Calling Nurse Abbott is an example of a British girl's comic story from the early 1960s. The sequential art comes from a hardbound book (see cover above). This is an annual, published towards the end of the year for Christmas, featuring a character from the comic Girl. Girl is the female equivalent of the famous boy's comic Eagle. Girl comes across as rather middle class aspiring to be upper middle class. Typically for British weeklies intended for children, it contains a combination of illustrated text stories, sequential art, and informative sections. Scanned and posted below are all of the sequential art pages from this 1963 Calling Nurse Abbott Annual. The nurses in the main stories are young, independent, savvy individuals. There's some rather nicely drawn art here, by an artist I'm unable to identify. There are some very British culture- and period-specific goings on in this first story:
In this second Nurse Abbott story there are also more glimpses into Britain in the early 1960s. I love the industrial backdrops on page 4.
Finally, the publishers chose to use sequential art to present some true life accounts of famous nurses, plus Marie Curie and Helen Keller, in black and white.
Finding back issues of the actual Girl comics has proven impossible for me so farm, after several years of trying. The annuals are obtainable, and I'll be posting material from a couple of those from the late 50s in the near future. I hope y'all enjoyed this little glimpse here into some rather nice examples of what British girls were reading in the early 1960s.
