In 1976 Stan Lee created an over the top soap opera strip called The Virtue of Vera Valiant with Frank Springer. It was modeled after the popular tv series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a daily soap opera spoof with Louise Lasser by Norman Lear, which had started in January 1976. Frank Springer was a good choice. He was mostly known for a series of realistically drawn satirical strips in The National Lampoon and the erotic strip The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist. I recently bought most of the Sundays of this strip, which ran for slightly more than a year. I will be showing them in portions (some of which I have shown earlier). The Sundays continued the storyline from the dailies and frankly, work very well without them.
3 comments:
Hate to say it, but this is dreadful work. Stan seemed to think all women do is emote and cry all day. Despite pretensions of "satire," it's really a dumb rip-off of Stan Drake's The Heart of Juliet Jones. And probably from dealing with Stan, Frank Springer didn't give his best effort.
What do you mean by “despite pretensions of satire??”
That’s what this was. That’s why Stan wrote it the way he did.
As pointed out earlier, it was a riff on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”
You’re bitching simply because it wasn’t something it was never intended to be.
I have no idea what motivates people like you to express completely inane opinions.
Although I agree with what you are saying, I am not very happy with your wording. Dave is entitled to his opinion as far as I am concerned. In fact, I sort of agree - but not because I think it's Stan's fault. I never liked Mary Hartman (2x), just because of that same reason. I found her a shrill and limited character and the series an example of satire done the wrong way. Sap later did it a lot better, imo.
Post a Comment