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

Mary, Mary: Leonard Starr and On Stage

The strip defies easy explanation or categorization.

On Stage, later christened Mary Perkins On Stage in December 1961 on a suggestion by Milton Caniff, was a Soap Opera that did not feature love stories, at least not the kind of love stories one would think. Months would go by and not one kiss or embrace would be seen in the continuity, let alone anyone declaring his or her undying love. Unlike Juliet Jones which took sixteen years of one suitor plotline after another or Brenda Starr where the romantic suspense lasted for almost four decades around the heroine, the dark-haired Mary meets then marries her stalwart husband Pete very early in the second year and that was that.  In contrast with the much older and popular Mary Worth, the title character was not a segue to another cast and settings and their problems and heartache while she fades into the background. On Stage, in fact, may have the smallest supporting crew ever. It simply had Mary.

It was a backstage strip, yes, Broadway, Hollywood, summer stock and location shoots, rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts, but had little in the way of glamour or celebrity we imagine today. Mary was an actress of the everyday sort, a blue collar player if you will.  And the strip portrayed the entertainment industry sometimes as sharply and brutally as earlier films like All About Eve, The Bad and Beautiful, The Sweet Smell of Success, or Sunset Boulevard were doing in first run theaters.  Real members of the acting community, director and producer Harold Prince for example, believed the cartoonist had come from Broadway, yet all the exact details came from careful research, not actual experience on the boards.

Some have said it really was an adventure strip, but if that was the case, On Stage was a strange fit there too.  Mary didn't carry a gun, know martial arts, work for a newspaper, or solve cases for the Police Department, and for every tight corner where she showed a remarkable ability to keep her wits, another sequence would show her flustered, confused, and an amazingly poor initial judge of character.  When she is threatened, there is a very tangible sense of danger because of her obvious vulnerability. Some action hero she turned out to be, but a hero she was most definitely.  

The art was just as hard to pin down.  Everybody agrees the strip was well drawn, but on pictures alone, there were other strips more spectacular, like Juliet or Ben Casey, or even more conventional fare like Alex Kotzky's Apartment 3-G or Ken Bald's Dr. Kildare. This didn't bother Starr.  He believed in taking whatever shortcuts he needed to produce the strip.  On Stage had a background assistant throughout the run of the strip and Starr readily admitted he used any device, mechanical or otherwise, when the need arose.  

Starr hadn't expected to carry the full load as writer either, scripting because he didn't find a collaborator early on who could produce ideas for the strip as good as he could.  So he wrote it himself throughout. (Writer Archie Goodwin was a helper for a short time in '61, but Starr didn't use much of what Goodwin contributed.)  On Stage had bracing topical stories for the times, on race relations, drugs, the environment, date rape, and so on, way ahead of what anyone else was doing on a strip.  But Starr himself would downplay that angle or the assertion that his strip had any deep meaning or underlying messages about society.  

He just wanted the strip to be entertaining, to be fresh, for the reader to be engaged and to look forward to it each day.  And in that aim, he was entirely successful.

Other strips lasted longer and had wider distribution.  Others had more dramatic photo-realistic art and were filled with bravura action sequences.  But On Stage by Leonard Starr may very well have been the best story strip of the second half of the century.

Saved by the Funny Papers

Leonard Starr was born in Manhattan on October 28, 1925.

Not much has been written about his early life, but in a vignette published in Jerry Robinson's 1974 book The Comics, Starr mentions his family was "directly affected by the Depression," a drab existence brightened each week by his love for the Sunday funnies.  In later interviews he repeats the Sunday story with affection, and he remembers especially the delight he took in delaying to the absolute last moment his favorite, Flash Gordon: ". . . My father was out of work, savings were dwindling, and there were no harbingers of better times coming. I'm sure there was desperation around me, but I was unaware of that part of it. I can recall only that those years were totally gray.  I know that the sun never once shone in all that time. Only on the Planet Mongo was there any color; only there could we find any vitality, any life."  Later he would switch his devotion to Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, but those delicious moments sprawled out with the newsprint before him, digesting each story panel by glorious full color panel, going so slowly his mother thought he would freeze in place, have remained with him his entire life.  

Starr recalls revealing modest talent growing up, once winning a Boy Scout poster contest and receiving his prize at Radio City Music Hall, a talent he hoped to nurture by attending the Manhattan High School of Music and Art and then Pratt Institute for a short year following his HS graduation in 1942.  His early, aborted art education is still a sore point with him, a waste of time with inept instructors and useless drill.  During his last year in high school, Starr and classmate Frank Bolle (an artist still working today in syndication) saw a want ad listing for artists from Lloyd Jacquet's shop, Funnies Inc., which had just started to provide packaged comics, mostly to Timely (later Marvel) three years earlier in 1939 and was giving the other established studios a run for the money in the booming market.  

Starr and Bolle went, applied, and soon found themselves knee deep in work for uncritical comics-hungry servicemen, doing backgrounds, inking, penciling, then moving to doing the whole book.  There ensued a ton of titles, little of which Starr can place today, the only requirement to do the job as quickly as possible.  These were the days of penciling 8 pages one day, then inking them the next, 25 pages a week.  The Grand Comic Book Database lists over 220 items with his credit attached (and not all were attributed. "Donald Fraser" was also a pen name Starr used), and one checklist for 1943-56 charts work for 15 different publishers during that time span and twice that number in individual titles.

In 1953, with 10 years of making a good living as a comic book artist, but frustrated by his lack of real improvement, Starr was advised by Dean Cornwell to return to art school and take night courses at the Art Students' League under the legendary Frank Reilly, the principal life drawing instructor at the school when George Bridgeman retired and a Cornwell-from-Dunn-from-Pyle disciple.  Reilly was a major factor in producing a horde of great illustrators, among the better known Cooper Studio Girl Art pros Joseph Bowler and Ernest Chiriaka and many superb cover artists of the Trash Paperback era the likes of Robert Mcguire, Walter Popp, James Bama, Stan Borack, Lou Marchetti, Rudy Nappi, and Vern Tossey.  

If Starr has frequently dismissed his early art education as worthless for 30 years, he is equally adamant that Reilly, who died in 1967, was the best teacher he ever had, claiming "He [Reilly] gave you the meat and potatoes, and there wasn't a single day that I didn't learn at least 10 things.  I had gaps in my knowledge, and during 6 months of evening study with him, the gaps began to fill up."  

Starr's improved chops meant a move away from comic books and toward straight illustration jobs, magazines, pocket book covers, and line art for newspapers, until finally, around 1955, Starr began working for Johnstone and Cushing, the top line art shop in the country (Stan Drake, Neal Adams, Alex Kotzky, Dan Barry, Lou Fine, and others).  Aware of the grind of being a strictly commercial artist for hire, the wear and tear of commuting and the creative ceiling imposed by conservative ad clients, Starr, married and living fifty miles outside the city, began in the mid 50s to devote 10 hours a week to developing strip ideas for submission to the major syndicates.  A national strip was the big money at the time and Starr was determined to cash in.  (Former J & C stable mate Drake was making over $85,000 in '55 with Juliet Jones, a huge amount of money back then when a well off professional pulled down a weekly salary of  $150 and a brand new Cadillac cost $2,000.)  

Starr's own favorite among his many early attempts was a medical missionary strip.  His efforts earned considerable interest, but no takers, until he took his batch of ideas to the Chicago Tribune--New York News Syndicate in late 1956 and a backstage strip caught the eye of syndicate vice president Maurice Reilly who believed the time was ripe for a theatre storyline.  Starr was cool to the idea, including the strip among the samples to show his range, the "infinite expansion" a successful story strip needed. Previous Broadway strips had failed or were quickly moved away from the Shubert Alley milieu.  And he didn't like the thought of drawing all those theater seats, lights, sets, and opening night crowds.    But On Stage was what the syndicate wanted.  So he began the strip while still completing his J & C assignments, another artist (unnamed in the one interview mentioned) roughing out the opening continuity.

On Stage began 2/10/57 with a Sunday and ended with a Sunday, 9/9/79, 22 years and seven months later, a run Starr ended of his own volition to take over the revival of Harold Gray's Annie.  During its active run, On Stage was the only photo strip to garner for its artist the National Cartoonist Society's award for "Best Cartoonist of the Year", the Rueben, in 1966.  On Stage also gathered the best Story Strip award from the NCS in 1960 (the first awarded) and in 1963. 

The something special about Mary had begun.

[Several TV series were discussed over the years, but each project stalled because of the reluctance of its owner, the syndicate, to allow outside rights. Reprints of the strip in the US are few, but cheap and found with a little effort.  In the early 80s, Blackthorne Publishing put out a series honoring Rueben Award Winners and an initial volume On Stage was done containing two 1966-'67 stories, cobbled together from Sundays and dailies.  A second volume of stories was shelved when the publishing company went bankrupt.  Dragon Lady Press later issued two sets, three early stories (two from 1/2-5/25 1958 and 6/25-9/16 1961) and the last three (2/4-9/9 1979) with both Sundays and dailies included in magazine format.  Much harder to find, the Menomonee Falls Gazette ran B/W Sundays and dailies from 10/16/72 to 3/27/76 (full tab Sundays until Starr switched to the half-tab size in Sep 1974). 

On Stage in back in print by Classic Comics Press.  See "Leave Her to Heaven" for a review or Sources.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

When he began the strip, Starr embarked on some serious study on the craft of writing.  He read some thirty books, the best, he has said often, a book called The Art of Dramatic Structure by Lajos Egri.  According to Starr, the book emphasized pacing and "narrative flow, " qualities he strove to have in his strip.

He was no less determined to accurately portray Mary's world.  He had some idea of the atmosphere he would depict through his theater friends from high school, but he was no expert.  Over the years, by his own estimate, he devoured hundreds of books on theater and acting, biographies, memoirs, set design and so on.  Ron Goulart claims in his 1995 survey of American comics The Funnies that Starr even invested in some shows to gain an insight into Broadway when On Stage became a hit.  His outside reading was eclectic and wide ranging. As a working writer facing the horror of the blank page, he felt he needed to have the largest frame of reference possible.  When asked for his favorite writer, Starr has mentioned Charles Dickens, believing him to possess a "cartoonist's sensibility."

Starr is a big fan of movies, but doesn't think his love for classic Hollywood movies and genres had an overt influence on his strip, no more than a simple manner of constructing a sequence, daily or Sunday--where the scene is set, what characters are involved, and close ups of the character's faces.  But, it's evident movies have had a significant impact on his sense of storytelling.

Kelly Green with Stan Drake