Fearless Fosdick - The "hole" Story

The "hole" Story

Fosdick is so tough that on the rare occasions he isn't wearing his black suit, he pins his badge to his bare chest. The ramped-up comic violence depicted in Fearless Fosdick is (usually) bloodless, over-the-top and deliberately surreal. Perpetually ventilated by flying bullets, an iconic Fosdick trademark was the "Swiss cheese look"—with smoking bullet holes revealing his truly two-dimensional cartoon construction. The impervious detective considers the gaping holes "minor scratches" or "mere flesh wounds" however, and always reports back in one piece for duty the next day. (When the Chief once said, "Fosdick! We thought you were dead!" Fosdick replied, "I was—but it didn't prove fatal. Only a mild case.")

Virtually indestructible, Fosdick's famous iron-jawed profile adorned both Consolidated B-24 Liberator and Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber aircraft during World War II, joining the other Li'l Abner-inspired wartime nose art mascots—Earthquake McGoon, Moonbeam McSwine, Daisy Mae, Lonesome Polecat, Hairless Joe, Silent Yokum, Sadie Hawkins and Wolf Gal.

Fosdick has notoriously bad aim and even worse judgment. Oblivious to more obvious felonies being committed in broad daylight in the background (such as murders, assaults and bank robberies), Fosdick would bypass them to shoot someone who walked on the grass, or sold balloons without a license.

Gullible, inept and impossibly dense, he regularly shoots dozens of innocent bystanders and apprehends the wrong individuals—while the real criminals go free. A darkly comic running gag in the series is the stoic, stone-faced image of a determined Fosdick standing amidst a still-smoking pile of bullet-riddled pedestrians—the inevitable collateral damage of any Fosdick crimefighting endeavor. "When Fosdick is after a lawbreaker, there is no escape for the miscreant," wrote Capp in the introduction to Al Capp's Fearless Fosdick: His Life and Deaths (1956). "There is, however, a fighting chance to escape for hundreds of innocent bystanders who happen to be in the neighborhood—but only a fighting chance. Fosdick's duty, as he sees it, is not so much to maintain safety as to destroy crime, and it's too much to ask any law-enforcement officer to do both, I suppose."

Perennially underpaid at $22.50 per week (a running gag in the strip has Fosdick getting rehired after being fired from the force. He has to start over again at an apprentice rate, which is half his regular onerous salary), public servant Fosdick is duty-bound and literal-minded to the point of being a public menace to the citizens he is sworn to protect. Typically guileless Fosdick logic occurs in "The Case of the Poisoned Beans" (1950), a quintessential Fearless Fosdick continuity. In the story, the ever-vigilant detective goes about town shooting anyone he sees eating "Old Faithful" brand beans in an attempt to prevent them from consuming a toxic can he knows to have been tampered with. Throughout the story, the absurdity continues to mount—along with the astronomical body count—to its outlandish (and characteristically sardonic) dénouement.

No one is spared Capp's merciless satire in "The Case of the Poisoned Beans"—from the venality of the justice system to the crookedness of a complicit media (which refuses to air public safety warnings for fear of offending its sponsor, Old Faithful Beans); from the corruption of big business to the fickleness and stupidity of a complacent public. The diabolical plot, which concerns urban terrorism and product tampering, presaged the 1982 Tylenol case by more than 30 years.

"Capp makes Fosdick's police brutality acceptable, even funny, because Fosdick acts out of misguided goodness. He is, like Abner, an innocent," wrote Max Allan Collins in 1990. He's also a victim of the system himself. According to Capp, "Fosdick is underpaid only in terms of money. His superiors and his community are lavish with things worth more than money, such as hollow praise and chances to risk his life." Capp dedicated a book of reprinted Fosdick continuities to "all underpaid cops, because there are no other kind."