He destroyed Ham Fisher’s life.

Most of it was pure Richard III villainy. He had a prosthetic leg and thus could not participate in World War II, This led to a personality based on bitterness and inadequacy, which he transmuted into hardcore conservatism late in life. In truth, his early strips were very progressive and were concerned mainly with Southern Populism. At some point that became admiration instead of discontent.

Ham Fisher destroyed his own life.

I don’t know. There was clearly something WRONG with Ham Fisher. The problem was that Capp and Fisher were both highly competitive, driven, psychopaths. One would’ve killed the other in some permutation.

I read about how cutthroat early comics was. George Harriman survived purely by being the personal Tom of William Randolph Hearst. The way Harriman kept his race secret from his audience but public knowledge to his peers has always struck me as strange.

At the time there was a push to revive several departed comic strips with new authors. Pogo was brought back for a few years, but the new version was godawful, shying away from the original's political satire and wordplay, in favor of lazy parodies where Albert the Alligator dressed up as Batman.

If Lil' Abner had been brought back I imagine most people would have looked at it and said, "what's this ripoff of Snuffy Smith?"

The Rural Purge of 1972 happened. CBS pulled all "hillbilly" shows and replaced them with shows set in urban locations, and because of that, all other networks did the same. This then rolled over into non-sitcoms, they pulled Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk. As this was a decade away from cable being a mainstream alternative to network television, "hillbilly" humor became unattractive to network programmers until the era of Roseanne Barr, where it was reworked as "working poor" humor.

A lot of it also goes back to a wistfulness of the Depression era generation for a time before the Tennessee River Authority. America is really weird.