Leonard Starr was by far the absolute best off the strip artists in conveying facial emotion accurately. His ability to capture the exact facial appearances for every conceivable emotion is astonishing.
In this daily, the beautiful Corrie reluctantly agrees to go out alone with Rod, the resident hotshot actor, who also happens to be a manipulative, lowlife piece of shit. Corrie is smitten with him, because she's a small town girl with a fiancée who is more goofy looking than handsome, and Rod represents everything about life in the big city, a direct contradiction to her small town life and upbringing. Corrie allows herself to believe that big time actor Rod has designs on her, and although he tells her that he also invited her fiancée Claude to the restaurant, she naively thinks he's kidding. That is until Claude walks in, while Corrie is in mid sentence in panel 2, catching her completely by surprise. As small as Corrie's face is in that second panel, the facial expression is dead on perfect, showing just how caught off guard she is by her fiancée's sudden appearance! She barely tilts her head to the right and instead uses primarily her eyes to look over at who is causing the interruption, shockingly realizing that it's Claude and that Rod was telling her the truth all along about having invited him as well.
The final panel shows the perfect mixture of abject embarrassment along with the disappointment that Rod was telling her the truth. Because even though she loves her small time acting fiancée Claude, she had allowed herself to get swept up in the fantasy of being swept off her feet by a big time famous actor in the big city. If you like this daily, I strongly suggest you look at the next one I have after this, dated 1965-11-25, which features Corrie still caught up in Rod's manipulative games, as she begins lying to her fiancée Claude in order to go out with Rod, and that daily features an exquisite image of Corrie staring at herself in the mirror, in a moment of sheer self-loathing. Really heady stuff even today, never mind in 1965!
