Gerald Norton or Judd Saxon?
The name of the protagonist Judd Saxon – and consequently the strip – was changed in Gerald Norton” in France-Soir newspaper, in the late 1950s, then a monthly pocket Edi-Europe from 1964.
JUDD SAXON, art Ken Bald 57-61 -wr Jerry Brondfield 57-61
Soap Opera was a term coined about 1940 to describe sentimental radio serials promoted to ‘the millions’ by sponsors of soap, coffee, cleanser and personal deodorant. The soaps were nothing startlingly new or original — they had their genesis in the early nineteenth century in stage melodrama and penny parts serials. Thomas Peckett Prest serialized Fatherless Fanny; or, the Mysterious Orphan (1841), in Reynolds’s Miscellany James Malcolm Rymer serialized The Divorce, a Story of Fashionable Life (1859), and George Biggs’ Family Herald (1843) offered weekly serials almost exclusively tailored to women.
Comic strip soap opera’s heroes and heroines were solidly white middle class supporters of the status quo. The villains were not of the horrid Dick Tracy sort, like Mumbles or The Mole, rather they were mostly indistinguishable from the middle class heroes. Jane Arden’s handsome villains sometimes sported an identifying moustache, occasionally a crooked nose, but usually they resembled that clean-cut boy next door.
cont,d in Yesterday’s Papers
