is fanatically loyal to a police department which exploits, starves and periodically fires him," Capp told Pageant magazine in May 1952. Although Fosdick is the hero of all red-blooded American boys, Daisy Mae detests him with venomous passion. All throughout Li'l Abner, the neglected Daisy Mae finds herself in the ironic position of being jealous of a "stoopid comical strip character!" When Capp was asked (in a Playboy interview conducted by Alvin Toffler in 1965) about the specific gender makeup of his readers, he responded by using Fosdick as an example of the (perceived) inherent differences between the male and female sense of humor:

Whether most of the readers are male or female depends on when the survey is taken... During a Fearless Fosdick sequence, I lose 20 million women. They stop reading right away... Men enjoy Fosdick's bad aim, for example. In order to scare off a guy who's selling balloons without a license, Fosdick will shoot three or four innocent housewives through the head—all in the line of duty, of course. Men enjoy this sort of humor, but housewives don't seem to see anything funny about it!

—Al Capp, Playboy, December 1965, pp. 89–100

Although Fearless Fosdick began as a specific burlesque of Dick Tracy, it eventually grew beyond mere parody and developed its own distinctive, self-contained comic identity. Like all of Capp's creations, Fosdick gradually evolved into a broad, multileveled satire of contemporary American society. Mixing equal parts slapstick, black humor, irony, and biting social criticism, Fearless Fosdick provided a running commentary on, among other things: the lowly lives of policemen, the capriciousness of the general public, and the thankless role of society's "heroes"—as well as the superficiality of modern pop culture and the compulsive nature of its avid fans. Capp would return to these themes again and again in Fearless Fosdick.