to more obvious felonies being committed in broad daylight in the background (such as murders, assaults and bank robberies), Fosdick would bypass them to shoot someone who walked on the grass or sold balloons without a license. He regularly shoots dozens of innocent bystanders and apprehends the wrong individuals—while the real criminals go free. A darkly comic running gag in the series is the stoic, stone-faced image of a determined Fosdick standing amidst a still-smoking pile of bullet-riddled pedestrians—the inevitable collateral damage of any Fosdick crimefighting endeavor. "When Fosdick is after a lawbreaker, there is no escape for the miscreant," wrote Capp in the introduction to Al Capp's Fearless Fosdick: His Life and Deaths (1956). "There is, however, a fighting chance to escape for hundreds of innocent bystanders who happen to be in the neighborhood—but only a fighting chance. Fosdick's duty, as he sees it, is not so much to maintain safety as to destroy crime, and it's too much to ask any law-enforcement officer to do both, I suppose." Gullible, dense and impossibly inept, public servant Fosdick is duty-bound and literal-minded to the point of being a menace to the citizens he is sworn to protect. Typically guileless Fosdick logic occurs in "The Case of the Poisoned Beans" (1950), a quintessential Fearless Fosdick continuity. In the story, the ever-vigilant detective goes about town shooting anyone he sees eating "Old Faithful" brand beans in an attempt to prevent them from consuming a toxic can he knows to have been tampered with. Throughout the story, the absurdity continues to mount—along with the astronomical body count—to its outlandish (and characteristically sardonic) dénouement. Fosdick begins his "crusade" by shooting dead a father who was trying to open a can of chicken soup for his children's dinner; Fosdick's "body count" is over 612, not including his dear old Aunt who made a mistake of trying to open a can of beans in his presence. The body count goes even higher after Fosdick has to turn in his gun--he uses a bow and arrow! Organized Crime takes advantage of Fosdick's stupidly not only by having hitmen give cans of beans to victims (whom Fosdick of course kills) but also opening up "Beaneasies" (a spoof of Speakeasies) where customers can fill themselves up to their heart's content of beans. Ironically, Fosdick ends up being sentenced to die in the electric chair, and for his last meal