Mary Perkins, On Stage

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Mary Perkins, On Stage (originally titled simply On Stage) is an American newspaper comic strip by Leonard Starr that ran from February 10, 1957 to September 9, 1979. A backstage drama, it followed the adventures and misadventures of actress Perkins and eventually also her photographer beau and later husband, Pete Fletcher, on Broadway, in Hollywood, and on various movie sets around the world. It began under the title On Stage, changing to its longer and final title in 1961.

Its scripts mixed soap opera, adventure and broad humor while its art was characterized by a studied line and often innovative storytelling. Starr, won the National Cartoonist Society Story Comic Strip Award for the series in 1960 and 1963, and its Reuben Award in 1965. The strip ended when Starr left in 1979 to take over Little Orphan Annie. An occasional collaborator was Starr's friend, Stan Drake, cartoonist of the comic strip The Heart of Juliet Jones.

The publisher Classic Comics Press announced in February 2006 that it had arranged with On Stage rights-holder Tribune Media Services to release collected volumes of the strip, the first scheduled for June 2006 and reprinting the strips of Feb. 10, 1957 to Jan. 11, 1958. The second volume was released later in 2006 and the plan is to publish all strips in chronological order.