FRIDAY FOSTER

Jordi LONGARÓN

THE SUNDAY STRIPS

writer

Jim Lawrence artist

Jordi Longarón

strip re-lettering

Antonio Moreno translation

Andrea Rosenberg editor

Christopher Marlon

for ablaze managing editor

Rich Young

editor

Kevin Ketner design

Rodolfo Muraguchi

special thanks

Wayne Lown at Tribune Content Agency, Luis Martinez at Norma, David Moreu and Javier Mesón

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lawrence, James Duncan, 1918-1994, author. | Longaron, Jorge, illustrator. | Morrow, Gray, illustrator.

Title: Friday Foster / [written by] Jim Lawrence; illustrated by Jorge Longaron and Gray Morrow.

Description: Portland, OR: Ablaze Publishing, 2020.

Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-950912-06-3

Subjects: LCSH Fashion models—Fiction. | Fashion—Fiction. | Models (Persons)—Comic books, strips, etc. | African American women—Comic books, strips, etc. | Graphic novels. | BISAC COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / General | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Comics & Graphic Novels / General | COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / Anthologies

Classification: LCC PN6727.L3696 F75 2020 | DDC 741.5—dc23

Friday Foster: The Sunday Strips. First printing. Published by Ablaze Publishing, 11222 SE Main St. #22906 Portland, OR 97269. Friday Foster TM and © 2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. All rights reserved. For the English edition: © 2021 ABLAZE, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Ablaze and its logo TM & © 2021 Ablaze, LLC. All Rights Reserved. All names, characters, events, and locales in this publication are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or places, without satiric intent is coincidental. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means (digital or print) without the written permission of Ablaze Publishing except for review purposes. Printed in China. For advertising and licensing email: info@ablazepublishing.com 10 9 8 7

Jim LAWRENCE Jordi LONGARÓN

THE SUNDAY STRIPS

FOREWORD

BY JAMES LAWRENCE JR.

When I learned that the Friday Foster comic strips were being compiled into a book, I was thrilled. Like similar projects for other comic strips that James Lawrence wrote, Buck Rogers and James Bond, this was another opportunity to keep the author’s memory and his contribution to popular culture alive. I was even more thrilled when Christopher, the editor and idea man behind the project, invited me to write this Forward. Thank you, Christopher!

My father, James Duncan Lawrence, had a career as a freelance writer that spanned nearly four decades which touched multiple generations of people and entertained millions. Yet, as a “ghost” writer creating work mostly under fictional or “pen” names, few people know who he was or anything about him. His work included contributions to radio shows like Sgt. Preston and the Green Hornet, teen book series like Tom Swift Jr., The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and comic strips including Buck Rogers, James Bond, Captain Easy, Dallas and Barbara Cartland Romances. He collectively penned more than one hundred books, 200 radio shows, 250 comic stories, television scripts, magazine articles, textbook/encyclopedia entries and even two early interactive computer games for the software company Infocom. It was an incredible amount of work!

If you are a fan of any of his work, you deserve to know him as a person, not just the creator of comic strip stories like Friday Foster. As his son, I had the pleasure of his company for nearly forty years. I had the blessing of experiencing his good nature, humor, and his wonderful storytelling abilities personally. I also had the privilege of learning to love science, music, poetry, reading a good book, and just simply the joy of learning itself. Although it is not possible to share all my experiences with you in such a short introduction, I can share some of what I enjoyed through a series of brief vignettes.

Dad was constantly reading and learning. Whether it was one of the many magazines or newspapers which arrived on

our doorstep on a regular basis like: Time, Life, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, or the Newark Evening News or any of the many books he borrowed from the library, he was always reading. What amazes me even more, I think he remembered everything he ever read.

I remember asking him one time who the Scarlet Pimpernel was, the main character of an adventure novel by the same name. While I was expecting a simple one-line response, I received in typical fashion, much, much more. In the course of about 10 or 15 minutes, Dad told me that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a daring fictional character of a popular book, described the setting, provided a brief synopsis of the story, the approximate publication date, the author, a little bit about who the author was, and the name of one of the sequels. His ability to recall things that he learned was quite amazing. And keep in mind that it had probably been years since he had read the book and it was certainly long before the convenience of Google.

My brother and sisters and I always enjoyed watching the tv game show Jeopardy. There were times when Dad would pass through the room as Alex Trebek was reading the most difficult question of the day, the “Daily Double”. Inevitably, without missing a step, Dad would answer the question correctly without a second thought as he continued on his way.

One of my fondest memories was when Dad would read us bedtime stories from classics such as the Wizard of Oz series or, more often than not, from one of the books he had written like Tom Swift Jr., Hardy Boys or The Bobbsey Twins. Of course, we just enjoyed the stories completely unaware that he was the author. Dad was a very humble man and never told us they were his. Dad had a creative mind that could tell a story at a moment’s notice. And when we would ask questions, it was not unusual for him to embellish the stories with extra details not in the books.

His storytelling ability is best illustrated by the tales he would tell us while our family was on vacation. Imagine a large family

packed in a station wagon traveling to their favorite vacation spot. Many hours of driving wear on impatient children who are fighting with each other while asking Mom and Dad every ten minutes, “Are we there yet?”. Well, that was never our experience. Dad would always keep us quiet by telling us Hardy Boys type mysteries. He would make up the story as he was driving until he would run out of steam, at which point he would bring it to a mini-cliffhanger and then say in a suspenseful way, “and more to follow in the next chapter of…”. He would drive on quietly for another 20 minutes and then suddenly, surprise us with, “and now the next chapter of…”. Those were wonderful times.

Of course, his storytelling creativity had a downside. As he would develop his stories, there had to be absolute quiet in his office, which happened to be our house. Most of the time, if you happened to visit our home you would hear very little noise. One of the two things that you would hear a lot of though, was him pacing the floor upstairs while talking to himself — reciting his stories to make sure everything sounded correct. The second sound was of him hammering on his typewriter. Dad typed fast and hard. So hard in fact, he would leave nail marks in the typewriter keys. Accompanying the clattering of the keys, there was also the sound of him winding fresh sheets of paper in or pulling finished pages out of the typewriter, along with the characteristic ding and zip of the carriage moving back and forth across the machine.

As a freelance writer, Dad was always looking for the next opportunity. He was always coming up with new ideas, like he did with Friday Foster, and trying to find an outlet to publish his work. This process must have been a full-time job in itself. You must keep in mind this was long before email and social media. For this, not including the telegram and smoke signals, his options were U.S. (“snail”) mail and the telephone — which he was on all the time. He kept in touch with writers, artists, and publishers certainly all around the country and other parts of the world. I didn’t really appreciate the extent of his telephone time until I was older and

started paying for long distance calls and then even later as cell phone costs became more and more expensive. During the peak of this activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it would cost maybe $20 to have a home phone, our telephone bill was always much higher. Once we received a bill that was more than $500 — and that was for one month! It was a lot of money, but that was how he marketed himself, how he stayed in touch with his professional network. Many of his calls were to artists like Yaroslav Horak, the artist for James Bond, living in Australia, and Jorge Longarón, for Friday Foster in Spain. Both strips ran daily, and he would regularly discuss story details with both of them.

I loved my father and miss him very much. It has been 27 years since his passing and my memories of him become more treasured as I grow older. As I commemorate him, I need to be careful that I don’t paint him as a superhero of popular culture. As Mark Twain once pointed out, “The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened”. My father was a humble man that considered himself to be only a “hack” writer. As you can tell, I adamantly disagree with this idea, because I experienced his storytelling capabilities firsthand. He told me on more than one occasion that his goal as a writer was to help young people want to read so that they might learn to love reading and learning as much as he did. A noble cause.

If you have enjoyed his work, if you are a fan of his work, now or in the past, I want to say Thank You. It is people like you that help me keep my father’s work and memory alive. I hope you enjoy this book and the love that helped create it. Thank you again Christopher and thank you Ablaze Publishing!

JAMES D. LAWRENCE JR.

James D. Lawrence (59). New Providence, New Jersey. Spring 1978. Photo Credit: James D. Lawrence Jr.

INTRODUCTION

BY CHRISTOPHER MARLON

The blaxploitation era of films was slightly before my time as I was just being born when the movies were coming onto the marketplace. I had known about the Friday Foster movie for decades when about six years ago I got on a blaxploitation kick and started watching many of the films I knew of, but had never seen. As a film lover and filmmaker, I have to admit many of them were hard to watch from a technical and narrative standpoint. However, when it comes to their cultural significance and pure entertainment value — I’m all in! Their worth and importance within the context of American cinema cannot be understated. Which leads me to the 1975 Friday Foster movie. If you’ve ever seen a blaxploitation flick, you know that they are chock-full of afros, ass kickin’ and often times just plain ol’ ass (the almost obligatory sex scene)! As an R-rated film, Friday Foster does include these perfunctory elements. But one of the many things that I like about the movie is that its overall tone is much more light-hearted and dare I say, at times whimsical than its brothas and sistas within the genre. Again, as a student of cinema I wondered why this was and started to do some research. My curiosity was cured by discovering something about the film which I never expected to find — that is was based on a newspaper comic strip.

As I continued my quest to find out more about the comic strip, I immediately fell in love with the vibrant, photorealistic artwork and campy stories. I couldn’t get enough. I was hooked and just as important, I understood how the film paid tribute to the source material. After reading as many of the strips as I could find online, I decided to see if I could collect the original strips on newsprint. It just so happened that I found an Ebay seller (in Maine of all places — Thank you, Erickson Comics and Paper) who specialized in comic strips and had a large lot of Friday Fosters for sale. I made a deal with him and bought my first batch of about 75 strips. From that point on I knew I had to collect the entire run of Sunday strips. There was a slight

learning curve, as I knew nothing about comic strip collecting. Mind you, I had collected comic books as a child and had even gotten back into doing some sporadic collecting as an adult, but the world of comic strips was new to me. I quickly figured out that: Sunday strips were in color while the rest of the week was in black and white; the weekday strips were 3-panel-story continuations of the Sunday strip (at least in the case of Friday Foster ); the two primary formats were halftabs (9-panel, three-row strips) and thirds (5-8 panel, two-row strips) — counterintuitive I know and that older comic strips are typically more difficult to find than comic books of the same age.

But this was my mission — and over the next four years I slowly amassed the majority of the total 214 Sunday color Friday Foster strips for the entire run. The strip ran from January 18, 1970 to February 17, 1974 and they become extremely scarce around September 1973. From my research I gathered that the strip had begun to wain in popularity by that time and its distribution was down to The Los Angeles Times as its sole carrier from a high of about 25 newspapers at its peak. As I kept digging, I was fortunate enough to find a site that had black and white only scans of the half-tab strips from the Menomonee Falls Gazette for that end period — how they got them I’ll never know.

So now I had the entire run of the strip in either physical or digital form, with my ultimate goal being to collect as many halftab strips as possible. As I admired my collection I wondered if the strip had ever been collected into a book before. A little more research and I found out that it had not — Thank You internet. I now had a new personal mission — to get the (Sunday color) Friday Foster comic strip published in book form for the very first time!

Knowing that the Chicago Tribune was the syndicator I made a few calls to the Windy City before finally tracking down the

executive in charge of licensing its intellectual properties. In a 60-second conversation I was succinctly informed that the rights to the strip were not available. No reasoning — they just weren’t. To be honest, I was dejected, but not deterred. I decided to put Friday on the back burner and went on to another project for a few months.

About six months later as I was buying more strips for my collection I incidentally received word that a group of Spaniards had acquired the Friday Foster rights for a Spanishlanguage book of collected strips. Ironically, I had talked to one of those very guys months earlier about working on a book. I immediately called the Tribune back and the rights were available — if I had a publisher. Relatively early in my search, I encountered a guy at a new indie publishing company who stated the project sounded interesting. I told him about my vision to create a book that looked at Friday Foster from a 360 degree perspective (printing more than just the strips) and why I wanted to do it (share my love for a groundbreaking, history-making comic strip).

Within a few months I had set up a call with the Tribune and prospective publisher about acquiring the rights. Fast forward a few more months and we had a deal! Thank you, Scott Cameron of the Tribune Content Agency. So within little more than a year from the time I set out to get ‘er done, a deal was papered, I had a publisher and was well on my way to turning my dream into a reality. Thank you, Rich Young of Ablaze Publishing. All-in-all it has been a relatively smooth process considering this is my first “at-bat” for producing a book. Words can’t accurately express how excited I am to bring this heartfelt labor of love to the public. I hope the following pages bring you as much joy in reading as I experienced in creating them.

Long Live Friday Foster!

CHRISTOPHER MARLON

PS — This book was originally set to hit shelves in June 2020 to commemorate the fifty years since the comic debuted in January 1970. As I consider Friday Foster to be a gold standard amongst comic strips, it would have been the ideal salute to the strip’s golden anniversary. However, like most things in 2020 the release was delayed by COVID-19.

JAMES D. LAWRENCE

NOTES FOR A BIOGRAPHY

BY DAVID MOREU

Certain comics industry figures have become legends because of their vital contributions to popular culture, even if they remain completely unknown to the public at large. The American scriptwriter James D. Lawrence is one example of a little-known figure with a cult following. The international impact of his comic strips is just the tip of the iceberg in a career that was as vibrant as the iconic characters he developed. “The first thing I ever sold was a short-short story to the Chicago Daily News,” he commented in Comics Interview 69. “I didn’t write fiction until the ’50s really. But that depends on what you include under the heading of ‘fiction.’”

Born in Detroit in 1918, Lawrence was a major behind-thescenes player in the world of show business that boomed in the United States after World War II. During that period, he wrote more than 250 scripts for popular radio serials such as The Green Hornet, Jack Armstrong, The Silver Eagle, and Sky King. As the format’s success waned, he decided to make the leap to television, where he worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and also started writing mysteries, adventure novels, and science fiction for the baby boom generation. His most notable titles include Barnaby’s Bells and Binky Brothers, Detectives. In addition, he published the series Christopher Cool: Teen Agent under the pseudonym Jack Lancer and even worked as an uncredited writer on the famous Tom Swift and The Hardy Boys series. Eventually, though, his career took an unexpected turn.

Syndicated comic strips had become hugely successful in the United States, and in the mid-1960s Lawrence agreed to write the classic strip Joe Palooka, about a boxing champion. The strip was a smash, allowing him to go international with, James Bond, which appeared in the UK’s Daily Express and recounted the adventures of the celebrated secret agent with a license to kill. In 1967, while looking for ideas for new strips, he came across a copy of the Newark Evening News and realized that there were no African American characters in the comics section. “I suddenly said to myself, God here’s a page full of nothing but white faces!” he told the New Yorker in March 1970. “And Newark’s a town that’s well over half black! It struck me as very wrong.”

That disappointment with the media and politics spurred him to create an African American character who would reflect the period of enormous social change that was rocking the country as the civil rights movement advanced. He first developed Jet Jones, which became Friday Foster in 1970 and turned out to be one of the most popular and widely talked about comic strips in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Lawrence had no idea that his collaboration with the Barcelona cartoonist Jordi Longarón would lead to a great friendship and transform his professional career forever. “Of course I took care in writing my picture directions, but it was always as if Longarón could read my mind,” he remarked in Comics Interview 69. “What I visualized, that was the way it would come out. . . . All artists think they ought to be writing the stories. Understandably, perhaps, they tend to regard writers as interlopers who are riding on their backs. But there was none of that with Longarón.”

Friday Foster appeared in newspapers until 1974, though Longarón wasn’t involved for the final few months of publication. The change took place during a period of economic recession exacerbated by the previous year’s oil crisis, and as a complicated situation was playing out in the leadership of the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. The popular strip

Portrait of Jim Lawrence, 1970s.

ceased publication as a result, but it became a cult favorite because of its transgressive nature. The movie production label American International Pictures had already purchased the rights to make a blaxploitation-style adaptation; it released its movie version of the same name, starring Pam Grier, in 1975. “I got a piece of it, with a little arm-twisting and the help of a lawyer,” Lawrence remarked in the same interview. “In those days, if you weren’t Al Capp, you surrendered the copyright. It was owned by the syndicate.”

Undaunted by the cancelation, Lawrence continued to write successful strips such as Captain Easy (which had appeared in the funny pages alongside Friday Foster ), My Story , Buck Rogers , and Dallas . He also relaunched his literary career with Dark Angel , a series of crime novels with cover illustrations by Jordi Longarón, and The Man from Planet X , which he published under the pseudonym Hunter Adams. Over the course of his correspondence with the Barcelona-based cartoonist, the two men batted around several ideas for comic strips that never came to fruition. “I was doing books and comic strips kind of catch-as-catch-can, living a very harried life,” he said in Comics Interview 69, “constantly battling deadlines and so on, because I was always doing about four or five things at once.” Lawrence died in 1994, leaving behind him a huge body of work (including several anthologies) and many gaps in the story of his private life.

Original panel for Friday Foster drawn by Jordi Longarón published on January 29, 1973.