Articles

Pat Mills at CAPTION2004

Sat, 31 May 2008 10:12:19 +0100

Transcribed by Will Morgan for Comic Focus no. 2

Oxford’s CAPTION convention, the annual comics gathering devoted to the small press and independent comics, had an unusual guest of honour in 2004 in the form of Pat Mills, co-creator of Charley’s War, Slaine and Marshall Law, amongst dozens of other series, whose credentials appear at first decidedly mainstream.

When interviewed by Jenni Scott on Sunday, August 15th, however, the conversation took an unusual turn towards exploring his lengthy background and history in British comics, and trod a path well away from the usual stock questions…

JS: Welcome to the interview with our guest, Pat Mills. Obviously, as the theme this year at Caption is “History”, that includes the history of comics, the history of the small press, the history of the comics industry in Britain, and yesterday we saw Pat’s very interesting presentation about “Charley’s War”, a series set in a fixed historical period. Now, we’re getting his input on a slightly different aspect of history, specifically his involvement with and shaping of the British comics industry, so we’re very pleased to have him here to talk to us about that.

I’ll just begin with some brief outlining about Pat’s background, since obviously there’ll be some things we’ll all know about, such as his involvement with 2000 AD, but then there’ll be other parts of his background which most of us won’t be familiar with, and which we’d enjoy hearing him talk about here. We’ll then move on to how did the British comics industry work in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and also about the craft and storytelling aspects of the profession, which Pat is familiar with not only as a writer but also as an editor.

If we get to it, we’ll then be dealing with the aspects of personality and politics as they come through in his in comics, but one aspect that we’re not planning to dwell on particularly is the whole superhero and 2000 AD area that he’s worked in. That body of work has been pretty well documented elsewhere, whereas his work in the more traditional boys’ comics – and especially girls’ comics, because you all know that I’m a freak on the subject! – is material that hasn’t really been covered.

Obviously, if you have questions about Slaine or whatever, say them if you want to, but I’m not going to ask those questions, and may just skip lightly past that whole area quite quickly if at all possible!

Pat, you’ve been working in comics since the 1970’s, is that correct?

PM: Yes it is.

JS: And you started off with DC Thomson as a staff writer… was that out of school?

PM: No, no. I started about 1971, working on a romantic magazine called Romeo, which I worked on with John Wagner, the creator of Judge Dredd, which is kind of a strange origin for us both! Romeo was very much a pulp, what I think would be seen as a poor relation to another Thomson publication, Jackie, which was very much trendier, but they decided that John and I weren’t trendy enough for Jackie, so they put us on Romeo.

JS: As trainees, or….?

PM: I was a sub-editor and God help me, John was my boss, chief sub-editor. Surprisingly, the standard of material in Romeo was actually very good; okay, the message was pretty dire, which was “marry someone with good prospects and keep away from the guy with the motorbike”, but on another level, they were very good for similar reasons to Charley’s War in a way. They’re on crap paper, it’s a cheap-looking publication, so it’s got to be good! So, for example, we had many artists working for us who’s whose names you would be familiar with; Esteban Maroto, Buselli, who was an Italian artist known for drawing sexy strips, but when he was working on Romeo, he was doing a comedy strip; a lot of the artists who worked for Warren’s Creepy and Eerie were working for us, so this was something entirely new in my experience. I knew nothing about comics, I wasn’t previously interested in them, I’d fallen into the job almost by accident, and I was looking at some great stories and superb artwork.

JS: So what led you to that job? Because you had to move up to Scotland, presumably…

PM: It was an accident; I didn’t even know who DC Thomson were. But I wanted a job in journalism, and there was an advert for a job as a journalist trainee, so I applied, and after about five interviews – probably an extra couple just because I was English – they let me in; a little suspiciously, but they let me in.

JS: Because Thomson’s is a family-run business, isn’t it?

PM: Oh, D. C. Thomson’s is like a world unto its own. At some time, you really ought to do a panel just on that subject. It’s a big subject, and it’s very funny. So yes, I ended up there, not at first on a comic. They put you in a sort of clearing house, and my first job was reading manuscripts for People’s Friend, their magazine for grannies, so there I am at 21 or whatever, reading these stories with grannies advising the teenage girl, “Don’t go out with that bad guy!” I’m reading this kind of stuff – thankfully, they didn’t put me on that permanently, they put me on Romeo, but –

JS: - I’ve got to wonder what you would have done with People’s Friend!

PM: That’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? (laughs)

JS: And then after a year or so, you moved back down south to work for IPC as a staff writer?

PM: Well, I went freelance after a year, and I had a family, a mortgage and everything, so I had to succeed, so I tried just about every kind of comic that was going, and they all wanted material! It was a great time, so suddenly I had too much work, so John, who was still chief sub-editor on Romeo, joined me, and we were both freelancing away. John then went on to become editor of a girl’s comic called Sandie, I stayed freelance then eventually did staff work for IPC on Tammy, and then later we did the initial work on Jinty.

JS: Freelance editing or writing?

PM: Both. I wanted to keep that freedom.

JS: But it was possible to be a freelance editor?

PM: Oh sure, they just paid you by the week.

JS: And you created a lot of important characters and series within the space of a few years – as you just mentioned, you did the initial work on Jinty, Misty started in 1978, 2000 AD in 1977…

PM: Basically, I went from Jinty, where I was connected with it but I wasn’t the only creator, to Battle, which I did with John, Action, which I did solo, then I did 2000 AD, then they said to me, “Right, we’d like you to do a girl’s comic version of 2000 AD”, which ultimately turned out into Misty. Then I said to them, “Look, I’ve had three successes, how about giving me a share of the profits?”, and they said, “Get lost!”, so I said, “Okay, I’m out of here.”.

So I ended up only as associate editor of Misty. It’s one of my regrets, but I don’t see how I could have done it, it would have been another year of very hard work, but it is a regret that I didn’t fully create Misty, because I think that if I had, and I don’t say this out of any arrogance, because the audience was there, I think if I had, Misty would still be around today, The guy who ended up editing Misty was really not suitable for the job, to put it very mildly.

JS: Well, we will be coming back to the subject of Misty, and to the issues of creating comics for the boys’ and girls’ markets, but just to do a bit more timelining, Jinty started in ’74, but you started working on it in ’73?

PM: Probably the year before it came out, yes. Let me think. We did the initial stories, then the editor of June, Mavis Miller, came in, and she was basically the only one who was able to adapt from the – basically, you had an old regime, very stuck in their ways. And this applied right across the board, to humour comics – which I also wrote for – they were totally stuck in their ways, and Mavis, to her great credit, adapted from June and School Friend, which was somewhat old-fashioned, into the new style of thinking that we were all trying for, to upgrade stories for a new generation.

JS: Is there one title that stands out? One that you think of particularly fondly?

PM: I think personally, where girls’ comics were concerned, Tammy was exceptional. I was a sub-editor on it during my weekly freelance days, but I thought what they were trying to do with Tammy was quite exceptional, and it was a very, very successful publication, we’re talking about a circulation of something like a quarter of a million per week, maybe even more. That’s a lot of sales! By comparison, Sandie, the one John worked on, closed at something around 200,000 per week. There were some very stupid policies they had, including this thing about merging comics together, but… yes, Tammy, I remember with great affection.

The stories were very on the nose, they worked. Okay, some of the titles were astonishing, like Slaves of War Orphan Farm, No Tears for Molly, really revelling in misery, and course most of them were written by men, and we’d be killing ourselves laughing as we were doing this stuff! I don’t think it’s any more or less unhealthy than writing stories about guys in black leather riding motorbikes!

I remember the girls’ comics with great affection, and it’s a regret of mine that I never really sustained something like Misty, because I think now it would be appealing to a more adult, more sophisticated audience, and we could be selling across Europe. But you try convincing the publisher – forget it! Girls’ comics no longer exist…

JS: Absolutely; you look on the shelves, there’s very little for a female audience. Bunty, for example, closed down a few years ago. Tammy, that you were mentioning, actually swallowed up a whole lot of comics – Jinty, Misty and Tammy all merged with it…This ‘merging’ of titles, where a few features from one title would be incorporated into a more successful one, was that something that was more specific to the girls’ titles than to the boys’?

PM: No, that was general in the comics industry; it’s a disgusting policy. It’s called, “Hatch, Match and Despatch”; they talked about it with great pride. It’s a way of conning the newsagent – and nowadays, of course, W. H. Smith’s is too cunning for that sort of thing, you can’t do it any more.

A title comes out that sells say 250,000 per week. Every week, the distributor cuts the circulation by so much. At a certain point, the sales will be quite low, unless the readership is very, very loyal, in which case it will stick. So you get over this by merging two comics together, in which case their combined circulations will be taken into account. It’s horrible, it’s accountancy thinking. They were considering me at one point as being the kind of managing editor of all these different comics, and they asked me my views on “Hatch, Match & Despatch”, and I said I thought it was a disgrace.

It’s an appalling idea, it insults the readers. I think everybody here has had some experience of a comic they like being suddenly merged into this completely different title which they probably hate, this horrible shotgun wedding between the two…I think it treats the readers with utter contempt, and that it’s disgraceful.

JS: I’d like to talk also about some of the techniques and tactics that were used to boost or maintain circulation on a title, such as free gifts; like here, we see a charm bracelet on the first issue of Misty, and Jinty had a little spider charm, the second had a free hairbrush… my sister literally bought Jinty because of the free item taped to the cover, and she didn’t buy any of the other ones on sale that week, so that obviously worked…

PM: Oh, I wouldn’t criticise the policy of the free gifts, except to say that sometimes they were incredibly dull, and I had several run-ins with the guy who did the free gifts – for example, when I did Battle, I wanted to have Afrika Korps stickers, and the guy, who was a World War II veteran, said he would resign if I got my way! I said, “Well, look, bikers would buy it, because it’s not a swastika, it’s just a kind of German cross.” And he said, memorably, “We don’t want to attract those kind of readers.”. That gives you some idea – you’re talking about people who by any criteria were from some kind of museum..

JS: So, not really looking to enlarge the circulation by any means; if they wanted the title to be a success, you’d think they wouldn’t mind what sort of readers they got…

PM: I think they had these ideas in their heads, perhaps from a time when comics had so many loyal readers, that it was almost like a license to print money, but by the ‘70s, things were starting to get tougher, circulations were dropping, so they needed some modern thinking. And even that period was eventually, of course, going to be challenged by video and computer games.

JS: Going back a little further, prior to the 1970s, you obviously had this great number of titles in both the boys’ and girls’ markets; Girl, for instance, Diana is an early one… when we talked before, you were referring to how you were trying to react to that context of a fairly conservative set of stories, an entrenched view of what the comic for kids should be; could you outline for us what that kind of context was, and how you reacted to it?

PM: Well, let’s take girls’ comics; before Tammy, you had a number of comics like Diana, or Princess Tina, which were aimed at middle-class girls. The ‘nice’ comics; there was Girl, which was a companion to Eagle. They all had a little bit of education. Then along came Tammy, which was nothing to do with me intitially, it preceded me by perhaps as much as a year, and Tammy was a working-class girls’ comic. It had a very heavy “chip on its shoulder” kind of message. It was edited by a guy called Gerry Finley-Day, who went on to work on 2000 AD –

JS; - He wrote Rogue Trooper…

PM: - That’s right; and he was an exceptional talent, who hasn’t really been given the recognition he deserves in the history of British Comics. I was very impressed with what Gerry was doing with Tammy, it was like Bunty, but better, stronger… it perhaps lacked some of the wit, the comedy of Bunty.

So, really, we took the thinking that applied to Tammy, and applied it to just about everything down the line that followed, whether it was Battle, Action, 2000 AD… For example, in the traditional war comics in the past, it had always been the officer class as heroes; there were no officer heroes in Battle. You were lucky to be a sergeant! And this seemed very normal to us, but the later titles were all fuelled by a kind of class-war concept.

JS: In fact, that’s a very good moment for us to look at Concrete Surfer from Jinty is the story of a girl, a poor girl, who’s come back from Australia, where her parents have emigrated to try to find a better life, she’s come back and is living with her posh cousin, so there are the class-struggle themes you mention, but there are also these great action sequences, it’s also about Bertelman turns – a surf- and skateboarding move – and how girls can be as good as boys. So here’s an example of how you’re bringing in that class-consciousness, but in a story that has many other aspects to it.

PM: Oh yes, it was very deliberate. It wasn’t a formula that I started by any means, and when I say ‘formula’ I don’t mean to imply that the story lacks any passion because it follows guidelines. But this was a style that had been designed in Tammy, and it had worked very well; you had the, to put it bluntly, smug middle-class bitch, and then the girl who’s less pretty and feeling bitter and twisted.

It worked phenomenally well. Concrete Surfer was only one in a long line. Probably my particular favourite was Ella On Easy Street, which was a wildly controversial idea, I don’t think you could get away with it these days, where she’s a working-class girl, she’s happy in her home, everything’s fine, but then her dad changes his job. And the whole family becomes affected by Yuppieism, and family life starts to go wrong, so she tries to sabotage it! She could pass exams, but she chooses not to, and, particularly the way I’m describing it here, it sounds appalling, but it was written so well, by Gerry and also by Charles Heron [sp?] that it worked. You were thinking as you read; “No, she’s right, why does Mum have to go off to night school?” and all that, it was a very seditious idea. I’m surprised that teachers and parents didn’t scream at the idea that maybe being happy was better than having lots of ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels.

JS: There is a well-known trope in children’s stories of ‘money can’t buy you love’, but what you’re saying goes further than that…

PM: It went much further than that. It was beautifully drawn, by the way, by a Spanish artist called Casanovas who was really a classic, beautiful artist.

JS: I would like to touch briefly on some of the names you’ve worked with, particularly artists, because in British comics, it’s often hard to tell who worked on it, as they were almost always uncredited. At least with an artist you can hope to recognize the style, see that “Well, the same person obviously did these three series”, but for a writer it’s much harder. In fact, it’s only talking with yourself that we’ve identified and publicly acknowledged some of the stories you’ve worked on – like Land of No Tears, with the Alpha Girls and the Gamma Girls in the far future, and the poor little crippled girl who is bolshy and annoying, and yet they learn – well, not to love her, but –

PM: Yes, that story was about genetic perfection in the future, and therefore this very ordinary girl is faced with – it’s the old thing that pervades girls’ comics all the way through; elitism, and the struggle against it.

All in all, I think the message in Tammy was quite positive, and in Jinty too, but there were styles of stories that would seem pretty questionable these days – slave stories were always very popular, and I think a psychologist might have a field day, not just with the people who wrote them, but with the readers!

JS: Like the one from Jinty that’s one of my favourites, Slave of Form 3B, about the girl who finds out she can hypnotize her weaker-willed classmate, and makes her do all these things like helping her cheat at hockey, sabotaging her rival’s gym kit, and it descends disturbingly further and further into this poor weak classmate, Tania, is made to walk round this wall hypnotized, and she falls off in the middle of the night, and no-one finds her until the next morning…!

((Resounding laughter from audience..))

JS: … And the one who finds her is the evil girl – she’s obviously evil because she has dark hair in a bob – and she drags Tania into a shed by her ankles, throws a bit of burlap over her, and thinks; “Well at least now if they find her, I won’t be connected with her!”

((Laughter))

JS; - This poor girl nearly died, and at the end she’s in a wheelchair, not permanently, but she’s rewarded by being acclaimed as the heroine of the school, and “Gosh, she’s so brave, she may even be head girl next year!”

PM: Some of these stories were extraordinary, of course, but they were touching something in the reader’s consciousness, that’s why they were being done, these stories would work in male comics, it’s….shall we say, not a male fantasy. We tried, and they failed.

JS; It may be a female fantasy – mostly –

((Knowing laughter from audience))

JS: - but given the kind of bullying that goes on between girls ((last part of sentence inaudible))

PM: We actually would sit down and say, when we were constructing a girls’ comic or revising an existing one, “Right, let’s have the slave story”, and the reason was because they were so popular with the readers! The one you just described is actually quite mild compared to others I’m aware of… I wrote one called Captives of Madam Karma, the details of which I’m too embarrassed to repeat even now, it was pretty cruel!

There was another one – which wasn’t mine, so I’m quite happy to talk about it – called Slaves of War Orphan Farm, which I think tells you everything. It worked like this; if you – if we were constructing a girls’ comic now, obviously times have changed, but I can’t imagine the collective psyche is that different – we would have a slave story, what we called a Cinderella story, where the heroine’s down on her luck, we’d have a friendship story – these were the three lynchpins. The friends’ story was very important.

Just an important digression, because she’s such a good writer that I have to mention her, Pat Davison was the most important girls’ comic writer, she was very talented, the rest of us, if you like, were following in her shadow, seeing how she did it and probably copying her, but she really was the star, and yet nobody knows her name, so I’m taking this opportunity to mention her.

JS: Can you tell us any specific series that she wrote?

PM: Oh yes. She wrote Little Miss Nothing – beautifully drawn by a Spanish artist. Inevitably, cruel ((inaudible)) and all the rest of it – but it was that lightness of touch… Generally, it was male writers in this field. I think Pat Davison is the only woman I can think of who genuinely had a better touch in the way she did this, she wrote far more from the heart, the rest of us were 23-year-old guys killing ourselves laughing as we wrote this stuff, but she wrote from the heart, and it was quite genuine. Little Miss Nothing was in Sandie, and it was so popular, that we did that thing that everyone does in publishing even to this day, which is to look at it, and dissect it, and try to duplicate it. We were told; “Right, do something like Little Miss Nothing”, and we ended up with all these limitless variations… just like the superheroes, you start off with Superman and Batman, and before you know it, you’ve got millions of different superheroes. Same thing; same formula.

JS: So did you think that the formula actually helped you in your work, that you came up with things you mightn’t otherwise have come up with? How restricting, or liberating, was it?

PM: The formula on girls’ comics was actually quite good, you had a lot of freedom but you still had some guidelines. On male comics, boys’ comics, the formula was much more questionable.

JS: More questionable in the sense of less effective?

PM: Yes, I think so. I couldn’t even say why, but the formula was distasteful on the male comics.

JS; In previous discussion, you’ve mentioned the different formulas that were used in girls’ comics – for example, the slave story, the Cinderella story, and so on – and in the boys’ comics you don’t have so much of the ((partly inaudible)) context, you don’t have so much of the friends –

PM: Exactly so. There are distinctive differences, many of which made me quite cross, because when we did Battle and so on, we followed the girls’ comic role model, and my boys’ comics were, and I take great pleasure in saying this, disguised girls’ comics! Sometimes that formula didn’t work, but most of the time it did… I’ll give a couple of examples of when it didn’t work, which really shows the difference between the sexes.

Mystery stories – girls, female readers, love mystery stories, say a school where there’s a mysterious headmistress, and girls are disappearing, and other girls are turning up in the dormitory - this gets them going! And the explanation can be complete crap, and it usually was, and it doesn’t matter!

We tried this with male readers, we only did it once, and they hated it! That was Terror Beyond the Bamboo Curtain… You could see the thinking; we had the sadistic Japanese commander of the prisoner-of-war camp, and prisoners are disappearing, and strange things are going on, and the readers DID NOT CARE! They weren’t bothered about the mystery, they just wanted to see the action! What was the Terror Behind the Bamboo Curtain? Who cares, bring on the violence! A female readership, even if you’ve got a mystery as simple as “What’s inside that box?”, that’ll keep them going for weeks! It’s a fundamental difference between the sexes.

Another example, that really pissed me off; on Action, we did this story loosely based on The Fugitive, called The Running Man, about a guy on the run from the Mafia, and of course The Fugitive was a success for an adult audience, but the young male audience? “He’s running away! He should just kill ‘em all!” The audience’s sympathy was with Crazy Luigi with the axe! ((Audience laughter)) Whereas in a girls’ comic, a fugitive story, where the heroine’s running away from something, that’s fine…I’m sure there’ve been several.

JS: Oh, yes, there’s a whole swathe of them in Jinty alone. I remember Song of the Fir Tree, two orphans just after the Second world War, they don’t know that their father’s still alive. They escape from a concentration camp, and there’s this Nazi officer from their local village, who put them in the camp, and he wants to kill them, so they won’t be able to dob him as a Nazi!

PM: He’s following them…like Les Miserables, he’s relentless in his pursuit…

JS: And following behind him is the kids’ father. They’re getting home to Norway, and none of them quite meet each other until the next to last page!

PM: Sounds like a great story. Obviously written with conviction.

JS: I also want to talk about – you’ve mentioned Pat Davison, but other people you’ve worked with in the same context – John Armstrong was one that you’ve mentioned, for example. He drew Moonchild. The reason I know that was that at a convention in Norway last year, John Armstrong, Pat and various other comics creators had been invited to go, because in Norway there’s been a lot of reprinting of British comics. It was ironic that I had to go to Norway to meet these people from the British comics industry.

John Armstrong is a very recognisable artist; girls who read comics of this era would recognise and remember him. He identified each page he drew with a little hidden monograph, but his style’s very recognisable because it’s this very realistic, photo-referenced work. John’s a great favourite of yours, I believe.

PM: Oh, yes. I think John Armstrong is incredible. To me, he’s like Joe Colquhoun, he’s of that standard. Moonchild was the lead story in Misty when it started, and I believe that if all the stories had been of the quality of Moonchild – and some of them were – Misty would still be around. His work is very immediate, you’re right there, and it has a sophistication about it that’s difficult to achieve. Concrete Surfer, for instance, is very nicely done, but it doesn’t have that quality about it that Moonchild does. John is a really great artist.

JS; In subsequent issues, you see the development of the heroine’s mysterious power, how did it come about, what can she do with it, what can it do to her, essentially…It’s all very Carrie, isn’t it?

PM: Moonchild was quite deliberately based on Carrie. When I talked about starting Misty, I said we should look at all the kinds of female adults’ fiction that were around at the time, and we should do girls’ comics versions of that. It was a deliberately calculated policy to do Carrie, to do Audrey Rose, which I did as Hush, Hush, Sweet Rachel, we never quite got around to doing Flowers in the Attic, but it was definitely on the list - but most of those female mystery books that were around, we did good girls’ comic versions. When Misty moved away from that, and got caught up in silly traditional stuff, that’s when it lost its way.

JS: For those of you who are interested, and don’t already know, there is a website that is reproducing Misty, 25 years after each issue was originally published. It’s www.mistycomic.co.uk. A fantastic endeavour this person’s undertaken. And at the point he’s reprinting now, around issue 60, it’s much noticeably more bitty, more short stories, more Future-Shock type twist endings..

PM: It was a great pity. What would happen - there was a policy at that time which I think is worth mentioning, because it might just explain what we were up against back then, and explain some of the strange anomalies that appeared in the comics. They had this idea that if you were an editor, you could work on anything, so one week a guy who had worked in the nursery department, where he was the editor of such titles as Fun To Know, Bobo Bunny, whatever, and then there’s a vacancy on Action, so they stuck him on one of the most violent and aggressive comics ever!

Similarly, what happened to me was the editor of Sally, which was an ancient comic, was offered to me on Action. I said no, because he was of a different generation, he wasn’t suitable, and he ended up as editor of Misty, which was entirely wrong. It needed to be somebody who was into this kind of Stephen King material. It’s not really an age thing, but you had to be into the source material. You knew, the minute they put the wrong editor on a magazine, that it was doomed, and your heart really sank, because you were offered very strange people. You just didn’t know what to do. What I tended to do was start a comic, and when it was up and running I’d just walk away from it, otherwise you’d just make everyone’s lives miserable.

JS: And yet 2000 AD has survived…

PM: Because we had reasonably good starting-up people. The really key thing is the first twelve to fifteen weeks, if you’ve hooked your readers and gotten out of the free gift period, to a regular readership that’s got the habit. That was when I knew 2000 AD was secure, and I could move on.

JS: But how did it happen then that some things – Jinty is the best example I know – that goes on six, seven, eight years, but it’s still eventually amalgamated into another title?

PM: I can’t be 100% sure of this, but I’m pretty certain… I started Jinty with Malcolm Shaw, another very important girls’ comic writer, who sadly passed on quite a few years ago, but he contributed to 2000 AD, Tammy, very good writer indeed. Then it was taken over by Mavis Miller, who, as I mentioned earlier, had previously edited June and School Friend, and she adapted to the changes. Jinty was her. So I’m sure that the stories that you and the other readers liked and remember, it’s her, it’s written over every issue. After she left to get married, I’m pretty sure that it was when she left Jinty that it began to falter.

There was always this rivalry between the Jinty editors and the Tammy editors, but Mavis had got it right, she knew her readership, she knew what she was doing, and whoever took over – I don’t remember who it was - that was why it went under. I think if Mavis could have stayed the course, Jinty might be around today.

JS; It does become a question, though, not just of those initial twelve weeks, although they’re formative, but also of the personality and continuity of the people working on it…

PM: Yes of course. The first twelve weeks are critical, but then it does depend on who follows it.
Again, to give you an anecdotal example, Pat Davison, she was working on Dutch Tina with her husband, Alan, and she said, “Look, we’d like a credit on our work, we’re getting a credit in Holland, we’d like a byline.”. And the managing editor said, “No, if you have one, then everyone will want one.”, and she said, “Okay. So what?”. This was seen as real revolutionary behaviour, to want the credit for your own work!

JS: That did come in eventually, a few years later.

PM: In girls’ comics?

JS: In Tammy, a few years later, before it finished.

PM: It was deemed that it would start a dangerous precedent, and that’s an attitude that I have to say, has not disappeared from British or American comics to this day, I have seen editors face down artists or writers just to prove they can. It’s not even mostly about profit with some people, it’s about power.

I don’t understand it; Pat Davison was writing beautiful stories that girls were crazy about, rushing out and buying – she wants her name on the comic? Give it to her! She wants more money? Within reason, give it to her! To me it’s simple, it’s supply and demand. But no, the attitude of too many editors is “You want more? Fuck off!” So she left, and we lost someone who I thought was, within her field, the equivalent of Alan Moore. She should be as revered, as known, as Alan. And to me, that’s a real tragedy.

JS: I think at this point we could throw it open to questions.

Q1: (Inaudible – something about bringing back some characters. This was asked by Chris from Superhero Store (www.superherostore.co.uk) and Starscape Comic (www.starscapecomic.co.uk/).)

JS: I think the rights are more complicated, aren’t they?

PM: You’ve got the IPC era, and then the Egmont era. Egmont owned Battle, Action and 2000 AD… It’s possible that they own the girls’ comics stuff as well, I’m not sure, but I really don’t think so.

A long while ago, John Wagner and I put a proposal to adapt the British girls’ comics and try to do them in America. Change the spelling, and maybe upgrade one or two stories, but we figured that they could be adapted to an American market. Needless to say, we couldn’t get anyone interested, but some of the classic stories, such as Little Miss Nothing, by Pat Davison, that would have adapted to America, and if we could have presented it in a format that would have been acceptable to the Americans, I think that would have been a classic.

Q2 (same person, inaudible except for “would you be interested in making it happen?”)

PM: I certainly would, because I think it’s a shame that all this talent has been unrecognised. But I don’t see it happening. Comics are so steeped in male thinking, it is a male club, and they will pay some lip-service to female readers, female writers and artists and so on, but generally it’s quite negative. That’s based on my own experience, from female artists I know. They’ve told me, “Do I want to work in this world? It’s too bloody male!” And that’s a shame.

JS: On the question of rights (addressing questioner) is it yourself who reprinted Leopard of Lime Street?

- Yes.

JS: So you actually did request rights from Egmont? So, certainly there is an example of the rights being obtained for a reprint.

- I did actually request them from IPC as well, but they wanted £150 pounds per page.

PM: - What?

JS: So how did you actually know what to request from Egmont or from IPC?

- I put up a poll on my website (inaudible) asking what people wanted to see reprinted. First was the Steel Claw, but that had already been done in the 1980’s by Quality Comics. Second was The Leopard of Lime Street, Adam Eterno was third, so I asked about those two, and got very different prices!

PM: Where was Leopard of Lime Street?

- It was from Buster, it ran from 1976 to about 1984, and was one of Britain’s longest-running super-heroes.

JS: What I really meant by my question, though, was how did you know which stories to request from which company?

- I didn’t; it was Gil Page, he’s actually the (inaudible) licences officer for both IPC and Egmont, and he knows which characters are which, and he knows that IPC doesn’t know…

((audience laughter))

JS: So, you could have asked him to pretend, then…!

Q3: (largely inaudible, I think the gist is, “how did you tell which girls’ stories were popular and what were you doing on girls' comics to make them popular”, with reference to the earlier-discussed popularity of ‘slave’ stories. This was asked by Gavin Burrows.)

PM: The same way we did with the boys’ stories. It was a bit like working in a straitjacket, you had these popularity polls, often little boxes on the readers’ page, and the readers would write-in which three strips they liked most – and sometimes, too, the one they liked least. So you pretty soon knew…

They were accurate, but they could result in some quite dictatorial stuff from the editors. The same thing applied in 2000 AD, if you had an episode that was perhaps a little slower, a little more cerebral, the story would go down in the votes, and the editor would literally ring you up and say; “It’s dropped five points this week!” They had graphs, with different coloured lines – they took it all that seriously! – and you’d see the point where the story was at its most popular, usually where something truly horrible was happening to somebody, and they’d want it like that all the time, whether it was boys’ or girls’ comics. So the natural flow of drama which applies in any other medium, where you have high points, slow points, that didn’t apply on these comics, they had to be white-heat the whole time.

I should also say that the same applied to the comedy comics. I wrote, God help me, ‘fun’ comics, though I question the validity of the word – Whizzer & Chips, I wrote a stream of those, I think it made me almost suicidal, they are just not funny. I used to write some of the lead stories in there. I really needed the money that badly!

(Heather from Honeypears zine, which particularly covers this era of girls comics, asked about matching artists with writers, so for instance would you match sports stories with sports artists.)

PM: Ah well, John Armstrong, he was an all-rounder, he could do anything. Sports stories, horror, you could put him on any strip. But if you’re talking about an animal story, for example, if you had a Disney-like story about the adventures of a cute cat or a cute dog, something like that, it had to be Casanovas, nobody could draw animals like Casanovas.

JS: He did Dora Dogsbody in Jinty, who looked after a bunch of dogs in a kind of dog hotel… She had a cheeky loveable dog of her own, called Scamp.

PM: I think I may actually have written one or two of those, some of these things I wasn’t very good at, and Dora Dogsbody I was hopeless at, but yeah, with that one you would go for Casanovas, he was in high demand for animal stories.

One he did for Bunty was remarkable, called Inky, it was really very beautiful. Aimed at younger girls, but lovely work. So if you had something like that, you’d look for a suitable writer. For the more formulaic stories, you could pretty much pick any of us, but probably for Inky, or the equivalent in Sandie, which was a cat story, you’d go to someone like Pat Davison if you could get her, you’d look for a sensitive writer. We were aware of these differences, and you’d pick people who were more appropriate to the subject matter.

(Female questioner – question unintelligible but something about cruelty and whether it's particularly appropriate for a British market)

PM: I think there’s a long tradition from Dickens onwards of this kind of story. If you look at EastEnders, or Grange Hill,

((Inaudible interjection.))

PM: Oh, specifically to girls, you mean? There would tend to be psychological cruelty, they seemed very into the Victorian things, like No Tears For Molly, which was based on the TV show, Upstairs, Downstairs, about the downtrodden below-stairs maid. Bunty or Judy had one of those that ran for years and years, called, and I think the title says it all, Wee Slavey. I’m not sure how all this originated, but it certainly did have something to do with that Victorian tradition. And it still continues today. Grange Hill had very much that feeling.

((Male questioner)) - Were there any girl’s comics that didn’t end with ‘y’ or a ‘y’ sound in the title?

((Laughter))

JS: Perhaps for very little girls… Diana!

PM: There was Pink, although that was a little bit more mature, I think.. Yeah, mostly they were all ‘y’ or ‘ie’; Sandie, Tammy, Jackie…

JS: Jinty, Misty, Bunty, Mandy, Judy, Sally..

PM: The thing was, if you were on a roll with these things then you did tend to stick to a winning formula. That applied to male comics too; there was a phase before I came along where you had Tiger, Jag, Lion, I’m surprised they didn’t do Rhino, they went through the zoo.

((Another inaudible female questioner asking about boys reading girls comics))

PM: Yes, I did it myself, you’d read all this romantic stuff as a kid, and you’d laugh at it, but I think you’d be aware that there was this crossover

((Same questioner, something like; “I read Spider-Man and 2000 AD, but then I realised that none of the other girls were reading that kind of thing..”))

JS: If you’ve got a brother and a sister in the same house, they’ll read each other’s comics, though. I read my brother’s Whizzer & Chips, and he read my Jintys, and he remembers Jinty far better than I remember Whizzer & Chips now!

PM: Which I can understand, given the low standard of Whizzer & Chips, a lot of which I was responsible for! Thoroughly unmemorable!

JS: Unfortunately, I think we have to wrap it up now; Thanks to everyone for coming, and particularly to Pat for sharing his insights into the British comics industry, and giving some long-overdue credit to names that have been unknown for too long!

Antonia Forest

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 16:45:25 +0100

I wish Antonia Forest would write more books. I'm not alone in that, either — a whole bunch of people exist who would line up at her door and beg her for more if they knew where she lived — or even who she is (Antonia Forest being a pseudonym). The ironic thing is that apparently she has a book partly in progress — but it's been in progress for years now, and is unlikely to finish.

So, why is she a favourite author of mine? Why was it that after reading just one book of hers (Autumn Term) I knew I must read more — even though I was reading it way past the usual time for such things (it's a school story and I was several years out of school — and even of university).

I'm a sucker for school stories, don't quite know entirely why. I say a sucker — I don't now go round re-reading the Blyton St Clare's books (though I re-read them enough when I was young for several lifetimes), but the idea of setting a book at school, at boarding school, where there's so much life compacted into one small place, no-one able to escape, and the stories can't be as expansive as science fiction or mysteries where anything can happen (kids kidnapped, escaping captors through strange powers or the training of their detective parents, who knows). It's a great setting for stories. Even more so if you know how much actually happens at these places — the most bizarre features planned by favourite authors can seem plausible as a result (for the short length of a book).

Antonia Forest doesn't demand belief and plausibility — she builds it up. All her characters are real and have their own power, their own characteristics, their failings and magnetism as appropriate. The main characters are the Marlow family (twins Nicola and Lawrie are the youngest, then Peter, Ginty, Ann, Rowan and Karen — who's Head Girl when the first book starts — and Giles, the oldest and supposedly wisest, who's away in the Navy most of the time). As usual in kidlit, the parents don't get a huge look-in, though we at least know the mother's name (Pam) and that she eloped with the father at a rather under-age time.

Ahem. Anyhow. Yes, traditional large family, twins, boarding school (Kingscote School), and yet it feels rather different to usual school stories — for one thing, the hatred between certain school 'friends' is in some cases random as in real schools — picking on the one who just happens to be unfortunately pick-on-able (in this case, Marie Dobson; in my school, Laura Blackburn, and I thanked my lucky stars it wasn't me — or mostly not me). The incidents during the school term are as small, or as large, as they would seem to the real protagonists. Most amusingly, the use of language is inventive and reflecting the fact that although Forest can hardly expect to be up to date in the use of the latest school slang, she gives that impression — by making you feel like Nicky, particularly, leads the pack in inventing slang and having it adopted, rather than hinting that the slang may in fact be the reverse — outdated or invented by some old git.

Impressively, Forest extends her spell outside the milieu of the school story — she takes the characters, or at least the family, into non-school stories, set in the holidays. The first one is actually set before the first school story (The Marlows and the Traitor, a fairly straightforward spy-defeated-by-children type story) but following on from that they all interleave with the Kingscote School settings, enhancing and deepening them. Nicky and Peter's friend Patrick becomes a cause for a never-fully-articulated rivalry between Nicky and Ginty — Ginty who is nearer Patrick's age, and gorgeous — Nicky who is much more similar to Patrick than is Ginty, and furious at having her friend taken away even as she wonders if she really still thinks of him as just a friend.

Unfortunately, most of Forest's books are out of print. Autumn Term has been reprinted by Faber, with a gorgeous pencil drawing cover, and we hope to see more reissued. The holy grail of a new Marlows book, however, seems unlikely ever to be seen.

15/03/2003

Jinty Come Back

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 16:35:18 +0100

based on my 1998 article originally published in GirlFrenzy

1. Introduction

Girls' comics have a poor name in the UK: stereotypically, they deal with stories about blind ballerinas, horses, or orphans; or at the youngest end, tales of fairies and dolls that come alive. Hardly exciting material: sort of dumb and bland at the same time.

However, you may remember reading a comic that was different. The commonest memory that women of my age have is of the comic Misty: supernatural tales of schoolgirls defeating Egyptian snake priests or horror tales of bad girls getting their grisly comeuppance. Much more like it, don't you think?

My great memory, though, was always of Misty's stablemate, Jinty, published by IPC from the mid seventies to the early eighties. These stories were even further from the stereotypical image of girls' comics, though they contained some of the aspects of them: an orphan... who met Epona, the Celtic horse goddess; a promising athlete... sent to sleep by the hum of a malicious spinning wheel; the bully of Form 3B... who mentally dominates a weaker girl. And then there were the really far-out ones: the whole of the UK flooded by global warming; the girl whose mother was a mermaid; Viking clay warriors coming to life; and the headmistress obsessed by perfection who turns her pupils into essentially Stepford Schoolchildren.

Sadly, I lost my Jintys some time ago; as usually happens with these things, my mum gave them away (though she says that I agreed to this — bah!). They'd served the function of getting me interested in comics, though; but that was not the end of the story. I guess I forgot them for a good while, delving into the entirely different, four-colour world of American comics — The X-Men in particular — but eventually they resurfaced in my mind. Once they resurfaced, I began to mythologize them, recounting the mad plots over and over to friends. They made good, crazy-sounding tales, alright. So much so that I started to wish I had my old pile of Jintys back, at least to see if they were as good as I remembered them.

Finally, I placed an ad in Comics International, and lo and behold, someone actually still had some to sell. More than just some: four whole years' worth, in fact! Snapped up quicker than you could imagine. And when they arrived, in a big box, I could hardly bear to go to work and leave them waiting for me. Finally, the question was answered: what were they actually like, after all these years? Did they stand up to the mythologized memories?

They certainly did.

2. What and who?

What was the set-up of Jinty? Like other older girls' comics such as Misty and Tammy, it consisted mostly of continued stories which would run for a good number of weeks — from as few as nine to as many as perhaps twenty-five or thirty. In addition, there were single-page gag strips and on-going humour strips with the same character each week but without a continued storyline. Finally, there were also various feature articles about pop music, suggestions for things to make and do around the house (a rag rug from old tights, for instance), and even the odd beauty tip (though no overkill on this).

The artists represented were quite varied, but generally of a high standard: some of them I've recognized since then from other work in British comics (for instance Jim Baikie and Casanovas from 2000AD). It's likely that a good percentage of them were Europeans working for hire cheaply, though it's difficult to be sure because there are no credits given (though there are some signatures here and there). Credit or no credit, there is some beautiful work in these comics.

The range of themes in the stories are also quite varied: the ones I prefer and remember best are the mysterious, science-fictiony, or fantastical ones, but there are also ones about grim real life, sports stories, historical tales, environmental stories, and comedies; even ones with a touch of politics in them. Unfortunately, I don't know who the writers were for any of these stories, apart from Pat Mills (who surely must have done the one about Epona the Celtic horse goddess, and definitely wrote one about a girl skateboarder).

A common thread amongst these stories is a strong moral sense: self-reliance as a virtue, along with consideration for others, unselfishness, clear-thinking, responsibility and teamwork, courage, and persistence. At times, this morality gets overpowering and over-blown, as in the story of the snob who is sent to shine shoes by her rich father to take her down a peg or two, or the one about the rich young pianist who has to learn to do without her piano when her parents lose all their money. But altogether, it's not too bad a packaged morality to sell to young girls, if you're going to sell anything.

It's interesting to take a closer look at this ethics package, as it's at least somewhat different from that sold by the other, more standard, girls' comics. At the junior end of standard girls' comics, in Twinkle, kids may be naughty, but the story is so short (these comics don't feature continued stories) that there is little time for character development. The protagonists are therefore either moral already, or quickly taught the appropriate lessons — not to hit a friend, say, or not to be selfish. In the older range of girls' comics, girls may be put in difficult situations where they have to defeat spies or save the school, but they themselves don't usually undergo any kind of character change — they are to all intents and purposes already perfect.

In Jinty, by contrast, the message is to be human, but not inhumanly perfect (you could make a case that the Stepford-schoolchildren story, Children of Edenford, is the greatest statement of this). The point of the stories, in many cases, is to socialize the main characters; to present the virtues of teamwork without taking away individuality, or to accept difference amongst one's peers so long as it's not a destructive kind of difference — and if it is a dangerous kind of difference, to tone it down and assimilate it. Often the characters must struggle in isolation against a real or imagined hostile background, but the resolution of the story demands a joining of the protagonist with a community — children reunited with parents, or a brave girl finally believed by all those who mocked her until now. (Note that the struggle is never of community with community — there is little or no class consciousness in these stories. The main character may be poor, but she never struggles to better the lot of her whole community.)

Another particularly interesting aspect of Jinty (shared, admittedly, with other girls' comics) is the lack of boys and men in the stories. Brothers feature, but hardly any boyfriends, and never any just friends who-are-boys. Even in the background, boys are often nowhere to be seen. Men feature as fathers or considerably older brothers, but only rarely as villains or other characters important to the story. Selective culling of the male population, perhaps? Of course, it's hardly surprising that a girls' comic should have this absence of boy characters, but it does look very odd when, as in some cases, you're faced with a whole village which seems to be composed almost exclusively of girls.

3. Specifics: Science Fiction

Let me illustrate my generalities with some specifics; I'm sure that when I'm done, you will quite see how it was that I mythologized Jinty and why I was not disappointed in the end. Although there are many more stories I could have picked out, here is a themed taster of the most memorable and interesting of the lot.

Science fictions: 'On the planet of two suns, they treat girls like animals!'
This classic tag-line heralded the start of an equally classic story, The Human Zoo. Presumably inspired by the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the Planet of the Apes series, this tells of twin teenage girls abducted by aliens along with a bunch of other people from their village. The aliens are tall, emotionless, telepathic; one of the twins is held for medical experiments, while the other is sold as a pet and then to a circus. Before long, though, the circus-twin, Shona, is set free into the wilds by her erstwhile mistress (a 14-year old alien inclined towards animal rights). There, Shona soon meets up with other humans, native to the planet, who are eking a living in the barren lands. Guided by mysterious telepathic messages from her twin sister, Jenny, she leads them to a land full of fruit and good food.

Later on, the humans go to the city to try to rescue Jenny, and through a rather unlikely concatenation of circumstances, they find Jenny (who has been made telepathic by the aliens), rescue her, and save the alien King's little daughter from drowning, not to mention the whole city from flooding; thus proving themselves not to be animals. The result is that all the Earth humans are sent back home, and a handy time-machine will ensure that they arrive no later than they left (with their memories wiped). A fascinating allegory about animal rights — or something.

It's noticeable in most of the science fiction stories that the main character is a loner, struggling in a hostile society — real 'outsider' stuff. For instance, in Fran of the Floods, where the theme is global warming (the waters rise throughout the story until the climax, at which point they very kindly start to go down again, leaving our heroine pretty much untouched), Fran Scott is separated from her family, her friends, and her whole social milieu, to be reunited with them rather flukily at the end.

In Jassy's Wand of Power, the water diviner Jassy must find a way to stop the UK-wide drought, which turns out to be caused by one evil man's power stations. The Wand of Power in the title refers to a divining rod used to find water: obviously a handy thing in a drought-stricken world, but dangerous too, because the government has forbidden the use of all psychic powers, including fortune tellers and water diviners!

Add to the roll-call the following science fiction tales: a robot who was nearly human (The Robot Who Cried; she had no human emotions but eventually learned to, like, love, or whatever), the Battle of the Wills (a ballet dancer who longs to be a gymnast, although her grandmother won't let her, finds a mad scientist who can create an exact duplicate of her — but which one will get to do the gynmastics, and which one is really real?), Almost Human (a very Superman-type story of an alien from a dying world who has super-strength etc, but the catch is that she kills lower life-forms, presumably including humans, with a touch), and Land of No Tears (crippled young girl who trades on her gammy leg is mysteriously sent to a world of the future where society is divided up into the perfect Alpha girls and the reject Gamma girls; against all odds, she proves in a series of sports contests (!) that Gamma girls are ok too...). It's a pretty good list of science fiction clichés, brought to life quite professionally and actually rather intriguingly.

4. Specifics: Fantastical

I'm A Mermaid's Daughter, Not A Real Girl!
Science fiction accounted for a good number of the stories, and the fantastical — usually intruding uncomfortably into real life — accounted for quite a few others. If the science fiction stories looked to recent films and science fiction clichés for their inspiration, these fantasy stories harked back to classic children's books. In common with classic childrens' books, these stories usually start with an ordinary or seemingly ordinary girl in a group of her peers, when something odd starts happening, as it were in broad daylight.

In When Statues Walk, for instance, schoolgirl Laura leads a mundane life until her older brother brings back some pottery shards from the building site where he works. Gluing the pieces together, Laura finds that they make up a life-size Viking clay warrior; mysteriously, by the next morning it has vanished. The reason for this is that it is actually alive, guarding a figure on a Viking longboat which starts to haunt Laura's dreams. The figure in her dreams tells Laura to come and rescue her from the wicked warriors; but when she does, the figure turns out not to be the young girl she appeared to be, but rather a thousand-year-old hag (in fact, Loki's daughter Hela, for those of you up on Norse legend). The warriors, rather than being wicked, are there to make sure that Hela stays trapped in her aging body until the full thousand years are up, at which point she will crumble into dust. Rather unfortunately, Hela takes the opportunity to swap bodies with Laura, leaving her to crumble instead, unless someone can persuade the warriors to help recapture Loki's daughter...

The Guardian of White Horse Hill is Epona, the Celtic horse goddess, who shows herself gradually to orphan Janey when the hill is under threat from road development (radical environmentalism and paganism together, in the '70s). All Janey knows at first is that there is a lovely white horse that comes to her and has her ride on its back, but she gets into trouble with her foster parents when she says this, as she finds out that they can't see this horse — and they can't see her, either, when she's riding it. This is not the end of the story, though — she actually goes back in time and into the body of a Celtic priestess, who through the power of Epona saved the village from the threat of the Romans. It is clear that the power of Epona will save the present-day village, too, and reconcile Janey with her adoptive parents.

In Golden Dolly, Death Dust the threat is initially much more mysterious. Grumpy old lady Miss Marvell moves into Haylton, the village where Lucy Farmer lives. Lucy has recently been given a corn dolly by her Cornish aunt Hepzibah, and she finds out why when Marvell, who is secretly an evil witch, plots to destroy all bright and living things in the countryside around Haylton and in the rest of England. Of course, Lucy's parents don't believe her (such a nice old lady Miss Marvell is, after all!), and the only allies she has are her French friend Yvette and Corn Dolly herself, who can come alive to fight evil and decay, representing as she does the bright power of the sun and of growing things. It finally comes down to a race against time to collect the flowers which will make a charm, along with the first sun of Midsummer's Day, to defeat the dark power of Miss Marvell.

Living in South America as I did when growing up, one of the stories I was particularly entranced by was Alice in a Strange Land. As in Lord of the Flies, an airplane full of schoolchildren (all girls, of course) crashes, with all adults aboard killed instantly. Lost in a trackless jungle, the girls manage to find a nearby city — the lost city of El Dorado, no less. Timid Alice and her bold but selfish cousin Karen are hailed as the returning Sun Goddess, the only question being which one is actually the goddess. Although Alice wins the test set to separate them out, her sneakier cousin claims the prize — only to rather regret it when she is eventually told that the role of the Sun Goddess is to be sacrificed to keep the city safe from earthquakes! The once-timid Alice musters up courage she didn't know she had to save Karen from being sacrificed by the head priestess, who is actually a Victorian lady explorer kept alive by the spring of immortality under the city... oh dear, it's all getting rather complicated, isn't it?

Combing Her Golden Hair starts off much more straightforwardly, as the story of a girl and her possessive gran; admittedly, the gran is rather odd in her quirks, making Tamsin wear plaits and glasses although she doesn't need them, refusing permission for her to swim although it turns out that Tamsin is a natural swimmer... the mysteries deepen when Tamsin finds a silver comb in the house, a comb which whispers secrets to her. The vanity of combing her hair all evening drives her gran beserk, to the extent that Tamsin is even locked in the shed; but the comb consoles her and urges her to escape to a place in Cornwall she had previously never heard of.

Eventually she gets there (courtesy of her friend Ellen, who goes on holiday there with an unsuspected stowaway in her caravan), and swimming out to a lonely rock, finds a mirror matching her comb. The answer to the mystery is Tamsin's mother, who is in fact a mermaid. (Unusually for children's fiction, the final denouement does not have the girl reunited with a loving though supernatural mother, but rather rejecting her cold-hearted mother in favour of the human grandmother who brought her up all those years.)

The ultimate morality story in the whole run of Jinty must surely be Worlds Apart. In this, the main characters are six schoolgirls with different defining characteristics — one is fat, one vain, one sporty, etc. Through a handy industrial accident, they are sent in turn to worlds governed by each girl's main characteristic: first they go into a world where everyone is fat, then into a world where everybody is good at sport, and so on. The killer, though, is that although each world initially seems perfect to the one whose world it is — as you can imagine — the dream rapidly turns into a nightmare where the only way out is by death, which moves the girls onto the next world. For instance, the sporty girl's world is one in which athleticism is all — even wars are run as a series of sporting events. And in this case, it's Britain vs the USSR, who of course cheat by taking drugs. And the losers of the war, including the sporty girl, are executed appropriately — death by sport (strapped to an exercise bike until she dies!). The message is clear — learn moderation or die horribly. Cool!

5. Specifics: Staggeringly Dodgy

'Is it mad to want to see a perfect world?'
Well, yes, it is if you're the headmistress of the Children of Edenford (or Stepford, more like). Purity Goodfellow, the headmistress, is a truly scary figure, wide-eyed and obsessed. At her school, being seconds late for early swimming practice (at 6:30 am) is cause for discipline; winning the school race, contrariwise, gains you the immense privilege of cleaning the silverware — a blessing the too-perfect pupils would almost fight over to receive. How does she achieve this drastic warping of childrens' natural instincts? Why, how else but by drugging their food. And eventually the parents' food. You'll be glad to know she dies horribly at the end, falling into her own sacrificial fire.

It's great to think that they could get away with printing stories like this in a girls' comic, with the heroine bound to a bed, and eventually led off to the sacrificial altar — a set of clichés of the dodgiest horror film. Admittedly no suspiciously skimpy clothing was in evidence, but still...

Mind you, compared to The Slave of Form 3B, it's pure as the driven snow. The lead character in this is not the heroine, but the strangely compelling bully, Stacey, who discovers her power over the rather weak-willed new girl Tania. Stacey wants to be someone at her school, Waverly, and she'll do whatever it takes. She's asked to look after Tania and practically straight away realises that Tania is so nervous and shy that she can even be... hypnotized.

The rest is, initially, fairly predictable: Tania is made to do anything Stacey wants, starting with dressing backwards and inside out, then copying exam solutions and nobbling her hockey rival so that Stacey will get the place on the team, and eventually turning Tania against everyone and everyone against her. Tania begins to realize that she is doing odd and underhand things, and is worried and puzzled, but once she finds out that Stacey's been hypnotizing her, things get a lot weirder. Vowing that she will not do Stacey's bidding again, Tania discovers to her shock that Stacey is not only a hypnotist, but also a telepath! She can pick the very answers out of Tania's brain, and control her from afar. Erm... yes. Likely.

Stacey becomes darker and darker, happy to see Tania injured and even close to death — it's only Tania, after all — until at the end she is found out. Tania, in a wheelchair, receives the recognition of the entire school, and it's even suggested that she might be the next head girl. What a reward for suffering innocence; but what a pity, Stacey is still by far the more interesting character.

6. Specifics: Good Old Jim Baikie

'Mm, this tea tastes... gulp... strange'
Yes, missus, it's because Fran has put dandelion wine in the pot instead of tea. Fran'll Fix It actually ended up by fixing Fran herself and just about all who came in contact with her in Jim Baikie's excellent foray into humour. There were quite a few short humour strips in Jinty, but they weren't usually on going stories. Fran'll Fix It was a fantastic exception to the rather anodyne amusements of one-pagers Alley Cat or Penny Crayon; quite gob-smacking in its breadth, scope, and numberless little details. It's too good to describe; you'll have to see it for yourself.

Jim Baikie's strips generally were extremely well done; while the stories were fairly engaging in their own ways, they were definitely enhanced by Baikie's beautiful lines. Especially memorable stories include Spell of the Spinning Wheel, Village of Fame, and particularly the science fiction of The Forbidden Garden. In Spell of the Spinning Wheel, a determined athlete fights against the curse of a spinning wheel — after she pricks her finger on it, any humming noise sends her to sleep. Unfortunately, her mother, the sole bread-winner of the family, relies on the spinning wheel in her craft shop...

In Village of Fame, a village is chosen as the site for a fly-on-the-wall soap, which seems pretty good until a girl finds out that the producers are thinking up all sorts of stunts to keep the ratings high, from engineering the break-up of her big sister's relationship to making the whole village believe they've been kidnapped by aliens...

And in The Forbidden Garden, the whole earth has been polluted and poisoned — no plants can grow — the trees are plastic and water is strictly controlled. A dying young girl tells her sister, Laika, that she wishes she could just hold a plant or flower before she dies. Finding a part of the old town — which is in fact the London that we know — Laika finds an old garden and seeds and thinks it's at least worth a try. However, if she's found in the Forbidden Zone she would be imprisoned — or perhaps she'd be done for stealing the water for her plants — and that's if the pack of wild dogs don't tear her apart first.

7. Specifics: Sport and Paranoia

'They will discover that my star is Yvonne Berridge, not Olga Marcek.'
Not all the stories were entirely unlikely; but some were unlikely in an entirely different way. Curtain of Silence was the story of young cycling fiend Yvonne Berridge, a self-obsessed, driven teen who wanted only one thing: to become a cycling star. The trip to the Iron Curtain country of Mavronia seemed like the path to that, and indeed, in a strange way, it was: the star of that country's team was Olga Marcek, two years older than Yvonne but almost exactly identical in looks. You can guess that they swopped places; but of course it wasn't as simple as that. Olga wanted to escape to the West, using Yvonne as an unwitting distraction; instead, they were both involved in a boating accident from which only one emerged alive. That survivor was Yvonne, but the evil Madam Kapelski, the Mavronian coach, told the world that Yvonne had died and Olga survived. (Yvonne lost her voice in the accident, so there was no chance of her being able to tell anyone the truth.)

So the story became one of sport and paranoia — how can Yvonne escape? Will her parents ever know that she is still alive? Is their companion Elsa really a police spy? Can Yvonne win the crucial Moscow match and save her friend Tanya from punishment? At the same time, it was also a morality play, with Yvonne changing from the self-centred cyclist who thought of nothing but winning to a more sober girl who knew that winning could bring its own pain.

One of the best features of the story is Madame Kapelski, a character in the long Jinty tradition of sinister crones. Not content with kidnapping, impersonation, and deception, her aim is to break Yvonne utterly. Tanya, Olga's cousin, is a useful tool — Kapelski knows that Yvonne will not let her be sent back to the grim State School for the Children of Dissidents. Kapelski also risks taking Yvonne back to England for a cycling tour, on the theory that if she sees there that escape is useless, then she will forever be in her power. When Yvonne's young brother follows his hunch that she is not Olga, and hides in her hotel bedroom to meet her, Kapelski has him kidnapped too, with the intention of putting him firmly out of the way. And in the final instance, when everything has gone horribly wrong for her, Kapelski has, as you might guess, no compunction in ordering the killing of Yvonne to try and save herself.

Of course, good wins out throughout, and at the end Kapelski stands trial, Yvonne gets her voice back, and finally returns to England and her family; but it's always great to see the fanaticism etched on the face of these villainesses and to feel that a happy ending is not a certain outcome...

8. Specifics: Real Life

'Daaance to the muuusik!'
Two more quick stories before I finish, to show you that Jinty dealt with 'real life' issues too. The Concrete Surfer is Jean, returning from Australia where her parents tried to make a go of things, with no success. She's one of life's losers, compared to her posh cousin Carol, except for one thing: she's a fantastic skateboarder. The background plot is that Carol can't bear being less than top at everything, so when Jean seems to threaten her position, Carol strikes back, with the culminating 'shoot-out' being a public skateboard competition. However, the main point of the story is really the skating itself — great splash pages of action and info-dump, not only proving that girls can too skate but telling the readers how to do it, too.

In Life's a Ball for Nadine, we see the only black lead character in Jinty's run, and guess what — she's good at sport and dancing. Progressive? You coulda fooled me. Again, there is a background plot, whereby Nadine is cajoled into playing for the school netball team when really she wants to disco dance (ending in a stark choice between the netball and the dancing championships), but the main point is showcasing two activities girls of the time would be particularly interested in: sport at school, disco outside.

9. Pic-stories
The market for girls comics has sadly broken down drastically since Jinty's heyday. The signs are noticeable in the later issues: prose stories featuring in Jinty as well as comics and reprints of earlier stories being the two most noticeable symptoms. The death knell was when it merged with stablemate Tammy, never to be quite the same again. It had a pretty good run — about eight years all told — but it's a real shame that there is nothing similar in its place now. If nothing else, the effect it might have on girls as future consumers of comics could be quite fascinating to see. Although Jinty always called itself a magazine or paper and the stories were pic-stories or just stories, for a comic which never said it was one Jinty did pretty well at keeping me reading comics.

I don't know whether the girls' market has changed so irretrievably much that a weekly comic would inevitably flop; it could be really interesting to see what would happen if someone tried it nowadays. How about it?

Updated 29/11/1999; formatting and typo editing 23/04/2006