What Bunty did next: exploring some of the ways in which the British girls' comic protagonists were revisited and revised in late twentieth-century comics and graphic novels

Abstract

Typically, analysis of the British girls' comics that dominated girlhood reading between the 1950s and 1980s focused on only one kind of protagonist, ‘the victim’. This article looks at the wider range of protagonists that existed within the narratives offered by these titles. These protagonists change over time and vary according to the age of the implied reader, typically emphasising aspiration, activity and resilience over passivity. However, that does not stop the stereotype of some of the genres and protagonists within these texts forming the basis of responses to the girls' comic in the late twentieth century, long after all but a few of the titles had disappeared. Titles from the 1980s and 1990s, as suggested, are often reactions to or extensions of the perceived limits of earlier titles. In some cases these are excessive and caustic responses to what might be seen as a hugely dominant discourse about an idealized construction of girlhood and the narratives and protagonists appropriate to it.

Keywords:

• British girls'
• comics
• protagonists
• genre
• responses
• audience
• women comics creators

Notes

1. Briony Coote offers a categorization of the various narratives found in the girl's titles at http://www.26pigs.com/judy/characters.html [Accessed 26 April 2010].

2. Mandy and Judy were combined and ran as M & J from 1991–1997. It largely shifted to a magazine format at this point. Incorporating a title that was failing with a stronger one (ensuring the resources put into the lesser title were not wasted) was a common practice and could result in some confusion for readers.

3. I intend to focus on the girls' comic and Viz in further research.

4. British girls' comics were accompanied by an annual hardback collection with the same title and often smaller format (A5) publications that were single stories, originally published over a number of weeks, collected together in a manner now recognizable from, for instance, trade paperbacks of superhero titles. These titles, such as Bunty Picture Story for Girls (1958–date) were typically published monthly.

5. Whilst the introduction of Bunty in the late 1950s might seem without precedent, it actually built on the tradition of the millgirl paper, like Peg's Paper (Newnes and Pearson 1919–1940), which was also aimed at working-class readers.

6. There were two major shifts within the genre as a whole in response to falling sales in the 1970s and 1980s. One was an increasing emphasis on horror, the other a shift to the photo-story, which forced a shift into school stories and narratives about everyday life, reflecting the way that whilst one can draw anything, photography, before the advent of manipulation of digital imagery offered a more limited scope.

7. There was only one occasion across the entire genre where the heroine died, and this story appeared very late on in the life of the genre. ‘Nothing Ever Goes Right’ (Judy, DC Thomson 1981) is discussed by Barker (1989, pp. 234–238). Readers, in this very well received story, saw the death of the heroine as a satisfying ending. The publisher did not repeat the exercise, despite, or perhaps because of, the readers’ enthusiasm.

8. I focus on one ballet strip in Gibson (2008b) ‘Nobody, Somebody, Everybody: Ballet, Girlhood, Class, Femininity and Comics in 1950s Britain’.

9. I take a longer look at nurses in comics in Gibson, (2008a) ‘From “Susan of St. Brides” to “Heartbreak Hospital”. Nurses and Nursing in the girls' Comic from the 1950s to the 1980s’.

10. Published 28 October 1978.

11. ‘The Amazing Valda’, Mandy Annual, 1976, 6–16.

12. On These Days. Broadcast on Radio 4, 17 January 1998.