Seeing Stars

Feg Murray's *Seeing Stars* was a Sunday newspaper feature that combined gossip-column illustration with comic-strip format. Each installment featured a Hollywood celebrity profile—here, actress Kathleen Burke, who won a nationwide contest to play the Panther Woman in *Island of Lost Souls*—paired with tidbits about other performers. The strip demonstrates how newspaper comics of the 1920s–30s served multiple functions: entertainment, celebrity journalism, and advertisement. Murray's sharp linework and dynamic figure drawing typified the era's illustrative approach to comic cartooning, while the speech balloons and segmented layout established visual conventions that would define the medium as it evolved into standalone comic books.