Short(est) Lived Comic Series #29 - Friday Foster (Dell Comics)

Two years go, I reviewed the collection of Friday Foster comic strips published in the Sunday newspapers (Friday Foster Comic Strips), at which time, I mentioned the fact that I was still searching for that hard-to-find issue of Dell Comics' version of the character, a stand-alone issue published with a cover date of October 1972, right in the middle of Lawrence's run of the comic strip.  Well, that search is over!  This past Christmas, a dear friend surprised me with a copy of this particular comic, in absolutely marvelous condition considering its age.  I've been holding off, waiting for the right time to read it, and that time is now!

 

Friday Foster is one of Dell's many one-issue comics.  Although the indicia at the bottom of the first page refers to this as "No. 1," there was never any other issues published after this one (which may be why it is so sought after and so hard to find at a reasonable price!).  While the characters and story are based on James D. Lawrence's comic strip, Lawrence was not actually involved in the comic.  The story was written by Joe Gill, and the art (both inside and on the cover) was provided by Jack Sparling.  Joe Gill is probably best recognized for his work at Charlton comic company, where he co-created Captain Atom, Peacemaker, and Judomaster, as well as others.  Jack Sparling was a rather busy artist back in the day, providing art for publishers such as Harvey, Charlton, Classics Illustrated, DC, Gold Key, Marvel, along with Dell Comics.  Gill does a superb job of staying true to the character of Friday Foster, while Sparling's art is a bit softer than Jordi Longaron's, but he still retains the look of all the cast.

 

The story finds Friday helping her boss, fashion photographer Shawn North, get photographs of an elusive American-born princess - Princess Jenny Shangri, newly wed wife of Prince Wimoweh of Teri-Aki.  She makes every effort to avoid the press, and Friday views her  as nothing more than a spoiled rich girl who has no understanding of what it is like for someone who grew up in Harlem (like Friday!).  She sabotages Shawn's attempts to get clear photographs, and ultimately has to confess her underhandedness to their employer at She magazine.  Well, as any good story goes, fate intervenes, and Friday finds herself having to pose as the princess's close friend in order to ferret out a member of the paparazzi who has been harassing the princess for some time - most recently causing a near-fatal car accident!  Friday is livid, but she takes the assignment, having no other choice.

 

Gill writes a well-scripted tale that could easily be translated to the small or big screen.  Friday spends time with Jenny (the princess), shopping for clothes, and while Jenny insists the dastardly Ferdy Trask is following them, Friday fails to see him (although the reader does spot him in various panels).  Friday begins to believe Jenny is making up the entire harassment scenario in order to gain publicity - but while she is trying to convince Shawn, the sneaky Ferdy Trask is doing his own digging into Friday's identity - and when he learns she works for Shawn North, he decides to turn the tables on her. Suddenly, Friday becomes the target of Mr. Trask's dirty deeds.  Not only is Friday threatened, but she comes home to find he has also threatened her little brother, Cleve!  Needless to say, Friday is not going to let Ferdy Trask get the better of her, so with Shawn and Jenny's help, she sets an ingenious trap to catch Trask at his own game.

 

One thing I like about these old Dell Comics is that you get 32-pages of story and art with no ads (except on the inside front and back covers, as well as the back cover itself).  That means Gill and Sparling have plenty of space to really flesh out the story, providing not only characterization, but also plenty of action and suspense.  Honestly, as I was reading the comic, I could see Pam Grier in my head acting out the entire story (for those who may not know, Grier played Friday Foster in the live action film of the same name back in 1975).  The bad guy gets his comeuppence, and Friday learns a thing or two herself about pre-judging people before she gets to know them.  The story has the same feel as those in the comic strip by Lawrence and Longaron, and I think they honored the source material very nicely.

 

It's so sad we only got one issue of this comic adaptation of the character - I think this would have made for a very dramatic comic book series.  Perhaps it was simply the wrong time period for a strong, black female character to lead a comic, or perhaps Dell was simply not a widespread enough company to attract enough readers to warrant more issues.  Whatever the reason, Friday Foster's one issue was a fantastic read and well worth the wait!

 

RATING:  10 games of bait and switch out of 10 for giving a little known character a chance to truly shine, while paying tribute to the character's creators with a superb story! 

Friday Foster - the Sunday Strips

I first heard about the character of Friday Foster when I discovered a one-issue Dell Comic that starred this African-American photographer from the '70s.  I've never been able to purchase the comic (as the prices for this one issue are astronomical!), but I always keep my eye out.  Then, one day, I discovered that David had recorded a movie on TCM called Friday Foster, starring Pam Grier in the title role.  Watching the film, sure enough, this is the same character that was in that comic book I wanted.  The movie was definitely a product of its time (known as the "Black Exploitation" era), but nevertheless, it had a pretty good story to it and was a lot of fun.  Little did I realize that Friday Foster was actually a comic strip before it was ever a comic book and movie - but I learned this when I purchased a collected edition of the Sunday strips, published by Ablaze Publishing.  The hardcover collection had more than just the Sunday strips, however - it also featured a LOT of extra material, including bios of and interviews with the creators - one of whom has a direct Nancy Drew connection!

So, let's start off talking about the strips themselves.  Friday Foster premiered on my very first birthday - January 18, 1970!  (I probably shouldn't reveal that, since it totally gives away my age!)  Syndicated by the Chicago Tribune, the strip ran for only four years (January 18, 1970 to February 14, 1974), but despite its short run, it definitely broke the mold when it came to newspaper comic strips.  While she was not the first black female character in a syndicated strip (a little known character named Torchy Brown holds that honor), she is the first syndicated strip to appear in non-black publications.  Created by James D. Lawrence, she was originally named Jet Jones before becoming Friday Foster in the actual published strip.  In the "Notes for a Biography" section of this collection, author David Moreu reveals that Lawrence was already writing other syndicated strips when he realized there were no African American characters in the comic strips - and he decided to do something about that.  The strip became the subject of a lot of talk in big cities, such as Los Angeles, New York, and others; but, apparently, all of that talk could not keep the strip alive beyond those four years.

 

To Lawrence's credit, Friday Foster was not a stereotype. She was not depicted with an afro that was so common in the '70s, and she was not only smart and sophisticated, but she quickly falls into her career as a photographer during her first storyline.  Before you know it, she's working for Shawn North, a famous photographer with whom she develops a very strong friendship over the four years of the strip.  Yet, despite moving up in the world, Friday never forgets her roots, and she's very protective of her little brother, Cleve (who is always running one scam or another).  Rounding out her supporting cast is Mame Van Clive, the editor of "She" Magazine; Simon Aubry, the art director; the enigmatic man known only as Blackhawk, who is a creative cat burglar; and Mwenye Nguvu, the mysterious Lord of the Jungle (a/k/a Slade King, former American football star) who makes more than one appearance during the run of the strip.  Each story ran, on average, eight weeks - and what is truly amazing is that even though this book only collects the Sunday color strips published from 1970 to 1974, there are no gaps in the stories.  Lawrence wrote them in such a way that even without the daily strips, the readers gets the entire story in the Sunday strips alone!  I didn't feel like I missed out on anything by reading only the Sunday strips.

Now, let's talk about those stories.  The strip begins with Friday working at The Club Senegal, a "swingin' Harlem nightspot," where Friday enjoys taking pictures of the girls, as well as the guests, hoping that some day, one of her pictures will help her crash the big time.  And wouldn't you know it?  One her photos does just that, because unbeknownst to her, one of her photographs has a couple in the background who do not want their outing to be made public.  The art director and editor of "She" magazine recognize the couple right away and put Friday in contact with Shawn North, a famous photographer - who just so happens to be engaged to the woman in the photo (who, incidentally, went to that Harlem nightspot with another man!).  This leads to a number of near-misses, subtle threats, and a fist-fight on a yacht!  This first tale is the longest storyline (as it serves to set up the characters and the series, in general), and interestingly, two of the Sunday strips (just before the last one of this story) do not feature Friday at all (which is daring for a strip to be missing its lead character for two weeks in a row!).  

The last panel of that first story sets up the next story, which involves the world's most famous "missing person" - Mike Morgan, a British pop-rock singer that supposedly died.  Friday and Shawn get pulled into the drama of Morgan's attempt to undergo plastic surgery to change his looks so he can disappear yet again - but a young woman following him may put a kink in those plans.  Just as the first story ended with a one-panel set-up for the next storyline, so does this one - and all that follow.  Lawrence basically created a formula, with eight to ten week stories ending with a lead-in to the next.  It worked well, as it kept the stories moving at a fairly fast pace, not allowing any lull that would bore the readers and turn them off of the strip.  And the stories varied greatly in subject matter - from rescuing a scarlet macaw from a man who wants to make it his trophy to a young hippie who decides she wants Shawn to be her man ... from a dangerous mission in Spain to kill a scientist to a small ivory elephant trinket that holds a very important secret ... from a fading model trying to stay relevant to a pair of star-crossed lovers destined to be kept apart ... from a stolen necklace and insurance scam to a Broadway actress determined to keep her son away from his father ... a family fighting over an inheritance ... a special effects make-up artist trapped in his own designs ... a crooked detective ... a haunted house ... a cursed idol ... a jungle bride .... and ultimately, a jealous editor from a competing magazine who wants nothing more than to take Friday out of the picture!  But, as the saying goes:  All's well that ends well!  And Friday Foster definitely ends on a high note.

It's truly a shame the strip didn't continue.  Jordi Longaron provided some truly beautiful art for the series (even if fill-in artists were occasionally used when Longaron was unable to get his pages to the publisher in time due to mailing days - remember, this was well before there was the internet!), and even though his backgrounds are not as detailed as those of Leonard Starr's Mary Perkins, On Stage strip (very few artists can do backgrounds as detailed as you'll find in that strip!), his characters and settings are such that your focus always remains on the story itself.  He is certainly a master of expressions - whether Friday is sad and crying or giving an admirer one of her "come hither" looks, or she's shocked by the discovery of a hidden room, Longaron's panels ooze with emotion that the reader can easily feel themselves.

As for the creator - James D. Lawrence - this is where the Nancy Drew connection comes in.  When I first got this book and saw "Jim Lawrence" on the cover, I didn't make the connection.  But the second I read the foreword to this collection, it dawned on me where I recognized the name from - the Nancy Drew books!  I knew that he wrote a number of the Wanderer books in the early 1980s (Race Against Time, Clue in the Ancient Disguise, The Silver Cobweb, The Haunted Carousel, and others) - but I was not aware that he had written comic strips, such as Buck Rogers, James Bond, and, of course, Friday Foster.  Lawrence was also the author of several Christopher Cool series for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, as well as Tom Swift, Jr. and rewrites for The Hardy Boys (I have correspondence from the New York Public Library between Mr. Lawrence and the Syndicate regarding his contention about creator rights to the Christopher Cool series).  So, it was with welcomed surprise that I discovered he was the creator and writer of this Friday Foster strip.  I did find it odd, though, that the book indicates Lawrence stopped writing for the Syndicate in the '70s, when the Wanderer Nancy Drew paperbacks he wrote were published into the 1980s.  (Thanks to a dear friend, Geoffrey Lapin, I have since learned that although Lawrence left writing for Syndicate for a while, he did go back in the '80s and wrote more books for them under a pseudonym so Harriet Adams did not realize it was him!  Yellowback Library, Jan/Feb 1986 No. 31, pp. 5-10).

Nevertheless, there is another comparison between Lawrence's work and the Nancy Drew connection.  After Friday Foster ended, Lawrence's children indicated in an interview that he wanted to keep the character alive, so he wrote a series of books with a very similar character called Dark Angel - a series of four books published by Pyramid Books through the book packager, Book Creations, Inc.  The painted covers for these books were done by none other than Friday Foster artist Jordi Longaron!  As can been seen by the covers, the title character in this series bears a striking resemblance to Friday Foster.  The interesting tidbit about the publication of these books is the book packager, Book Creations, Inc.  The essay about Dark Angel reveals that Book Creations, Inc. was formed by Engel in 1973 and dubbed "the fiction factory" because he and his editorial team "would sketch out ideas for series of books, contract authors to write them up, and then sell the rights to the series to published such as Dell, Pyramid, Belmont Tower, and so on" (p. 268).  Gee, does that process sound familiar?  Perhaps Engel took a cue from Edward Stratemeyer!

But, I digress!  This post is about Friday Foster, a unique character for her time and definitely a strip that is well worth the read.  While the one-issue Dell Comic was written and drawn by entirely different creators, I am still searching for a reasonably priced copy of that comic.  I already have a DVD  of the Friday Foster film, starring Pam Grier (which, by the way, is a fun movie and definitely worth watching!).  And who knows?  Maybe one day, someone will run a series of books collecting all of the daily strips - that would be something I would LOVE to see!  (Hint! Hint! Christopher Marlon, you did an amazing job with the Sundays - get us the dailies!)  Then again, I'd be curious to see what the character would be like in today's comic world.

RATING:  10 weaponized cameras out of 10 for breaking the stereotypes and providing a strip headlined by a strong, black female who could easily hold her own in a white male dominated market!