Tuesday comic strip day.
Following the succes of the soap opera spoof Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Stan Lee created his own variation for the comic pages. Draw by the recently deceased Frank Spinger, it ran for just under a year. Like Stan Lee's previous try at newspaper comics, the political photo funnies Says Who?, it was not the runaway succes Lee might have hoped. That didn't come until he trnsformed his most popular creation, Spiderman, into a newspaper regular which has been running ever sine. First with glorious art by John Romita Senior and lately in the capable hands of Lee's brother Larry Lieber. I believe te Romita years have reently been published (even thouh my copy still has not arrived), so that should be omething to check out, if only for the art. Vera Valiant had less to go for it. The art by Springer is certainly not his most imspired (he saved that for his vicious parodies at the National Lampoon) and the stories were more lame soap opera than mock soap opera. There were two pocket editions of the first two storylines, none of which contained this whisically selfreferential ending in September 1977. Follow the tags for samples of Says Who and th efirst week of Vera Valiant.
2 comments:
Glad to finally see how VV ends. I always liked it, but our local dropped it around the time the Osmond-clones came in. I never knew how it ended- and now I do! A good ending for a good strip!
I just got a near complete set of Sunday for this strip, including the last one in color and will share it soon.
Post a Comment