Mary Perkins, On Stage (originally titled simply On Stage) is an American newspaper comic strip by Leonard Starr for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. It ran from February 10, 1957, to September 9, 1979, with the switch to the longer title in 1961. Some papers carried the strip under the shortened title Mary Perkins.

The strip came to a conclusion when Starr left in 1979 to take over Little Orphan Annie.

Origins

Having previously worked on comic books, Starr decided to try to publish a newspaper comic strip. Starr submitted his concepts to Moe Riley, a vice president at the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Riley chose two of Starr's ideas: one about a missionary who worked in foreign countries and the other about a young woman who comes to New York to become an actress. The syndicate chose the second idea, and Starr was hired to produce On Stage.

Awards

right|thumb|200px|On Stage comic book published by Dell.

Starr won the National Cartoonists Society Story Comic Strip Award for the series in 1960 and 1963, and its Reuben Award in 1965.

Reprints

Classic Comics Press announced in February 2006 that it had an agreement with Tribune Media Services to release chronological collected volumes of On Stage. The first appeared in June 2006, reprinting the strips of February 10, 1957 to January 11, 1958. The second volume was released later in 2006, the third in 2007 and the fourth in 2008. By 2016, the entire run of the strip had been reprinted in fifteen volumes.

References

  • Leonard Starr official site
  • P.O.V. Online (Feb. 17, 2006): "Starr Power", by Mark Evanier
  • NCS Awards
  • Mary Perkins On Stage at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived from the original on September 7, 2015.