Jinty, Tammy, Misty and the golden age of girls' comics
The news this week that the Dandy's 75th anniversary issue in December would be its last in print must have been a blow to its readers, but at least they had the consolation of knowing it would continue online. For some of us, this summer has only reminded us how much we have lost.
Piked back-dive. Somersault in tuck position. As Tom Daley won his bronze, a host of women in their 30s and 40s – like me – were able to show off our surprisingly exhaustive knowledge of diving terms. Many of us had never been near a diving board in our lives – but back in 1981 we were glued to the adventures of Diving Belle in the comic Jinty and Penny. That's the one where school champion Belle McBane vows never to dive again after her father is lost at sea, but a mystic Gypsy persuades her to train in secret, leading to Belle diving off an oil rig and finding her father, who's trapped in a bathyscope with only an hour's worth of oxygen left. Phew!
Then there was gymnastics, whose bar, floor and beam were no mystery to the thousands of us who grew up with Tammy's Bella Barlow, the orphan gymnast who still managed a big smile despite her many, many troubles (selfish aunt and uncle, loss of memory, homelessness, arrests, cheating rivals, blackmail, injuries and unwittingly causing an anti-gymnastics uprising in the Kingdom of Ramaski, to name but a few).
Diving and gymnastics weren't the only Olympic events enhanced by a grounding in girls' comics. Name almost any sport (well, maybe not wrestling or modern pentathlon) and there was once a comic-strip heroine who excelled at it. It didn't matter if, in real life, you were last to be picked for hockey or, like June's Bessie Bunter, preferred biscuits to beach volleyball and cake to canoeing. In the 1970s and 80s, comics – or "picture-story papers", as they called themselves – drew their readers effortlessly into other worlds, whether competitive sport, Victorian slums or alien planets.
There were usually medals all round in the final episode of a sporting story – but that didn't mean our heroines had an easy ride getting there. We're used to the sob stories of the wannabe-famous on The X Factor. Ha! Reality-show contestants haven't got anything on girls' comic characters, who had to overcome unbelievable obstacles to achieve their goals. It didn't take the comics' (usually male) editors long to work out that girls just loved wallowing in misery. The story titles flaunt their heroine's sufferings: Tears of a Clown; The Girl the World Forgot; Bridey Below the Breadline; No One Cares for Cora; Lisa – the Lonely Ballerina; The Sadness of Happy Jones; Merry at Misery House. There were Slaves of, variously, the Mirror (orphan girl is hypnotised into destroying her sister's boarding house), the Candle (Victorian candlemaker enslaves girls and tries to steal the Crown Jewels), Form 3B (meek girl is hypnotised by scheming classmate), the Clock (reluctant ballerina is forced to dance whenever she hears a clock ticking), the Dolls (girl is turned into servant for the inhabitants of a Victorian dolls' house) and the Swan (amnesiac girl is forced to work for injured ballerina).
Beloved animals were threatened with death. Miscarriages of justice saw girls ostracised by their schoolmates and innocent fathers put in prison. Girls were forbidden to do the one thing – music, swimming, horse-riding – that meant everything to them. Dystopian futures were rife (and occasionally prescient – Jinty's Fran of the Floods saw civilisation "almost brought to an end by gigantic floods and freak weather", while Land of No Tears showed a world where the disabled were treated as second-class citizens). Homeless orphans (often with sick little brothers in tow) dealt stoically with obstacles that would horrify even Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
And, like Hardy's heroine, these girls didn't always get a happy ending. Consider Karen Chalmers, Tammy and Misty's The Loneliest Girl in the World, who after many traumatic episodes finally discovers that she is the only survivor of a holocaust – and, knowing this, goes to her certain death in order to see her parents one last time. We'd waited weeks for that revelation, only to be given shrieking nightmares.
That wait! We had to wait a week for each episode! It was torture, but oh, the anticipation … The skill involved in creating these comics shouldn't be underestimated. The creators weren't just breaking a story into little bits and illustrating it; these tales were impeccably crafted – told episodically, every three- or four-page section gripping the readers and moving the story on, ending on a cliffhanger to bring them back next week (and to make sure they never cancelled their subscription – not that you would ever fill in the "Please, Mr Newsagent, I want to place a regular order" coupon because it would mean cutting up your comic). Not all the stories were works of art, and not all were to everyone's taste. But there was such variety that every reader could find a diamond among what she – or he – might consider dross.
Yes, there were male readers, too. Although these comics were aimed primarily at girls (Bunty, Tracy, Mandy, Judy, Nikki, Sandie, Debbie, Diana, Sally, June, Tammy, Jinty, Lindy, Penny: the clue was in the names), that didn't mean they weren't appreciated by boys, even if it couldn't be admitted to in the playground. Steve Cole, author of the Astrosaurs series of kids' science fiction books, used to sneak a look at his elder sister's comics. "They seemed to me like little windows into girls' lives and loves and interests," he recalls. "Bunty, Jinty and, best of all, Misty. Misty was hardcore and scared the hell out of me: not just for all the ghosts, zombies and eerie beings that haunted its pages, but because its stories eschewed happy endings with a bitter relish. The heroines, or usually antiheroines, who populated its strips and text stories had only to betray the tiniest fault or foible and that was it – they would die horribly, or be disfigured, or be transported to an unholy realm of evil. Redemption came rarely to these unfortunate schoolgirls. 'Come, gather the sweets of the other side of midnight with your friend of the mists,' the floaty-white-dress-wearing vixen would suggest on her splash page at the front. 'I seek always the spine-tingling shudders of true nightmare.' Well, you couldn't deny she laid her weirdo cards on the table and, beguiled by her spooky glamour, I went with her gladly."
Ah, Misty. Although every reader thinks her own comic era is the best, there really was something special about the late-70s/early-80s IPC/Fleetway triumvirate of Tammy, Jinty and Misty. Between them they created a love of narrative, a passion for justice and possibly a need for therapy (at least according to my husband) that persists for life, and that last is mainly down to "your friend from the mists". Although only lasting two years before it was swallowed up by its cannibalistic sister Tammy (who would later consume Jinty, as well), Misty made its mark like few others. It wasn't the first girls' comic to focus on the supernatural – Misty launched only a few weeks after DC Thomson's similarly themed Spellbound was merged with Debbie – but it was the first to embrace it so intensely, so darkly. No ballet here; instead there were pacts with the devil, schoolgirl sacrifice, the ghosts of hanged girls, sinister cults, evil scientists experimenting on the innocent and terrifying parallel worlds where the Nazis won the second world war.
Within Misty's pages, the slightest moral flaw led to suffering and/or death – and readers lapped it up. When a letter called for the comic to be banned after it printed a story in which two girls who were cruel to a mouse ended up as pets in a pet shop, other girls wrote in droves to disagree. The offending correspondent was told to stick to "soppy comics" with "goody-goody stories about girls doing well at school", while others pointed out the moral message and argued that if there were more comics like Misty, there might be less crime in the world.
It's a good point. The cult Australian soap Prisoner: Cell Block H once featured a "Scare them straight" scheme where girls who had committed crimes were taught the error of their ways by the prison inmates. It would have been a lot cheaper just to buy them all a copy of Misty and let them be scared straight by its tales of the horrific fates that were in store for all girls who broke the law.
Comics weren't all doom and gloom. There were school hijinks aplenty with Jinty's The Jinx from St Jonah's and Pam of Pond Hill, Judy's Bobby Dazzler and, of course, Bunty's eternal schoolgirls The Four Marys, among others. There were sitcoms such as Gaye's Gloomy Ghost, The No-Good Gnome, Jeanie and her Uncle Meanie and Sue's Fantastic Fun-Bag (no laughing at the back, there), and often the escapades of some cartoon character – Penny's Blunder Girl, Princess's Sadie-in-waiting, Sandie's Brenda's Brownies – who wouldn't have been out of place in Whizzer and Chips or the Beano. But the laughs didn't last. The story of comics has an ending as unhappy as many of their own stories.
IPC's Tammy was cancelled in 1984, nominally merged with Girl, but making little impression on its new parent (Girl, a stepping stone between the traditional "picture-story papers" and the teen mags, such as Jackie and Blue Jeans, had photo-stories, boyfriends, pop stars and problem pages, alongside its occasional illustrated story). Girl only just saw out the decade before being scrapped. DC Thomson clung on for longer with Bunty and M&J still going in the 90s, but even Bunty, godmother of all girls' comics, published its last issue in 2001.
Boys' comics fared no better, and out of the "fun" comics only the Beano and Dandy remain. The DFC, an attempt to revive story papers, folded in 2009 after less than a year – although it was resurrected in January 2012 as The Phoenix, and is still burning brightly.
Tastes change, the world moves on. No one expects otherwise. Were these comics old-fashioned? Middle-class? Maybe. But, as with E Nesbit, Noel Streatfeild or Enid Blyton, that doesn't dilute the pull of their stories. The trouble is, Nesbit, Streatfeild and Blyton wrote books. Even if out of print, their tales can be found via libraries, secondhand book shops or the internet. But comics were seen as disposable. If it's a crime that there are practically no comics like these left, it's perhaps even more of a crime that their wonderful stories are inaccessible, bar a few in "best of" compilations, to all but collectors.
They're ignored as a resource, too. The film The Three Faces of Eve won an Oscar, so why not try a film of Misty's The Four Faces of Eve, in which Eve discovers she's been constructed from the broken corpses of three dead girls? Who wouldn't want to see what sort of TV series Joss Whedon or Steven Moffat could make out of Jinty and Penny's Worlds Apart (the best comic story ever), in which six girls find themselves in a series of nightmarish worlds created out of their deepest desires or fears, and can only escape with the death of each world's protagonist? Fans of The Hunger Games would surely lap up a film or novelisation of Jinty's The Human Zoo, the story of twins Shona and Jenny who are taken to an alien world where humans are treated like animals – kept as pets, hunted and experimented on.
My five-year-old children adore the weekly ritual of getting a comic. The comics they pick up may be mainly devoted to TV characters or superheroes or collectible monster franchises, and have a plastic free gift taped to the cover as a draw, but they're still loved. I promised myself that when they were older, I'd take out a subscription to a weekly fun comic or story paper that was full of original characters and brilliant tales. But with the loss of the Dandy, that genre moves ever closer to extinction.