The thoroughly engaging and visually captivating The Heart of Juliet Jones is an underrated gem of 1950s comic strip photo-realism and romantic adventure. Its admirable run began in 1953 (through 1999), under the artful pen of Stan Drake and the scripting of Elliott Caplin. The first week of the strip is added below, and it illustrates the melodrama of the this soapiest of soap operas.
The basic setup involves the Jones family – a widowed father “Pop Jones,” his 30-something unmarried daughter Juliet and teen wild-child other daughter Evie. Sibling rivalry and the tension between responsible Juliet and adventurous man-obsessed Evie form the basic dynamic. I am working from details in the excellent reprints of the early strips by Classic Comics Press (2008). The first volume has introductions by Leonard Starr (of Mary Perkins fame) and Armando Mendez.
A few things strike me about the strip. First, Drake was a well-regarded advertising cartoonist of the day before starting the strip, and he brings that precise idealized vision of 50s America to Juliet Jones. We are far removed from the moody brushwork of Caniff and lush outlines of Al Capp or Chester Gould here. This is very precise penwork that is aimed at a kind of idealized photo-realism. As Drake himself admitted about advertising art, the trick is to make the everyday and all people perfect and beautiful but to do so in a precise way. Fellow artists of the time like Starr and Alex Raymond (in Rip Kirby) had similar approaches. As I have written elsewhere, Raymond’s Kirby strip really helped introduce to the comic strip this post-WWII vision of mid-century culture. And the era’s greater use of close-ups and facial expressiveness visualized a psychological turn in American culture. But Drake’s style was the clearest link between this style and and emerging consumerist slant. It really looked like the advertiser’s vision of mid-century America come to life. And because of that, the mixed motives and emotional angst of the characters seemed to poke at, if not undermine, that idealized American self-image.
Drake also worked in a three-panel cadence, usually in medium close-up framing of two character dialog. There was a lot of space for reaction shots and close-up pay-off frames that highlighted Drake’s talent for facial expression. More than his peers of the 50s (Raymond in Rip Kirby, Caniff in Steve Canyon, or even Kelly in Pogo, Capp in Li’l Abner, or Johnson in Barnaby) Drake relied most on this demanding three-panel snippet of daily storytelling. It was demanding in that it forced Drake to move the story along and deliver some level of emotional impact and cliffhanger for the next day. And it was very much in the romance genre, surfacing the internal lives of characters and resonating emotional notes day to day. These were adventures of the heart.
Drake did not credit himself with innovation or even tremendous talent. He was among the first owners of the instant Polaroid camera. He used photographs of friends and family and tracing tools to model and copy his characters. Still his gift was in the precision of his line, the way he staged each frame and the little inflections he gave each face to express inner attitudes.
Per Mssrs. Starr and Mendez in this intro I picked up a ton of great tidbits about Drake’s fascinating life and work.
- His original ambition was to become an actor, with which he enjoyed some success. His father discouraged the insecurity of an actor’s life and had his good friend and actor Art Carney help talk young Stan out of an actor’s life. Yet, Drake seemed to bring to comics an actor’s appreciation for facial expressiveness.
- The Heart of Juliet Jones storyline was loosely based on a soap opera proposal Drake’s editor had received in the 30s by Margaret “Gone with the Wind” Mitchell.” Indeed the contrast between sensible, responsible Juliet and adventurous, flirty Evie resembles GWTW’s Melanie and Scarlett.
- While Drake handled the graphics end of the strip, it was scripted by Elliot Caplin, a prolific strip author (Abbie ‘n Slats, Big Ben Bolt) who was also brother to Al Capp.
- Drake was involved in one of the great tragedies in comic strip history, the auto accident that killed friend and fellow artist Alex Raymond. Raymond was taking Drake’s new Corvette out with him for a test drive. Raymond accidentally drove at high speed into a tree. Raymond was killed instantly while Drake was thrown from the car.
- Drake’s involvement in Raymond’s deadly crash, as well as the evolution of photo-realism in post-war comics have been chronicled in Dave Sim’s wild graphic novel The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, which I explored a bit in my review of best books of 2021.
The Heart of Juliet Jones is among a long but often overlooked history of strips (Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, On Stage) that not only featured women but followed more the conventions of soap opera than adventure or cartoon comedy. Both Juliet Jones and Mary Perkins On Stage demonstrate how some of these strips really stand out and deserve attention. Some of these artists are exercising muscles of comic art that adventure and comedy just don’t touch. Gesture, emotion, social and class dynamics, tension among characters drive these strips into areas of social and personal insight that adventure, satire and gag genres rarely penetrate. More to the point, these strips both idealize suburban, white, middle class mid-century America and at the same time poke at and disrupt the fantasy.
Discover more from Panels & Prose
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Panels & Prose 
Pingback: Rain #23 | A Panel A Day
Juliet Jones is probably my favourite comic strip, even though I have some major issues with it (if that makes sense–for example, I think Mary Perkins is the *better* strip in that style, thanks to the writing…)
However, in finally having read its complete run, I think it’s worth pointing out the several different styles of strip it would morph into. Understandably, we all focus on its 1950s run (as that’s been reprinted, and is, I think, the most “iconic” the strip was.) By the mid 1960s, the strip would largely focus on much more urban based, stories, especially with Eve based in New York City (the ComicsKingdom official reprints go up to around 1968.) However, it’s in the 1970s where you see the strip really trying new things–and whether this was all due to whims by Elliot Caplin, or Stan Drake’s influence as well, I guess we’ll never know (Caplin certainly liked his whims–see for example Big Ben Bolt where he’d throw in storylines with mad millionaires recreating Roman coliseums and kidnapping Ben as a gladiator.) And I find it fascinating, and endlessly enjoyable.
(As a big fan of soap opera history, it’s interesting that in some ways the move to the urban, with bigger corporations, etc, and move away from rural small towns and communities that Juliet Jones was doing was exactly what TV soap operas were doing too, although that didn’t reach its zentih until after Dallas became a hit in primetime. Suddenly daytime soap communities like Pine Valley and Springfield seemed to be the home of multiple millionaires, all with their own global corporations…)
You have Juliet Jones getting married (and she would be married for well over a decade) but then for several years her husband being lost somewhere near the Himalayas, which led to a very long, gorgeous storyline with Juliet in India trying to find him. There seemed a goal to rotate the tone of each story–so we get a (surprisingly) touching Eve romance that seems to be a reverse gender riff on Love Story, followed by a completely silly storyline about what to do with an inherited warehouse green denim, to Juliet and her international star lawyer in an action story having to outsmart a global mastermind. There certainly wasn’t this variety of storylines in the Nick Dallis trio of strips (although Apartment 3-G, which was created in the wake of Juliet Jones, sometimes came close) or Mary Worth. And the art always holds up, even with the shrinkage issues of the 1970s (although the Sundays, by now fully folded into the main storylines, are an oddity where they recap the dailies but often have contradicting plot details as if they were a rough draft for the daily storylines which, given that they’d be written further ahead of time, maybe they were.)
There’s even a surprisingly brutal “women’s prison” exploitation type storyline with Eve, set up with pot, is falsely imprisoned in a Hell-ish prison overseen by an (of course) butch warden who enjoys physically torturing the inmates (she ends up killing one of Eve’s cellmates.) It somehow… works and Drake does wonders with Dutch angles. I honestly am surprised it got approved by the editors (there’s one strip devoted to showing how the warden torments Eve in the showers with scalding water.)
The 80s are a bit less interesting–and start to become inconsistent when attempting the increasing continuity between stories that occurred in the 1970s. Eve ends up adopting a daughter of another dying beau who, for a few later strips, we get explanations about why she’s not present and then eventually is just forgotten about. As is a paraplegic war veteran, newly discovered half brother–who again they try to keep around on the periphery for a few strips, and then is conveniently forgotten. There’s a wonderful bait and switch way to permanently get rid of Juliet’s husband (who I assume they had run out of stories for) where a seemingly comedic storyline, in the pace of three panels, becomes deadly and changes abruptly in tone (and leads Juliet on yet another cross country action storyline while she’s trying to sort out her feelings–involving mad inbred European royalty, brothels, ski chases, you name it…)
I’m admittedly way too invested and fascinated into all of this. We have heard that Stan Drake would offer Elliot Caplin story suggestions sometimes (actually–we don’t know this. In one interview in the 1980s Drake basically states that he just draws whatever Caplin gives him, but in another he describes being quite involved in at least the overall plotting.) In 1988 the Sundays stopped, and then in Spring 1989–*mid storyline, no less* Drake gives the strip over the the ubiquitous Frank Bolle who had at least ghosted at some point (and was always meshed up with JJ as well as Leonard Starr’s strips–apparently he was instrumental in the layout of Starr’s early Mary Perkins, and by the time he took over JJ, Starr had been ghost writing for the soap opera strip Bolle had been doing for the previous five years, Winnie Winkle.)
The transition initially isn’t as bad as I expected it to be–Drake’s art by 1989 was suddenly starting to get less detailed, and for the first year or so, Bolle seems to be working quite hard to emulate it as best he can. But throughout the 90s Bolle’s art is on a steady decline (becoming not bad, per se, but unimaginative.) But what interests me is how suddenly and sharply Caplin’s writing drops in quality. The stories continue to be often quite wacky (I guess whimsical is the intention,) but with no longer any sense of grounding them in a reality based frame (pretty soon Juliet Jones, with Eve, owns a Hollywood movie production company and lives in a huge LA Gothic house.) Caplin has always had some trouble concluding his storylines (an issue with all of the soap opera strips to varying degrees–except when Leonard Starr is writing,) but he no longer seems to be trying, with long storylines suddenly wrapping up in two days with a non conclusion and there being absolutely no transition into the start of the new storyline. Was Elliot Caplin just getting old? Certainly I think he was juggling writing less strips by the 90s than the half dozen plus he was at one time (it seems impossible to discover just all of what he wrote for.) Was he no longer putting in much effort? I can’t imagine in the 1990s many papers were still carrying JJ (I was a teenager by then, but was fascinated by what serialized newspaper strips were still in various newspapers, and I had NO idea JJ was still running.) And of course in 1989 we end on a cliffhanger (Juliet and Eve’s hi-jacked plane is going down) and, that’s it. Caplin was sick (and would soon pass away) by then, but unlike with other story strips that whimpered to an end in the 1990s, the syndicate didn’t even give JJ a The End panel.
BUT, I still really wish the CCS volumes had sold better and the overly ambitious plan to do all of Drake’s run had come to be so that more fans would be aware of just how fascinating, ambitious and crazy JJ became after the late 1960s.
I think I’m often too hard on Frank Bolle, largely because he was the final artist in the final years for some of my favourite story strips and gave them increasingly mediocre to awful art in his own twilight years (and by this time, equal blame could go to the writing.) But it is interesting just how many of these he was the final artist for. He (uncredited) was the final artist for Rip Kirby. He was the final artist on Winnie Winkle when it folded in 1996. Final artist on Juliet Jones and when it ended (the first week of 2000,) he had just taken over as the final artist (for a 15 year run) on Apartment 3-G whose final, infamously disastrous strips are sure a long way from Alex Kotzky’s gorgeous own long run. But that’s another tirade :P