Something for the girls
Something for the girls |
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Page 3 of 17  An idealized, middle-class vision of a little girl and her comic (1957). Very much in the same vein, and an even bigger hit, was Girl (Hulton), a sister comic to The Eagle. Launched in 1951, it boasted the same high production standards, tabloid format and high moral tone as its counterpart. Furthermore, the original idea was to ape the kind of stories that made The Eagle so popular. Hence, the cover strip, 'Kitty Hawke and her All-Girl Crew', was a Dan Dare variant set in the skies rather than space ('Well, here we go again, gang, one more job chalked up to prove to Dad that we can operate his planes as efficiently as the glorious males!'). This was backed up by various other blood-stirring yarns, and by £agle-esque personality profiles of heroines such as Marie Curie and Joan of Arc. However, this strategy did not prove popular, and within two years Girl was featuring more sedate tales about ballet, showjumping and valentines, and featuring on its front page a more traditional series about a boarding school ('Wendy and Jinx'). A valuable lesson had been learned: stock adventure formulas were not translatable from boys' to girls' comics. The 'jolly hockey sticks' tone of Girl, School Friend and their ilk was not overturned until the late 1950s, and the advent of romance comics. In Britain the boom was started by Marilyn (Amalgamated Press, 1955) and was followed by the more famous duo of Romeo (DC Thomson, 1957) and Valentine (Amalgamated Press, 1957). These titles went for an older readership, and hinted at the immensely exciting adult world of sex. They could hardly be described as 'steamy', however, and in most respects were as much a reflection of their era as any of their predecessors. The stories were about 'true love' and the moral rectitude of marriage, and typically ended in nothing more shocking than a clinch. They express the kind of innocent, virginal sensibility we might now associate with Mills and Boon novels. However, these comics were followed by a spate of pocket-sized romance titles from 1957-63, such as Picture Romance Library (Arthur Pearson, 1958) and Romantic Confessions Picture Library (Fleetway, 1961) that were typically more racy, having been influenced by the pulp-style romance comic books being imported from America, which we will discuss later. |