Like William Wordsworth and others before him, Al Capp began life as a crusading liberal and ended it growing more conservative with each passing breath. For four decades, Capp gave the world Lil' Abner, a comic strip with a hold on the national imagination that would put the modest popularity of today's strips to shame. Filled with the adventures of the citizens of Dogpatch, a country town whose residents represented a caricatured cross-section of America, Lil' Abner worked both as an almost universally appealing gag strip and a freewheeling satire of whatever subjects about which Capp chose to address his ire. These began as fat-cat capitalists and McCarthyites and ended as hippies and welfare mothers. In the slender book The Enigma Of Al Capp—it might better be called an extended essay—Alexander Theroux addresses Capp's career with a special emphasis on this shift. Did a lifetime of frustration from having only one leg catch up with Capp, or did it have something to do with the sexual discontent evinced by his late-in-life prosecution for sexual harassment, before that term had been properly defined? Or was he a little bit right all along? Did the Left move away from its original vision? Theroux doesn't offer many, or really any, answers, but his thoughts on Capp make for interesting reading, if only because he takes seriously a man whose vision of society reached so many, however much his ideals changed over time.