Typical Al Capp

The strip Li'l Abner wasn't at its best by 1953 (which is when the year comics.com is up to in their run of the strip), but the current run is pretty typical of creator Al Capp's working methods: it's been days since the birth of Li'l Abner and Daisy Mae's baby, but we only just found out what it looks like, and we still haven't found out whether it's a boy or a girl, since something always happens to prevent us (and Abner and Daisy) from finding out. That's Capp: Li'l Abner was a semi-parody of the serialized adventure strip, where every day they'd find some reason not to clear up the mystery or wrap up the story, and a lot of the humor of Li'l Abner came from the outrageous delaying tactics Capp would use.

The only problem was that sometimes he'd forget or not bother to wrap up the story at all; one time he spent an entire year on the story of Abner searching for a woman whose kneecap he saw in a Fearless Fosdick comic, and if he ever finished the story, I didn't see it. (He also introduced, during that year, a scene with Daisy Mae meeting a mysterious stranger who appears ready to marry her and take her away from Abner; we never found out who the stranger was or where that story was supposed to go.)