Many years ago I drew a couple of newspaper comic strips for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. One of them was written by veteran comics author Jim Lawrence (James Bond, Friday Foster, Captain Easy etc.). Jim was the source of these two sample weeks of a proposed Harlequin Romances strip, based on the insufferable and insufferably successful Canadian series of paperback romances. To my knowledge the strip never went anywhere.
Jim wrote. It's not hard to guess the artist's identity: none other than the immortal Leonard Starr. In fact, Mary Perkins leaves the stage briefly to star here as Helen James, runaway heiress. Mary's, er, Helen's car breaks down in the snow, and she is given shelter by the Brooding Handsome Stranger that always seems to inhabit these novels.
Jim loaned me printed proof sheets of the samples. I made Xerox copies of the proofs. It's from these copies that I made the present scans. You'll note the top strip of each page is clipped off. That's because back then legal-size copies were 20 cents and I was a cheapskate.
I'm not sure how Starr figured he was going to handle the workload of both this strip and On Stage. Maybe he would have shopped one of them out to assistants. At any rate, it's a very nice job by a consummate illustrator.
P.S.: I read in a 2005 forum posting that Cosmo Girl magazine was running Harlequin romances in manga form. (A perfect match. Two tirelessly repetitive imported creative traditions.) Does anyone know anything about this? Couldn't find an example online.
5 comments:
I'm surprised no syndicate picked up on this. There was a good chance it would have been a runaway success and the art is great. Was this in the mid-sixties?
No, much later. Jim showed me the samples in 1982 or 1983. He didn't say just when they made the pitch, but I got the impression it had been within the previous few years.
I think someone should go through all his fanzines and do an article or book about unsold comic strips. I have seen samples from Jim Aparo, Jack Kirby, Bill Elder, Harvey Kurtzman and many many more. Alfred, something for you maybe?
Ger, that's an excellent idea for someone with lots of contacts and a wide range of knowledge (someone, that is, exactly unlike myself).
I'd be curious to see what kind of strip Jim Aparo pitched. Having a syndicated comic strip remained the Holy Grail of American cartoonists long after the prize was worth having. Everyone remembered the legendary strip millionaires like Capp, Fisher, Raymond, Caniff, etc. They figured that a strip with a major syndicate meant their own shot at wealth.
That came up during my Dallas days. As I mentioned in my blog, I was hired not because I good but because I was cheap. Old-timers who had labored as assistants for years, yearning for the Big Break, assumed I was making the Big Bucks. After all, it was a huge property and a major newspaper. Little did they know!
Consider that one of my replacements on Star Trek (I think it was Ernesto Colon) found the pay so contemptible that he donated it to charity!
I'm so glad this ancient (by Internet standards) blog post still exists, and I doubt anyone will read this, but...
As a huge Leonard Starr fan and, yes, a fan of "soap opera" comic strips (admittedly the supreme Mary Perkins is more of a soap opera/adventure hybrid) I've been curious about this proposal but never thought to look for any evidence, until now.
One bit of trivia that I think is relevant (and despite loving soap operas, I have no love for Harlequin Romances so I don't know where I came across this info) is that in 1978 Harlequin made their only (I think) attempt at a theatrical film adaptation of one of their novels and it was... Leopard in the Snow. It doesn't take a big leap to assume this is the same story, so Starr probably knew if he was going to try to adapt any title, this was the one to try. The film starred Susan Penhaligon (who?) and Keir Dullea, who is one of my favourite actors of that era but was far from discriminate when it came to what film roles he'd accept. Jeremy Kemp was also in it--and it was a UK/Canada coproduction. And I think made zero impact at the boxoffice (though the reviews, while not exactly good, aren't as bad as I expected.)
Like some other posters, though, I'm surprised it wasn't picked up. Maybe even by the late 70s, syndicates weren't keen to pick up any more soap opera style strips? Otherwise, it seems like a natural.
I also take great umbrage at your snide comment about manga being an imported, repetitive medium. :P Imported, sure, but "tirelessly repetitive?" And compared to what--American comic strips (which are much more so, as much as I love the format.) The strength of manga as a medium is how diverse and, well, not repetitive they are. For every long running shonen battle title like Dragon Ball (which is endless rinse and repeat in its storytelling) you have endless titles that serialize stories that don't resemble any other manga, and, often, know just how long to continue to tell the story they want before concluding. I've written a lot about Moto Hagio in particular, perhaps the most important female mangaka, who strarted off writing titles for girls magazines in the early 70s. She quickly diversified into genres and stories unlike anyone else--sci-fi, Gothic existential vampire stories--before Anne Rice-- stories examining cycles of abuse, wacky comedy ones offs... Her work might not appeal to everyone, but it would also never be called repetitive and she's hardly unique there. So there :P
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