over his head. Dogpatch residents regularly combat the likes of city slickers, business tycoons, government officials, and intellectuals with their homespun simplicity. Situations often take the characters to other destinations, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Hollywood, tropical islands, the moon, Mars, and some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's invention, including El Passionato, Kigmyland, The Republic of Crumbumbo, Skunk Hollow, The Valley of the Shmoon, Planets Pincus Number 2 and 7, and a miserable frozen wasteland known as Lower Slobbovia, a pointedly political satire of backward nations and foreign diplomacy that remains a contemporary reference. According to cultural historian Anthony Harkins: "Indeed, Li'l Abner incorporates such a panoply of characters and ideas that it defies summary. Yet though Capp's storylines often wandered far afield, his hillbilly setting remained a central touchstone, serving both as a microcosm and a distorting carnival mirror of broader American society." The strip's popularity grew from an original eight papers to eventually more than 900. At its peak, Li'l Abner was estimated to have been read daily in the United States by 60 to 70 million people (the U.S. population at the time was only 180 million), with adult readers far outnumbering children. Many communities, high schools, and colleges staged Sadie Hawkins dances patterned after the similar annual event in the strip. Li'l Abner has one odd design quirk that has puzzled readers for decades: the part in his hair always faces the viewer, no matter which direction Abner is facing. In response to the question "Which side does Abner part his hair on?", Capp would answer: "Both." Capp said he finally found the right "look" for Li'l Abner with Henry Fonda's character Dave Tolliver in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936). In later years, Capp always claimed to have effectively created the miniskirt, when he first put one on Daisy Mae in the 1930s. Parodies, toppers, and alternate strips Li'l Abner also features a comic strip-within-the-strip: Fearless Fosdick is a parody of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. It first appeared in 1942, and proved so popular that it ran intermittently during the next 35 years. Gould was parodied personally in the series as cartoonist "Lester Gooch"—the diminutive, much-harassed and occasionally deranged "creator" of Fosdick. The style of the Fosdick sequences closely mimicks Tracy, including the urban setting, the outrageous villains, the galloping mortality rate, the crosshatched shadows, and even the lettering style. In 1952, Fosdick