G-g-g-girls' comics!
May. 20th, 2011 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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scans_dailyTime for a bit more of this, I think:
And we're in the dark days now, the beginning of the end. Which is also when I was a reader, just about. These were the tales that made me a comics-fan.
Or maybe I should say, this was the art?
Bunty was the personification of the magazine who dealt with HILARIOUS PROBLEMS every week. It was very relevant and on-the-button. But the line art is so great! It's simple and done fast, but by one skilled hand.
We've also got a bit of THE COMP for today! The Comp was introduced in.. the eighties? I think? And featured as it's main characters a bunch of girls who all went to school together, the draw being that they were in a NORMAL COMREHENSIVE, rather than a boarding school like the Four Marys, and also that there were boys there. Which just brought in SO many opportunities for hijinks!
La:
The first bubble here says: "he's so dreamy!". Of course.
Ru-roh!
Yup - hot boys, smart girls going gooey, and mean girls. Oh Bunty, where were all the injured yet persevering ballet dancers in 1990?
Sigh.
And we're in the dark days now, the beginning of the end. Which is also when I was a reader, just about. These were the tales that made me a comics-fan.
Or maybe I should say, this was the art?
Bunty was the personification of the magazine who dealt with HILARIOUS PROBLEMS every week. It was very relevant and on-the-button. But the line art is so great! It's simple and done fast, but by one skilled hand.
We've also got a bit of THE COMP for today! The Comp was introduced in.. the eighties? I think? And featured as it's main characters a bunch of girls who all went to school together, the draw being that they were in a NORMAL COMREHENSIVE, rather than a boarding school like the Four Marys, and also that there were boys there. Which just brought in SO many opportunities for hijinks!
La:
The first bubble here says: "he's so dreamy!". Of course.
Ru-roh!
Yup - hot boys, smart girls going gooey, and mean girls. Oh Bunty, where were all the injured yet persevering ballet dancers in 1990?
Sigh.
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Date: 2011-05-20 06:26 pm (UTC)And Ricky and his mates are dicks :)
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Date: 2011-05-20 06:35 pm (UTC)I don't know who wrote these stories, but I believe that many of the artists were spanish dudes, who are at least a bit of a world apart from Bri'ish schoolgirls.
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Date: 2011-05-21 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 07:35 pm (UTC)I... there are no words. :D
And A Girl Like You - i.e. one who fails in all her endeavours! Wow. It's difficult, isn't it, when adults try to write stuff that "normal teenage girls" will relate to? Because for some reason the stereotype of a "normal teenage girl" is such a patronising underestimation.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm trying to harsh the Bunty-buzz, I actually had a smile on my face while reading all of these. Mmmm, nostalgia!
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Date: 2011-05-20 07:53 pm (UTC)It is immortal.
Yeah, I think the reason that I managed to love Bunty so much is that I started reading it when I was five or so, up to when we moved away from anywhere that stocked it when I was eight. So I had NO idea what a teenage girl might normally do, and ANYTHING would seem impossibly glamorous just because it was being done by, omg, a teenager.
It is my unsecret ambition to get Bunty relaunched, only not-crap. Future-Bunty will do TEEN RESEARCH.
Lots of it.
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Date: 2011-05-20 08:17 pm (UTC)Yeah, I think you summarised Bunty's appeal quite nicely there. I read it from about age 7-9, I think.
It is my unsecret ambition to get Bunty relaunched, only not-crap. Future-Bunty will do TEEN RESEARCH.
It could even understand that sometimes normal teenage girls can be interested in and relate to stories that aren't *only* about normal teenage girls! (No that there's anything wrong with stories starring teen girls or anything, but I do think there's this weirdly prevalent idea that all young girls only want to read about People Just Like Them).
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Date: 2011-05-20 08:37 pm (UTC)In the 60s-late 80s annuals I have we've got batshit talking Spaceship bunnies, bionic girls who fake injury to seem average, future civilisations, bionic lambs, invisible griffins, witches, hillbillies, magic, people in (gasp) FOREIGN COUNTRIES, girls on lifesaver teams, chimps, biology nerds, girls and young women in every niche profession you could imagine, and MYRIAD ballerina/ghost stories.
No-wonder it tanked in the end.
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Date: 2011-05-20 08:41 pm (UTC)Just Like Us!
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:00 pm (UTC)Was it to maintain her cover?! (because being publicly anti-Nazi would somehow be the final piece-in-the-puzzle that would allow onlookers to uncover her secret identity, natch. Kind of how like Bruce Wayne has to be a frivolous moron or else people would Suspect).
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:08 pm (UTC)Or was it that she pretended to be pals with the nazis so that she would know their secrets in order to thwart them??
Must research. I can't believe I haven't posted any of her here, actually.
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 09:20 pm (UTC)I think that The Cat was probably slightly less weighty than that, because on one occasion a woman who tries to betray her to the nazis is framed as a Cat-ally (pun not intended!) in revenge-I mean, jolly fair justice.
Then again, that's not the lightest of storytelling choices, is it?
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:42 pm (UTC)If you want harrowing and tragic, try "Suite Française", a remarkable novel written by Irène Némirovsky, an unromantic novel about the effects of French Occupation, DURING the French Occupation, and shortly before her eventual arrest and death in a concentration camp (The rest of the "Suite" was never finished as a result)
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:48 pm (UTC)Darn, that sounds awfully and awful-y interesting.
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Date: 2011-05-20 08:56 pm (UTC)That. sounds. marvellous. You should post some! Particularly the ghost stories, I was obsessed with those at around the same age as I was reading Bunty, and I'd love to try and evaluate them from a 9-year-old mind set. xD
There's just so much evidence that girls love fantasy and sci-fi and supernatural stories (and that women are wonderfully talented at writing them) yet it's so often overlooked. I feel that if most comic writers were asked to come up with a premise for a story aimed at teen girls, they would instinctively plump for some mundane story about school life or everyday relationship dramas, because... that's just the stereotype about what girls want?
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:06 pm (UTC)The hardest part is managing to trim the stories down into a third of the full length, because they only run up to (rarely) eight pages long, a lot of them technically being serials. It's hard to keep things coherent without diluting the crack.
But I shall try!!
My favourite ghost story (I have no idea why) was in an annual I haven't seen for at least decade, where an injured ice skater is visited by the country's top coach (who gave up skating as a girl due to a similar injury, I think?) who encourages her not to give up. So the girl does the audition-skate, and "gets in" (where? who knows!), and goes back to visit the coach but..
..THE COACH HAD BEEN DEAD ALL ALOOOOONG
It's such a non-ghosty ghost story, and so ultimately pointless, but there was just something about it.
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:31 pm (UTC)!!! I believe I dropped Bunty after a particular prevalence of unnecessarily long Luv, Lisa stories. I can't remember it very well, only that I hated it so, so much (and that Lisa was a slightly drippy looking girl with long black hair, maybe? Probably crimped, lol).
After dropping Bunty, I never read comics again until I was 16. :/
Maybe Luv, Lisa was to blame!
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:35 pm (UTC)I have never liked photo stories because they look so horribly posed, but Luv, Lisa just drove me up the wall. Oh, a thing vaguely threatens to happen, oh, it is headed off at the pass by some other vague possibility, oh, her brother has a new haircut, oh, she's wearing leggings. Oh, I don't give a toss.
I wouldn't say she was drippy-looking, cos, y'know.. she was a real person in real life! But her hair was long as you say, though it was sort of between blonde and brown.
I didn't read comics again til my mid-teens either! I bet it WAS Luv, Lisa! }:O
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:42 pm (UTC)Although it's possible that there was more than one Lisa!
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:47 pm (UTC)The lighting was also often horrible - it seemed like they just used whatever sun was out, or just your average family living room apparatus.
Haaaaaaaaaaate!
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Date: 2011-05-21 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 07:43 pm (UTC)That *is* a bit like me actually.
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Date: 2011-05-20 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 09:50 pm (UTC)Thanks for putting this up right when I needed it the most. [smooch]
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:53 pm (UTC)More up tomorrow, I should think, so you can psych out your ankle all "well I don't care if you fix yourself up or not, I shall have Bunty to read anyway!"
Which is a very Bunty thing to do, actually.
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:55 pm (UTC)Or maybe I could have an Enchanted Ankle Brace that would let me travel through time to do groovy things during caveperson times, or during the 35th Century. Preferably both. :D
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Date: 2011-05-20 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-20 10:04 pm (UTC)I fondly remember the barbarian girl with the silver hair who could link telepathically with wild animals and who brought down the evil Squire that wanted to make her his prisoner [wink wink nudge nudge]. Also the magical transistor radio that made unlikely people fall in love. The talking doll who wanted to be in a beauty contest. And so on.
American attempts at "girl" comics were never anywhere near as awesome.
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Date: 2011-05-20 10:07 pm (UTC)Girl-comic attempts at Americans were usually pretty awesome, though. Lots of derring-do.
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Date: 2011-05-20 10:48 pm (UTC)*blinks* That sounds like a device of almost unimaginable evil!
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Date: 2011-05-20 11:02 pm (UTC)It would play a corny pop song, which would cause your grumpy, chunky, middle-aged headmistress to start feeling uncharacteristically happy in front of the whole school.
While she was wiping away tears of joy, the school janitor would get a look at her and immediately go into a swoon. Except she'd look like his favo(u)rite young movie starlet. Of course he'd suddenly appear to the headmistress as a hot young stud (but in a decorous way) as well.
Etc.
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Date: 2011-05-20 10:55 pm (UTC)