I have been reading Volume 5 of Classic Comics Press's books of Leonard Starr's newspaper strip MARY PERKINS ON STAGE . (As a matter of fact , this volume has the Sunday strip's logo changing from simply " On Stage " to " MARY PERKINS On Stage " as I knew it .)
MPOS , first , is FABULOUSLY! drawn !
It has been described as " a soap opera strip that reads like an adventure strip " or , conversely , " an adventure strip disguised as a soap opera strip " .
Well , here (SPOILERS) it is more or less a soap/even has (I guess) elements of 30s " screwball comedies " - Things that could be played for dark drama are played for lightness , a toyboy/gigolo " not telling " the neglected/messed-up Tony Perkins-esque movie actor son of a rich divorcee that his mother really is sick , Mary being kidnapped by a (the word is not said) PTSD'd/messed-up combat vet whom she dated once ~ We do get a more " serious " story of a Christopher Lee/Lon Chaney Sr.-inspired horror movie actor make-up whiz who has a horribly scarred face (" no face ") , however , and a lengthy (off-and-on ???) story of a drama critic who is , in his split personality , a playwright ~ The 80s large magazine-sized comic I once had that reprinted (In B&W , as is this book .) -( One Sunday , BTW , prints the same panel twice !!!!!!!!!) the last 3 storylines of MPOS from the late 70s , by contrast had 2 of those stories climax in gun-carrying situations and the threat of death (Realized in one of them .))...I read the comic as a Sunday in the NEW YORK SUNDAY NEWS in the 70s , and the series is up to Volume 11 , creeping close I think to where I came in...In those 70s strips Mary had a pretty obviously intended to be gay Robert Benchley/Edward Everett Horton-esque pal (Her manager ???) whom I think was named Otto...Mary's husband always looked James Garner-esque to me .
This volume concludes with a preview of the first volume of the publisher's THE HEART OF JULIET JONES series , a very different version where Juliet Jones is a semi-old maid/spinster and younger sister Eve is a " hoyden/hussy " - who , while a high school student , throws hereself at Juliet's HS teacher boyfriend and makes him fall in love with her and give her a passing grade she doesn't deserve !!!!!!!!!
Dave Sim , in GLAMOURPUSS , wrote about this early period , and whether it was based on an un-used , owned by KFS but not publishable under her byline , Margaret Mitchell story outline/Bible form the 1930s that KFS owned...Dave , well:-)... !!!
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I've not read any Mary Perkins sequences, but I've seen some of the Sunday strips, and I totally agree about the art.
By the 70s it was common for Sunday comics to have drop panels so they could be printed in different formats. I'm sure that's why the Charlie Brown Sundays used to start with separate gag from the rest of the strip. Presumably the Sunday with the twice-appearing panel was printed that way by error, but this might have something to do with how the error came about.
In the 70s Stan Lee did a parody soap opera strip with Frank Springer called The Virtue of Vera Valiant.
...I was thinking that at least the earliest Sundays here may have been before the (for " normally " - then - 1/2 page in a broadsheet newspaper/full-page tabloid newspaper strips such as this) " make the first 1/3-first tier chop-offable " rule was enforced , although PEANUTS's Sundays (which started a couple years after the dalies) were subject to the " chop the top " option from the beginning...MPOS is SUCH! a " fabulous drawin' " showcase that perhaps the syndicate/Starr kept the rue away for a while...
BTW , Luke , in Australia do only (general , anyhow) tabloid newspapers run comics strips , not " respectable " broadsheets ?
...Vera Valiant ~ indeed , all of the Marvel newspaper strips of that period , though Vera bore the distinction of being the only one whose character never appeared in a comic book ` had at least one mass-market paperback collection issued at the time , didn't they ???????
The Age, which is a tabloid weekdays now but was solely a broadsheet until recently, has had a comics page as long as I can remember. The Australian, which is still a broadsheet, doesn't, but runs Doonesbury. The Herald, an afternoon broadsheet that ended in 1990 (or, if you prefer, was merged with a tabloid paper), used to.
...Yeah , I had read of Doonesbury running in Oz - Is The Australian Murdoch-owned ? Thank you .
What did The Herald murge into ?
Are these papers all " national " , a la British papers ? Australia's such a big country , that might seem questionable (Until " modern times " , especially , I mean...)...
Yes. It was founded by Murdoch in, Wikipedia tells me, 1964. The two major competing private newspaper companies here are News Corp and Fairfax Media. The Herald was merged with the tabloid Sun to form the Herald-Sun, which is a tabloid. Of the two Melbourne dailies The Age is Fairfax and the Herald-Sun News Corp. The Australian is a national paper.
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...Thank you . There's references to the Twist in the Mary book !!!!!!!!!!!
They're not listed at the GCD, but I've found images of two Vera Valiant paperbacks online.
...Colorized on the dailies (As the SPIDER-MAN paperbacks from then were , IIRC .) ? Chopped on the Sundays ? Thank you .
I don't know, but they look like typical newspaper strip reprint paperbacks of the period, and they were usually B&W. Amazon has images of both volumes. The Spider-Man ones say they're in colour on their covers and the Vera Valiant ones don't, and they were put out by a different publisher (Signet) and a couple of years earlier.
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