I don’t know if anyone reading this remembers Al Capp’s old strip, about a hillbilly family in the backwoods wilderness of Dogpatch, but I do, and I’ve been reading reprints on comics.com for a couple of years now.
The reprints have been from the fifties, then last week they switched back to the start of the strip. While Capp’s writing style is still recognizable, the differences are startling.
The later strips are cartoonish in style; the earlier work is much more realistic. And the characters and situations are a lot less outrageous—the opening plot (Li’l Abner goes to stay with a wealthy relative in the big city) so far resembles a lot of City Slicker Meets Country Bumpkin stories I know of.
Nothing significant, but it’s interesting to see how the strip changed (and improved—Capp was a lot funnier as he went more over the top).

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