Starrs In My Eyes
Steve Simmons
>One of the things we have to face as discerning strip fans, faced with
>the current strip scene is the question of strips that continue
>without their original creators . . .
>And of course, Ramona Fradon's and Mary Schmich's (sp?) Brenda Starr
>is a corker, with much better art than Dale Messick, and consistently
>good stories. Brenda's my heroine.
All right-thinking comics fans love Brenda. I don't know when Fradon
and Schmich took over from Messick, but the strip did pick up quite a
bit about a decade back.
At its best, "Brenda Starr" is a self-aware soap opera.
They stop just a fraction short of directly addressing the reader,
instead coming out with some gawd-awful melodramatic statement that
usually leaves me howling.
Over the desk at work is one panel from a daily. Some homeless guy
Brenda was trying to lift up is in her apartment. He's just showered,
is wearing her quilted bathrobe (black and white strip, but you *know*
that bathrobe is pink), and is holding her razor getting ready to
remove several months of beard. He stares at it and muses "Ah, the
razor. That torture device which lets men pretend we're not the
beasts we really are."
--
"The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. On weekends,
many of the younger demons go ice-skating down it."
-- "Good Omens", by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett