Something for the girls
Something for the girls |
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Page 2 of 17  A less innocent, working-class female strip star, 'Beryl the Peril', The Topper (DC Thomson, 1953). Art/script: Bavid Law. The children's humour comics, which were the successors to these adult titles, also made a play for female readers, with characters like Keyhole Kate, Beryl the Peril and Minnie the Minx becoming national institutions. If many of these publications had readership profiles that were split roughly fifty-fifty along gender lines, there were other comics in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s which were targeted at more specific audiences. For younger readers, for example, there was Playbox (Amalgamated Press, 1925), which featured the adventures of the sisters of Rainbow's Tiger Tim (among them Tiger Tilly and Olive Ostrich). Also, for slightly older girls, there were story papers, which increased the amount of space that they gave over to comic strips from the 1930s onwards. In Britain the first of the 'boom' comics of the 1950s had links with the earlier story papers. School Friend (Amalgamated Press, 1950) was a revival of long-defunct title, and was an instant success (in large part due to the popularity of its cover strip, 'The Silent Three at St Kit's', about a secret fourth-form conspiracy to combat a 'tyrannical head prefect'). The tone of the content was essentially middle class, picturing a world where boarding schools were the centre of social definition; where awfully nice 'gels' stuck up for their chums, disapproved of sneaks and rotters, and were ever so good at swimming. It was a seductive formula, and School Friend ran as a weekly for sixteen years, inspiring other story-paper conversions in its wake (most notably The Girl's Crystal, Amalgamated Press, in 1953). |