An entertaining story about Millie Collins doing all she can to help her brother’s girlfriend Sally and finding out if her acting coach is a fraud or not. Definitely worth reading!
TITLE: Millie the Model issue #143
YEAR: November 1966
COMPANY: Marvel Comics
EDITOR: Stan Lee
WRITER: Denny O’Neil
ARTIST: Stan Goldberg
As Archie Comics is known for its characters such as Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica, Marvel had a well-known character known as “Millie the Model”.
While we covered Patsy Walker (who was created by Stuart Little and artist Ruth Atkinson) who debuted back in “Miss American Magazine” issue #2 (back in 1944) and published by Marvel’s Timely Comics, the comic “Patsy Walker” would last through 1964, while “Patsy & Hedy” would last through 1967.
“Millie the Model” would last from 1945 through 1973, thus becoming Marvel Comics’ longest running humor title.
Now there are artwork differences. When “Millie the Model” first debuted, it had a humor look reminiscent to “Archie Comics” until issue #113, when both “Millie the Model” would go the romance path “Patsy Walker” and “Patsy & Hedy” and another good girl comic titled “Kathy”.
The artwork would by Stan Goldberg would reflect the dramatic tone of the comic book series until issue 154 when the comic went through a retitle “The New MMMMillie the Model” and would feature artwork similarly to the Archie Comics look that many are familiar with.
While after the good girl series ended with Marvel, artist Stan Goldberg would take his talents to DC Comics for three years with “Date with Debbi”, “Swing with Scooter” and “Leave it to Binky” and then Goldberg would join Dan DeCarlo, Henry Scarpelli and others to create the Archie style for many of the “Archie” related series.
The reason why I bring this up is because as a collector, while I enjoy “Millie the Model” a lot, my preference for collecting the series is the romance/drama direction from issue #113 through issue #154. While all issues could be enjoyed, each of the comics that are humor-driven by Stan Goldberg have a similarity to Archie which is understandable but I love his artwork during this 4-5 year stretch in the mid ’60s.
With issue #143, Millie receives good news as her brother Mike decided to visit his older sister in the big city.
Starting college, he wants to introduce everyone to his girlfriend, Sally, who is an aspiring actress.
But when everyone is about to go out, Mike expects Sally to join him but she tells him that she needs to practice on her acting lessons, which upsets Mike, because he was hoping Sally would join him in checking out New York City together.
As Millie and her good friend Clicker (who really likes her a lot) visits Sally, she discusses her reservations of her acting coach all he makes her do is practice to be a fireplug, read the telephone book and Millie tells her model friends about it and they begin investigating.
Meanwhile, her model/actress friend Jill Jerrold decides to pay Sally’s acting coach, Farley Fogg, a visit and realizes that he’s a kook and tells Millie, Clicker and Sally her thoughts and also plays a recording of her and Farley’s conversation.
What will happen to Sally when she finds out the truth about her acting coach?
All in all, an entertaining story about Millie Collins doing all she can to help her brother’s girlfriend Sally and finding out if her acting coach is a fraud or not. Definitely worth reading!