 Futility Lad's Last Moments |
In changing times, Johnson and Donovan seemed unsure whether to maintain the status quo or to reach back to their 1930s activism and throw their support behind causes. They continued to show an amazing knack for being on the wrong side of most issues throughout the 1960s and the bulk of the 1970s. Captain Useless supported the war in Vietnam to the bitter end, stood by President Nixon during the Watergate scandal and even supported OPEC during the 1973 Oil Embargo. Although they eventually reversed many of these stances, the damage was done and the strip was in dramatic decline.
Various efforts to retool Captain Useless as a cowboy, private eye, and a medical doctor all failed to duplicate the success of other popular entertainment of the time with leading characters in similar professions. Perhaps the most infamous of these efforts was the introduction of a sidekick for Captain Useless, Futility Lad. Fan reaction was so powerfully negative toward Futility Lad that he was quickly written out of the strip, never to be seen again.
In the final days of the strip in the late 1970s Captain Useless was drunk a lot of the time and would lash out at anyone who dared to speak to him, usually culminating in a barroom brawl and the Captain lying in a gutter. The few newspapers still carrying the strip by this time fled as they had in the 1930s.
With Donovan at retirement age anyhow, Johnson pulled the plug on the strip in late 1978, just as the newly hatched "Disco Captain" scheme marked an all-time nadir. The captain’s curse seemed to have won a final victory.
By the dawn of the 1980s, Captain Useless was just a memory. The team divided the spoils that come with a long-running cartoon feature. Phineas Donovan retired to the private island he bought with his share of the profits from the strip, bringing his family along with him and living out his days in tropical luxury. Mark Johnson all but disappeared for the next twenty years.
Next: A New Milennium
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