Rerun post: tracing the roots of my reading obsessions

This is a rerun post from my old blog about my childhood reading obsession with girls' comics. 

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Until fairly recently, there was a healthy market in Britain for girls' comics. In the 50s, my mum read The School Friend. In the early 80s, I devoured Mandy, Bunty, Jinty, Tammy and Debbie.

The format was weekly with both serialised and one-off stories. There was a 'story library' line with longer one-off stories in a pocket sized format. See below, Mandy's Who is Astra? I can actually remember buying this exact story before a caravan holiday and reading it over and over. The heroine was a blonde girl and the eponymous Astra was her mysterious black haired double who appeared out of nowhere and tried to take over her life. I think it was the first time I ever came across the word Doppelganger. It was deeply creepy. I would have been about 8 or 9.

Mandy was probably my favourite of these comic lines and funnily enough, it specialised in a certain brand of passive-aggression that long-time romance readers like me are very familiar with. There was a strip called Angel, in which the eponymous heroine - an older teenager, perhaps 17 or so - looked after waifs and strays in Victorian London. The hook was that she was dying - of something. I'm not sure I ever understood what. But she was using the time she had left for the tiny children!

There were lots if stories about Victorian girls who couldn't walk, as I recall. And blind girls. Lots of tragedy. Tragedy was the girls' equivalent of adventure. There were a few exceptions to this rule though. See below an excerpt from Valda, the Mystery Girl. Valda was about a thousand years old - a sort of Amazon, I suppose. She wandered around in a little slip of a dress doing heroic things. When she got tired out, she would begin to look "old and haggard" and would have to get out her Crystal of Life. When the sun penetrated the crystal and the light reached her, she was renewed. Cue endless stealing, losing and general fumbling of the crystal.

One of the interesting things about Valda was her total lack of humour. She was very stern. I want to say pious, but actually she was very pagan so, whatever the word is for pagan piety, that was Valda.

I wasn't keen on pony or tennis stories but I loved ballet school ones and anything with an orphanage. Even then, I loved the angst.

Here are a few more entertaining covers. I love this next one - though I don't recall reading it. I love the hook. I can't quite make out every word in the text-box but there's something about ...a life of ceaseless toil.... and then .... it was all in a day's work for ...... Wee Slavey... Don't you just love it? I also greatly enjoy the fact that the original girlish owner has traced the first two letters of Judy inside the letters - just the sort of thing I'd've done.

I definitely read this next one. I can vividly remember the cover, though not the story.

Similarly this one which falls into the 'lighter' line - this was in my collection. Those round glasses and perky expression were always a clue that this was one played for laughs. No tragedy here - indeed, I seem to recall Debbie was generally a lighter line.

Another big favourite of mine was Misty, a comic that didn't run for very long and was quickly subsumed into Tammy (which was itself later subsumed into Jinty). Misty had a paranormal/horror edge to it. I vividly recall a story that - I kid you not - had a distinct BDSM edge to it (at one stage the villainess uses the heroine as a footstool).

There's a website dedicated to Misty - see this link. I recall one series called the Moonchild (which was basically Carrie for 10 year olds). And Paint it Black - the heroine finds an old paintbox and, when she uses the paints, becomes possessed by its original dead owner who turns out to have been a governess who was imprisoned by her employers and forced to paint for them!

Schlock? Probably, a bit. But I loved these comics. They did something good for me, in the same way that Enid Blyton's St Clares and Malory Towers did something good for me - they showed girls - well, being in stories. In fact, being girls in stories.

Which was even better.