The Virtue Of Vera Valiant

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, by Stan Lee and Frank Springer

June, 1977  Signet Books

Last weekened I was in the room we use for storage and going through a bunch of boxes of junk. I came across a big printer box that had books in it, all of them still in the padded envelopes in which they’d been mailed to me (not sure why I never put them in a bookcase or whatever, but anyway). The majority of them were hardcover editions of the Greek/Roman poetry I was into many, many years ago (I guess my estrogen level must’ve been high at the time), but on the sides of the box were two smaller padded envelopes with mass market paperbacks in them. 

Of course, those were the packages I opened first – and they turned out to be this book, The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, and the sequel The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2. According to the postage stamps, each book was mailed to me in June of 2009…pre-blog, baby! As I mentioned before, one of the reasons I started Glorious Trash was to force myself to actually read all the books I bought, so these two Vera Valiant paperbacks would’ve been read back then if I actually had a blog. 

I am not sure how I discovered these books, which were scarce and obscure then and apparently even more today; I am surprised to see that The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, a daily/weekly newspaper strip by Stan Lee and Frank Springer that ran from October 11, 1976 to August 28, 1977 has still not been collected, other than in these two old paperbacks.  And even then the full series was not collected, so even if you get these two paperbacks you aren't getting the entire strip run.  This perhaps shows how obscure the series really is, as even Lee’s other newspaper strip, The Amazing Spider-Man, has been collected. But then, it’s kind of unfair to compare Spider-Man to The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. 

I think I found out about these books shortly before I bought them from online sellers in June of 2009 thanks to the then-recent DVD release of soap opera satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. This was a soap that mocked soap convention, and since it was before my time (I was born in 1974, so would’ve been 2 years old when it was on TV) I’d never seen it. But I recall thinking the commercials for the DVD release were funny (to this day I still haven’t seen the show, though I still think it looks funny)…and somehow, somewhere, I learned that Stan “The Man” Lee had done a short-lived newspaper strip “inspired” by Mary Hartman. 

How inspired? Well, just check the back cover of this first Signet paperback collection, which even mocks the title of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, repeating “Vera Valiant” twice: 

So, Signet Books was aware that this strip was intended to be a soap opera spoof, same as Mary Hartman was. I wonder if actual newspaper readers knew this. I’m guessing not, hence the short life of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. The book, by the way, is copyright The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, so I’m assuming they too were in on the joke. It’s also my understanding that some papers printed the series under the title “Vera Valiant, Vera Valiant,” to give further evidence of the strip’s inspiration. 

But the sad fact is that, judging from this 126-page paperback that collects the first three months of the series (October 11, 1976 to January 15, 1977), The Virtue Of Vera Valiant just isn’t very funny. This really surprised me; just the other month I mentioned how funny Stan Lee’s work was in the The Amazing Spider-Man strip. Here though his humor falls flat; the jokes do not seem very natural, given the artificial nature of the series itself (it’s intended to be a spoof of a stilted, melodramatic soap opera), and the jokes themselves are often of the groaner variety, or just lame in general. Also, there is a lot of repetition in setups and payoffs, but that seems to be standard in the disposable, ephemeral world of newspaper comic strips. 

We don’t get any setup or intro, and the strips are arranged on each page without the series banner. The Sunday strips, as they are longer than the dailies, take up a few pages – and more often than not they cover the same material as the dailies, only offering a little “new” material. And the Sundays are here printed in black and white, even though they were in color in the original newspaper printings. 

As I say, there is a lot of repetition, given that the audience might not be with the series every day; there could be weekend readers who only saw the Sunday strips, or weekday readers who didn’t see the daily strips, so Lee has to ensure the story is understandable for both parties. 

This also means there isn’t much in the way of continuity; subplots come up and are dispensed with wily-nily, with no explanation. This was another surprise, as the Spider-Man strips did have continuity, so my assumption is Lee was either finding his footing with this series (and perhaps dealing with editorial mandates), or he was spoofing the often surreal nature of soap operas themselves. But still, this makes for an unsatisfying read at times. 

The setup is simple: titular Vera Valiant is a young, dark-baired beauty in Hackensack, New Jersey – a lot of the easy jokes come from the fact that the story occurs in Hackensack, by the way. She lives with her Aunt Gladys (parelells to Peter Parker and Aunt May) and her brother Herbert; Aunt Gladys, in the little we see of her, is a doting but air-headed older lady, and Herbert is a heavyset buffoon. A lot of the repetitive “groaner” comedy comes from Herbert; there’s a lot of jokes about him flunking out of various correspondence courses, his latest subject being podiatry. 

There’s even more repetitive jokery around Vera’s boyfriend, Wendolyn, a meek C.P.A. That Wendolyn is a C.P.A. is constantly mentioned, usually in a facetious light – Wendolyn going on about how being a C.P.A. is a noble profession and whatnot. It’s funny the first time, sort of, but by the tenth time it gets old. Also, Wendolyn happens to be married, but for the past 14 years – since his wedding night, in fact – Wendolyn’s wife Melba has been a victim of “sleeping sickness.” Thus she is asleep in a hospital and has been so throughout the marriage; Lee plays up the melodrama of Vera wanting to be with Wendolyn, but feeling he should be true to his wife, even if she’s asleep, and etc…all of it done in a satirical way, of course. 

Thus each strip ends with a big “shock” moment, usually with Vera putting her hand to her mouth in terror, but it’s always something goofy or dumb that causes this…like late in the book a limo keeps circling the house and “strangers” barge in, and Vera is terrified..but it turns out the strangers are from a TV show and want to make Vera a real-life soap opera star. It’s stuff like this throughout, but then again this particular subplot is a curious prediction of reality TV. 

The bit with the “sleeping sick” wife takes up the first storyline, then we have a random storyline where Aunt Gladys falls for a guy who claims to be from Beta-III and who wants to sell condos on other planets; he has a spaceship that apparently is a hunk of metal sitting on the Valiant lawn, but the black-and-white reproduction of the panels kind of prevents us from seeing what Frank Springer intended it to look like. There’s more lame, repetitive comedy with the joke that Gladys’s husband “ran off with a defrocked TV repair person.” 

As for the supposed alien, he too is presented as a meek looking CPA type; overall The Virtue Of Vera Valient occurs in a rather bland world, with most panels taking place in the Valiant home. There is little of the escapism of a true soap, with rich characters in rich surroundings, and it’s altogether more of a threadbare, humdrum sort of affair. 

Then there’s the problem of Vera Valiant herself. She’s such a cipher she is hard to relate to, but then I’m not sure it was even Stan Lee’s intention that we would relate to her. She’s there to act as a spoof of the perennially-shocked and worried female protagonist common in soap operas, so her dialog is generally reduced to voicing concerns or gasping in surprise. Her brother Herbert meanwhile seems to have wandered in from an out-and-out comedy, and doesn’t fit with the vibe Lee is trying to create for the series. 

It’s interesting how Stan Lee seems to lose interest in his subplots so quickly, but again this could be his reacting to editorial demands. The subplot with the Beta III salesman is lame, and Lee himself seems to get sick of it; after spending so many strips on the storyline, he abandons it with Vera being sent to an insane asylum (a cop shows up and doesn’t believe her when she says that Aunt Gladys’s boyfriend is an alien), and the Beta III guy is never mentioned nor seen again. 

The next storyline is no less annoying, and just as long; Vera in an insane asylum, where the hunky psychiatrist seems to have a thing for her (he’s also treating Wendolyn’s sleeping wife, by the way) and thus won’t let Vera check out. But Lee gradually loses interest in this plotline, too, with the abrupt reveal that Vera works in a library and is visited by a coworker, an outspoken feminist who rails that there are more men in the insane asylum than women. 

This takes us into the homestretch, where a dashing, older man who runs the network’s biggest soap operas (Martin C. Martin) shows up at Vera’s home, having seen her on TV (another gag has Vera being put on a late-night TV news program while in the insane asylum), and coming up with the idea of making a real-world soap about her life. 

That’s it for The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, but more of the storyline was soon published in the second paperback, which I’ll be reviewing soon. A curious note, which I’ll belabor in the next review, is that the second volume states that a third volume would be forthcoming, but one never was – so The Virtue Of Vera Valiant not only failed to secure a long newspaper run, but also failed to garner paperback readers. 

Here are some random photos of the book, but the photos suck because the binding of my copy is so tight I could barely hold the book open with one hand while snapping pictures of the pages with the other. At any rate, Frank Springer’s artwork is great throughout, fully capturing the spoofy pathos of the series and giving each character their own look. However, unlike the Spider-Man strip, there is little in the way of risque material; Vera wears a full dress throughout the series and there’s nothing in the way of sex appeal. It’s just not that kind of story, I guess, but still the creep in me wishes there was at least a little of it…but then maybe I was just spoiled by the T&A John Romita brought to the Spider-Man strip.