Mary Perkins on stage

Leonard Starr is an American comic book artist, whose credits vary from Golden Age comic books and advertisements to soap opera newspaper comics and stories for European comic magazines. Born in New York City, Starr got his art education from Manhattan's High School of Music and Art and the Pratt Institute. While still attending Pratt, he did his first comic book artwork through the Chesler shop and Funnies Inc. in 1942. He collaborated on 'The Sub-Mariner' and 'Human Torch' for Timely and on 'Don Winslow of the Navy' for Fawcett Comics. He also worked for a variety of other publishers, including Better Publications, Consolidated Book, Croyden Publications, E. R. Ross Publishing, Hillman Periodicals and Crestwood. He then focused on advertising art until returning to comic books in the mid 1950s with war, mystery and crime stories for DC Comics and the American Comics Group. His first worked for syndicated newspapers was ghosting the 'Flash Gordon' strip for King Features in the mid 1950s. Starr's biggest claim to fame is his adventurous soap opera strip 'Mary Perkins, On Stage', that he created for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate in 1957. He drew the strip until 1979, when he was hired by the same syndicate to revive the 'Little Orphan Annie' strip. In the five previous years, the syndicate had been reprinting older episodes by the original creator Harold Gray.