Kyle Rothweiler on Al Capp's Fearless Fosdick

The key to understanding Fosdick is to understand that it is not a parody in the narrow sense of being merely a lampoon of the drawing and writing style of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. It is a parody, and often a brilliantly incisive one (the strip is casually populated with hilarious spoofs of Tracy's grotesque villains), but it is more than that. It is a satire of Gould's underlying assumptions about the nature of "the law." Tracy was created in the '30s as a morality play which would be a wish-fulfilling response to a crime-ridden reality in Chicago and other locations. "The law" in Tracy would not be undermined (i.e. bought off) by organized crime, but would fight the gangsters on their own terms with little regard for constitutional niceties -- that is, they would simply blow their heads off. Over the years Gould's strip developed into much, much more than this, into something much more esthetically complex and intriguing. But the underlying morality play, with all its dangerous implications, remained to the end.

It was Capp's purpose with Fosdick to challenge Gould's assumptions. Take "The Case of the Poisoned Beans," included here. [Max Allan] Collins says [in his introduction to the Fosdick reprint collection] that this is his favorite story in comic strip form, and one can only share his enthusiasm, even though one might wonder about his reasons for it. Indeed, I think this story would have to be included in a short list of the best things ever to appear in the comic strip medium. For one thing, it shows Capp to have had the supreme gift of any satirist, that of narrative logic. It demonstrates his mastery of the reductio ad absurdum.

It begins when Fosdick receives a note from Elmer Schlmpf, 23 Skid Row, Apt. 7, taunting the detective that despite being given the name and address of the murderer, he will not be able to prevent him from killing an entire family. Fosdick goes to the address and finds Schlmpf dead: a recorded message declares that the dead man has poisoned one can of "Old Faithful" brand beans, located somewhere in the city. Fosdick's solution to the problem is to go around drilling through the head anybody about to eat beans. From Fosdick's perspective this is quite logical. His duty as a representative of the law is to protect people from themselves. There is a tiny chance that bean eaters might poison themselves: to restore order and save them from crime he kills them.

There is a curious parallel here to the current laws against certain drugs. (One even hears the anti-drug propagandists refer to them as "poison.") The presumed purpose of anti-drug laws is to protect people from themselves; on the off-chance that humans might harm themselves with drugs, they are, if caught, subjected to the much worse harm of police harassment, arrest, trial, possibly incarceration. The same applies to the use of alcohol during the "noble experiment," prohibition. Thus, with inexorable satirical logic, as the number of bean lovers slaughtered by Fosdick in his noble zeal to protect the public mounts to 612, organized crime gets into the act. First they plant cans of beans on people they want assassinated (by Fosdick when he catches them with their stash); then they open "bean-easies" where people can indulge in their forbidden desire undisturbed. (Naturally, making beans a "forbidden musical fruit" increases the demand for them.)

The central panel of the story, the one which hits the core of its sublime absurdity, is one where Fosdick and his men are about to raid a bean-easy. "Men!" declares Fosdick. "There's a crime being committed in here! Beans are being eaten!" Meanwhile, out on the street are stabbing, shooting, beating, robbery, ax-murder, and defenestration, to all of which the cops are completely oblivious. Needless to say, the police force bursts into the bean-casy and plugs everybody in the place "to protect them, at all costs." Fosdick's reign of terror is only halted when he accidentally kills a cop. He is sentenced to death; for his last meal he requests beans, naturally gets the poisoned can, and is declared dead -- but his death "didn't prove fatal. Only a mild case." So he's put back on the force.

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In an absurd, deranged, hyperbolic comic strip yarn he tackles a subject which very few "serious" satirists have ever bothered with.

Furthermore, his form and his content are perfectly meshed. "The Case of the Poisoned Beans" could only be told in quite this abstract way in the form of a comic strip. The story is not, like so many comic book stories these days, an imitation of a live-action movie. It does not use the narrative techniques of prose fiction. All of Capp's narrative conventions are comic strip conventions. One gets the sense through the whole piece, of an artist (or artists -- Capp was, as usual, no doubt heavily assisted in the story) functioning with thorough relish and uninhibited joy in his chosen medium. This is doubtless in part because of the parodic element; the exaggerated comic strip effects are theoretically intended to ridicule standard strip practices; but the effect in this story, and in Fosdick in general, is, curiously, not one of mockery but of an abandoned revelry in the outrageousness of it all.

Thus the lighthearted tone of the piece, despite its important theme and the fact that hundreds of people are killed in the course of it. This, I maintain, could only be pulled off in the context of a comic strip. With live actors on the screen it would come across as a sickening Stalinesque bloodbath. As a prose narrative it would still tend to seem grim and gruesome since, for one thing, we usually visualize fictional characters as real human beings. With the wildly hyperbolic drawing style Capp employs with Fosdick there is no such danger. This style is exemplified by the celebrated round, Swiss-cheese-like bullet holes which kill everybody except Fosdick, to whom they are mere "flesh wounds." (On the cover of this book he is shown with a "flesh wound" through his chest so large that a bird is flying through it.)

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On the other hand, one could argue that even satire. no matter how abstract, presents, like every other artform, a view of reality; and that the "universe" presented in Fosdick is one in which life is cheap, pointless, and meaningless. This is true. However, while Fosdick may be a nihilistic creation, it embodies the most cheerful kind of nihilism. Like all great satire there is, at the bottom of it, at least a glimmer of hope. Since its insane events are premised on a perfect chain of reasoning (from an incorrect premise), it implicitly endorses the idea that "ideas have consequences," in itself an optimistic assertion of belief in the power of reason. One shouldn't overlook the simple fact that Fosdick is a brilliantly funny creation, full of throwaway bits in the dialogue and drawing, the kind of thing that, in my opinion, the comics can do better than any other medium. The book is a joy and an inspiration to anybody who has any interest in what the comic book at its best is capable of.