British girls' comics


British girls' comics flourished in the United Kingdom from the 1950s through the 1970s, before beginning to decline in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Publishers known for their girls' comics included DC Thomson and Fleetway/IPC. Most titles appeared weekly, with the content primarily in picture-story format. The majority of the stories were serialized, with two or three pages per issue, over eight to twelve issues. They were marketed toward young teen girls.
British girls' comics were often titled after common girls' names. Examples include Judy, Diana, Jackie, June, Penelope, Mandy, Tina, Sally, Tammy, Sandie, Debbie, Misty, Emma, Penny, Tracy, Suzy, and Nikki.
Long-running titles included Bunty, Mandy, and Judy and Jinty, Misty and Tammy.

History

Origin

Girls' comics were the natural evolution of a trend that started with story papers. As boys' story papers like The Magnet and The Gem gained readerships of young teens, publishers like Amalgamated Press looked to expand the market by producing story papers for girls. Titles like School Friend, Schoolgirls' Own, and The Schoolgirl, all launched in the period 1919–1922, established a girls' market.
By the end of World War II, story papers were phasing out in favor of comic books and television. The first girls' comics, Amalgamated Press' School Friend and Hulton Press' Girl, appeared in the early 1950s, with School Friend selling in excess of one million copies per week. The girls' comics trend took off in the latter half of the 1950s, with the long-running titles Bunty and Judy, as well as titles like Boyfriend and Princess, all debuting in the years 1956–1960.
DC Thomson had published its first girls' magazine, Bunty, in 1958. The success of this title led the company to publish Judy, which was also successful: between them, Bunty and Judy achieved a circulation of over one million. DC Thomson went on to launch other similar titles in the 1960s, including Jackie, Diana, and Mandy.

Industry consolidation

In the period 1958 to 1968, a series of mergers and acquisitions led to the girls' comics industry consolidating into two main publishers: DC Thomson and the newly created IPC. In January 1959 Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the Daily Mirror newspaper group, acquired Amalgamated Press. Within a few months he changed its name to Fleetway Publications, Ltd. Shortly thereafter, Odhams Press absorbed both Newnes/Pearson and the Hulton Press. King saw an opportunity in this to rationalise the overcrowded women's magazine market, in which Fleetway and Newnes/Pearson were the major competitors, and acquired Odhams. Fleetway took over Odhams in March 1961. In consequence, King controlled two national daily and two national Sunday newspapers, almost one hundred consumer magazines, more than two hundred trade and technical periodicals, and interests in book publishing.
In 1963 all the Mirror Group companies were combined by the creation of a parent company called the International Publishing Company. All of the existing companies continued to operate, but as IPC subsidiaries. When the dust cleared, IPC controlled five girls' comics titles — School Friend, Girl, Girls' Crystal, June, and Princess — while DC Thomson controlled three — Bunty, Judy, and Diana.
IPC set up a management development department in 1965 so that its various subsidiaries would no longer be in competition with each other for the same markets. This led to a reorganisation of the Group, in 1968, into six divisions, with IPC Magazines in charge of all comics content.
In the period 1960–1970, there were between seven and ten girls' comics in publication in the UK at any one time, with one estimation that the girls' comics market was larger than that of women's magazines.

"Hatch-match-dispatch"

The 1970s was a period of tumult for the British girls' comics industry. DC Thomson's Bunty, Judy, Jackie, and Mandy continued strong through the decade. IPC, on the other hand, changed gears editorially — as writer/editor Terence Magee details, "Pat Mills and John Wagner to shake things up. The safe and gentle middle-class stories gave way to gritty, working-class yarns." The company introduced a slew of new titles, most of which lasted a few years before merging into other company titles — IPC's "hatch-match-dispatch" method. Examples include Sandie, Pixie, Lindy, and Penny.
The IPC Fleetway stablemates Tammy, Jinty, and Misty existed somewhat outside this trend, although in the end both Misty and Jinty ended up absorbed into Tammy.
By 1974, DC Thomson's girls' comics had fallen off somewhat — Bunty, Judy, Mandy, and Debbie had a combined circulation of 750,000 that year — but remained the market leader. At its height in the late 1970s, Tammy sold 250,000 copies per week.

Transition to slick magazines

Starting in the mid-1970s, IPC introduced a line of slick girls' magazines that downplayed the traditional comics content, instead featuring mainly product-related articles and photo comics. Titles in this line included Pink, My Guy, Oh Boy, Mates, Blue Jeans, and the second iteration of Girl.
Meanwhile, DC Thomson's girls' titles which had launched in the slick format in the 1960s, such as Jackie, continued in that format; and others, such as Diana and Judy, changed to become slicks.

Decline

By 1980, there were eleven girls' comics titles in publication, but the last girls' comics of any note to debut happened in 1985: Nikki for Girls, which only lasted until 1989. Even DC Thomson's girls' titles fell victim to "merger mania": Mandy, which began in 1967, absorbed Debbie in early 1983. Suzy merged into Bunty. And by the time Mandy merged with Judy in 1991, that title had previously absorbed Emma and Tracy.
By 1990, only four girls' comics were in publication, all published by DC Thomson: Bunty, Mandy, Judy, and Twinkle. The last girls' title, Bunty, was canceled in 2001.

Back catalog reprints

The Fleetway/IPC back-catalog is now owned by Rebellion Developments, which since 2016 has reprinted a number of Tammy, Jinty, and Misty serials, and is due to republish further series as part of The Treasury of British Comics.
In October 2017 Rebellion published a Scream! & Misty Halloween Special, which contained all-new stories featuring characters from those comics.

Content

Girls' comics generally offered a mix of romance, pathos, school, and girl-next-door stories, thriving well into the era when consumer, fashion, and teen idol fare became popular in girls' magazines. The stories were generally moralistic in tone, with long-suffering heroines finally achieving happiness, while villainous relatives or girls who were liars, cheats, and bullies received their comeuppance. Also popular were stories of girls confronting adversity and overcoming it.
One of the earlier titles, Girl, founded by the Rev. Marcus Morris, was very much an educational magazine whose heroines, including those who got into scrapes, became involved in tales that had a moral substance. A considerable number of pages were also dedicated to real-life tales of heroic women in various fields.
Common girls' comics storylines included:
  • orphans forced to live with cruel or uncaring relatives
  • girls enduring blackmail, hardship, or unpopularity to protect a secret
  • girls slaving for cruel employers or criminals
  • saving animals from cruelty
  • cruel factories, shops, boarding schools or workhouses
  • heroines adopting masked identities to secretly help people
  • spiteful girls causing trouble for an unsuspecting cousin, foster-sister or classmate
  • girls becoming unpopular because events keep conspiring to make them appear jealous or selfish
  • blundering girls getting into one scrape after another
  • girls pretending to be disabled in order to take advantage of people
  • girls who were put under a curse or came into possession of apparently supernatural objects which adversely affected their lives, but of which they were unable to rid themselves until they worked out how
  • boyfriend-themed stories
The various strips in the girls' comics were usually broken up by letters pages, competitions, featured readers, puzzle pages, promotions, next-week previews, and advertisements.
Bunty's The Four Marys, drawn by Barrie Mitchell, was the longest serial in girls' comics, running from the magazine's creation in 1958 to its end in 2001. It centered on four young teens — each named Mary — in a girls-only boarding school in the fictional location of Elmbury, who often had problems with studying, staying alert, or helping the other girls and teachers. Of the four main characters, two were middle-class, one was the aristocratic daughter of an earl, and one was working-class, attending the school on a scholarship.
Three related Fleetway titles — Tammy, Jinty, and Misty — had their own particular focus. Tammy concentrated on sadder Cinderella-themed stories and dark tales of tortured heroines. Many stories were full of cruelty and adversity, based on research showing that girls wanted stories that made them cry. Jinty concentrated on science fiction or otherwise fantastical stories. Misty concentrated on supernatural and horror stories, featuring plots such as "pacts with the devil, schoolgirl sacrifice, the ghosts of hanged girls, sinister cults, evil scientists experimenting on the innocent and terrifying parallel worlds where the Nazis won the Second World War." Writer Pat Mills, later to become famed for his work on 2000AD, scripted many strips for all three titles.

Writers and artists

Despite the intended audience for the comics being female, the vast majority of the writers and artists responsible for the girls' comics industry were men. One notable exception was Marion Turner, who wrote hundreds of strips for DC Thomson's line, especially for Mandy, Judy, and M&J.
In general, artists and writers were not credited in girls' comics. As was common practice in the 1960s and 1970s, many illustrators were recruited via art agencies, including ones that specialized in Spanish artists — notable Spanish girls' comics artists included Luis Bermejo, Purita Campos, Carlos Freixas, Jesus Redondo, and Jordi Badía Romero. Artists can sometimes be identified by their work in Tammy or in boys' comics such as 2000AD, which brought in such a policy from earlier on. In other cases, it is possible to identify the artists from their signatures on the pages of the comics themselves. Identification of writers in girls' comics is currently dependent on information provided by the writers themselves.

Notable writers

Notable artists