The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970

Romance Made Real (Re-Mix): Stan Drake and The Heart of Juliet Jones

An artist who earned his chops in advertising, Stan Drake took his first strip assignment to the top.  For more than three decades, Drake made his strip the gold standard for a generation of comic strip artists--among them the young brash Neal Adams--as well as earning the admiration of graphic artists the world over. But the job took an incredible toll.  Drake struggled to reconcile the style he sought, an uncompromising movie star romanticized realism, with the punishing demands, day in and day out, of producing a daily and Sunday set 52 weeks a year, year after year. More so than for any other strip of this era, there were wide swings in quality for months, even off years.  

But when he was at the top of his game, there may have no other strip as visually captivating or a cast as glamorous. 

In many ways, I feel Drake stands for the genre in ways someone far more celebrated like Alex Raymond, for example, does not.  Drake's career has an almost F. Scott Fitzgearld arc and regret, a hopeful romantic with big, huge yearning dreams, who enjoys tremendous early success and wins the unattainable girl but at a huge cost physically and emotionally and then watches as the dark fields of the Republic eventually roll on and leave him behind to wonder what the hell happened to his dreams, his art, his life.  

By the end of the third act, he was all but forgotten.  

Babylon Revisited   Los Angeles once was a two-newspaper town and we were a two newspaper family, with the morning Los Angeles Times competing with the evening Hearst-owned Herald-Examiner.  The Times, with the incomparable Jim Murray, had the best Sports but the Examiner had the best Comics. In the Times sports section, because of Murray's wildly analogous lead column, my overheated imagination was full of Caruso launching into an aria from Pagliacci, Dempsey stepping into the ring against Tunney, crack Panzer units sweeping through the low countries on their way to Paris, which in Murray's hands somehow became Unitas taking charge in the huddle or Koufax peering toward the plate for the sign. Between glasses of juice and chocolate milk and buttered toast, giants and monsters walked the earth. The Times' line up of comics, Alex Kotzky's Apartment 3-G among them, seemed small and trivial by comparison. By evening and after dinner when I got to the Examiner's funnies, the pace was slower, more reflective, and I was more in a mood to appreciate a quieter moment, like the soothing slow gurgle when you let water drain from a bath. I seem to recall the Examiner carried Lee Falk and Sy Barry’s The Phantom and I know for certain that I relished its full-page Prince Valiant each Sunday.  But a strike grips the Examiner in ‘67 and slowly strangles it to death from then on.  As a kid, I was terrified of losing that paper, charting its throes with all the anxious concern of a major stockholder.  

No Examiner meant just one thing to me--no Heart of Juliet Jones!

I can’t remember ever thinking of Juliet Jones as being “comic art.”  It was too real for that, beyond category as far as the art was concerned. Trying to copy the drawings would've been harder than copying something in real life, better than the real thing. It would've been easier to fashion The Pieta out of papier-mâché.   In fact, in Eve Jones, the irresistible and irrepressible younger sister of the title character, I saw the model for all the gorgeous, tantalizing, sun-kissed California girls who lay just beyond my reach, somewhere in the mysterious future.  In High School when I made Varsity.  In College. In the hazy promise of Adulthood. On par with any of the young women I saw on TV or in magazines and newspapers like Yvonne Craig, Jennifer O'Neil, Peggy Lipton, Kam Nelson, or Cheryl Tiegs.

I religiously saved every comic I bought.  But I didn’t consider clipping Juliet.  Prince Valiant was one thing, Juliet was another. Juliet whispered Sex, but Sex nevertheless, an undercurrent as obvious to adult eyes as Play Misty for Me or Pretty Maids All in a Row.  If my parents found a stack of dailies or Sundays deep in my closet, the evidence was as damning as if I had stashed 8mm stag films under my mattress.  One false move at this stage and I would be Portnoy eyeing ice-skaking shiskas in the park, Humbert Humbert and Anabel at the Hotel Mirana in Paris, maybe even Peter Lorre crying out in M for mercy that’s not coming, ”I can’t help myself!”

Throughout my adolescence I played cool, hiding my twisted soul, my dark true obsession. I thought that somehow I was the last romantic, cursed with an acute desire for beauty and wonder that was almost painful.  

What I didn't know was Stan Drake was the true Last Romantic, that he had that same longing and in Juliet Jones from 1965-1975 I was getting the purest expression of that desire.  

I didn't stand a chance.  And in the years since this site first opened up, I have found others who suffered the same affliction.  This is for them and me.

Where Angels Fear to Tread I started the original webpage in 1999 because I was frustrated by the lack of information about the artists I wanted to study, especially Drake. Drake's profile, online for two years, was the largest in the entire site, lasting until a hardware/host crash took it down in September 2001.  Above, from 1954, a panel of Eve from the third storyline, reprinted in the first Arcadia trade paperback in 1986.  This panel became the Drake illustration you would see in every study thereafter, including Alberto Becattini's "American Good Girl Art 1900-1950" from Glamour International (1991), the publication that started me down the road of researching the connection between classic American Illustration and Good Girl comic art.  In the days before Ebay and ABE, it took me ten years to obtain copies of Arcadia Volume 2 and 3. A single page 1960 daily from Wally Wood's Witzend #13.  The cover of the NCS Cartoonist (Winter 1959), the one illustration I think that encapsulates Drake's life and career in one shot--Girls and golf, the deadlines he could never escape, the winter background adapted from a high contrast photo, the comic-styled figure of the dazzled and exhausted artist.  Drake said he was naturally a comic style draftsman, willing himself through hard work to become a realistic illustrator that became both the blessing and burden of his career, as he explained 30 years later to an amazed industry when he took over the art chores for Blondie.  The ending panels of a 1967 Sunday. A two panel strip is from 1963. The strip's official banner, 1954, '63, '67, and '77.  By the late 70s, the banner for the shortened name was almost as large as any panel in the Sunday.  The 1959 Drake daily was reprinted in my 2002 Comic Art feature, the caption explaining in the 60s, the two sisters Eve and Juliet went from sweet and innocent small town girls to the Big City. Trouble followed.  1959 is one of the vintage years of the strip, each day what Drake called "an all-out daily."  Classic Comics Press, the same publisher which has reprinted On Stage  for the last two years, has just announced plans to begin reprinting Stan Drake's The Heart of Juliet Jones later this year, Volume 1 Dailies having an Introduction by Leonard Starr.  Details to follow.