Mary Perkins on Stage: Vol. 1

Author: Leonard Starr

More than comic books, comic strips are drastically limited by format. Early comic strips may have had full pages in which to play out their stories, but by the fifties and sixties when Mary Perkins ran the space for the weekdays and Sundays had shrunk a great deal. Starr had to fit plot developments into three, maybe four, panels a day, while at the same time making sure that the information from the previous strip was summarized at the start of the next strip and leaving a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the strip. In inexpert hands, this essentially pares down developments to the space of one or two panels a day, which hardly seems like enough space to tell a story. Yet Starr not only did tell a story, he told a good story and told it well.

Mary Perkins (On Stage was the actual title at this point) is the story of the titular small town middle America girl and her attempt to break into show business. In a soap opera strip like this, needless to say, much more than simple theatrics take place--there is a wide range of drama on the scene. No matter the focus of any given storyline, however, what they all share are a measured sense of pacing, a focus on character, and fine, workman-like art. There's something to be said for something that is straightforwardly well put together. Reading these strips one after the other, it's easy to admire the ease with which Starr hides the necessary info dumps. The rare cases where the mechanics do stand out just bring out how astonishing it is that this collection of daily strips reads so well as a whole.

It's fascinating to look at the storytelling leaps Starr as to make in order to pull everything together in three panel chunks. In the course of a three panel daily, Starr might change scenes two times--perhaps flashing between two different settings where characters are developing conflicting strategies. It's a credit to Starr that these changes develop a rhythm of their own. At the same time, Starr could effortlessly switch over to a more decompressed style of storytelling, as in one strip that consists almost entirely of several smaller panels showing Mary smoking. It was in the Sunday strips that Starr was most able to stretch his legs because while the Sunday format provided a larger space, it also couldn't make progress in the story--some papers didn't carry the Sunday strip, only the dailies. As a result, Starr made the Sundays the place for in depth focus on character, a deeper understanding into certain events (which are simply implied as happening between Saturday and Monday in the dailies), or sometimes just to demonstrate some terminology or details about show business. Whatever he was doing, he made the best of the space.

Obviously I was won over by this collection and I think I'll have more to say in the future about comic strip storytelling versus comic book storytelling, but for now head on over to Rules of Attraction to read the article on Mary Perkins on Stage.

Status: Bookshelf