News of Yore 1943: Tarpe Mills Profiled

 

 Meet the Real Miss Fury-It's All Done With Mirrors

By James Aronson (New York Post, April 6 1943)

Girls, you'll have to get in line. Tarpe Mills, creator of “Miss Fury,” is one of you, and she said today she isn’t letting go of Dan Carey just like that. Recently she wrote one of Dan’s more burning admirers:

“Listen, sister, put your name on the waiting list. I got here first!”

This fair warning is given because last month The New York Post received 533 letters from enthusiastic followers of “Miss Fury,” the colored comic page that appears in the Week-End Edition. A lot of the letters were from girls who thought that Dan Carey, one of the heroes of the strip, was mighty brave and handsome, and if they ever met up with a type like him, well, their hearts would be faint and
fluttery.

Tarpe Mills, Erasmus Hall High graduate, said that she literally stumbled into cartooning. She posed for portrait-painters, photographers and sculptors to pay her way through Pratt Institute. She studied sculpture and was told that she showed promise; but the market for birdbaths was pretty dry, so she went into animated cartooning.

Among other things she created a few cat characters which were used in a series of pictures, and finally, she said, “I was carried out of the joint with a nervous breakdown.” It was back to posing and free-lance drawing.

“Then,” she said, "a foot injury kept me out of circulation and I started a serial called “Daredevil Barry Finn" for one of the children's comic books. I hated to drop Barry, so I went into the business whole hog and turned out such hair-raising thrillers as 'The Purple Zombie,’ ‘Devil's Dust’ and “The Cat Man.’

Miss Mills dropped her first name (she won't say what it was) because it was too feminine.

“It would have been a major let-down to the kids if they found out that the author of such virile and awesome characters was a gal,” she said.

Miss Mills said she writes “Miss Fury” to provide amusement for kids and grown-ups
alike. “Fashions, a hint of romance and human interest for the adults. Fantasy and action for the youngsters.”

She admitted she doesn't know where she got her inspiration except that she was one of those imaginative kids “who hang around the house reading books instead of running around outside playing hop-scotch.”

Who poses for the girl characters in “Miss Fury,” she was asked.

“It's all done with mirrors," she said. “l find it simpler to sketch from a mirror than to hire a model and explain just what the character should be doing."

(thanks to Mark Johnson, who supplied the article)