British Girls' Comics: Girl Annual 1965

Here's a selection of stories and features from one of the later Girl annuals, as the title was struggling to adapt to the swiftly changing fashions and culture generally of the 1960s. One of the few comic strips left from Girl's 1950s heyday was a single page of John Ryan's Lettice Leefe, now simply called 'Lettice'.

The handy thing about Girl was that it credited writers and artists. This 1965 annual featured art by Pat Tourret in this 4-page story "Out of the Blue". Her distinctive style looks familiar, and perhaps some of the stories in the Diana annuals from the 1970s are by her. Have to take a closer look. This story here is about a young woman struggling to find her niche in the world. Quite by accident she stumbles into her future, when her glider crashes into a quarry and she meets a professional paleontologist! Love it!

"Lazy Holiday", another 4-pager, and in color, is drawn by Gwen Tourret, another of the three Tourret sisters, all of whom were comic artists! Gwen went onto a career writing and especially illustrating children's books. "Lazy Holiday" is another of those independent middle class young adult female vacation sagas set in a European destination. Typically, the unsuspecting sunbathers end up with far more adventure than they anticipated.

"Model in America" is again drawn by Gwen Tourret and is an unlikely, if charming tale of a New York fashion model and her photographer saving the day as an old Southern family faces ruin from corporate ruthlessness. In the early 60s and before anti-Vietnam War sentiment tarnished the Brits' love affair with the USA, America remained an alluring, if distant, ideal for the young. I'm only surprised that so few stories in these girls' comics I've been looking at feature events set in the USA.

One of the non-story (I say that with tongue in cheek because these Beatles anecdotes are clearly posed and contrived for the fans) features in the book is about the Fab Four!

By now I can tell at a glance that the next story, "Beth Goes on TV", is drawn by Pat Tourret. A fourteen year old girl's dream comes true when she gets to sing backup with her favorite band. But is she ready to abandon her existing life for stardom on the road?

This next story, "The Red Pennant", is drawn by Leo Davy, an artist about whom I am unable to find any information. That surprises me, given the quality of his artwork in this story. In some ways it's almost reminiscent of Neal Adams' work, only several years before Adams achieved fame. Appropriately so for a British girls' comic, a gutsy young lady beats a champion sailor to save her family home.

This last example from a packed Girl annual is by a Spanish artist credited only as Ortiz. Exactly which Ortiz I can't determine for sure. It looks to me like it could be an early example of the work of José Ortiz Moya, who worked on Eagle and 2000 A.D., two British weekly comics in the 1980s. What makes me think this story is by José Ortiz is the similarity between this artwork and that of Ortiz's early 1960s strip Caroline Baker, Barrister at Law in the British newspaper The Daily Express. José Ortiz was also a significant contributor to Warren titles in the 70s and 80s in America.

"Cindy's Night Out" is a nice nurse romance that incorporates that favorite romance comic device, the masquerade party. Cindy decides to skip the party to study, but ends up running outside to aid a young doctor in trouble on his way to the very same event that our nurse protagonist has skipped out on. He charms her into going dressed as a nurse, and of course, in true romance comic fashion, she passes her exams anyway, and he reveals his true identity to her. We can imagine a life of wedded bliss in store for the two as the fourth page ends.

This 1965 Girl annual has presented some interesting stories and art. Being more of a magazine format in terms of content, there's a lot I've not represented with this selection - the various features, illustrated text stories, and so on. I've focused on the sequential art, and I think you'll agree that, on the basis of it, Girl is a publication well worth investigation.

British Girls' Comics: Girl - Pioneer of a New Trend

Girl, published by Hulton Press, was a powerful trendsetter in 1950s Britain. Sister paper to the famous boys' comic, Eagle, it served readers up a rich diet of career girl heroines, middle class culture, and private school antics. This was the world of ballerinas, horse riding, and yachts. The domain of mystery stories and adventures, and careers as a nurse, model, or air hostess. At 176 pages, Girl Annual 6 (1957) was packed with text stories, instructions for making things like lamp shades, news on the Royal Family, and tips for all sorts of everyday necessities for the upward aspiring. I like that a lot of the comic stories and art are credited - alas, something rare in older British comics. So here's a selection, starting with Belle of the Ballet, one of the longest running features in Girl. The ballerina represents almost pure fantasy for the reader, in terms of a connection to real life possibilities, and while girls could go to ballet lessons, their chances of turning this into a career at some point were extremely remote, given the limited numbers of openings for ballet dancers in the job market. Belle is drawn here by Stanley Houghton:

Next, another long-running feature in the weekly comic, Nurse Susan Marsh, drawn by Peter Kay. Susan is dedicated to her job, which is made unnecessarily difficult by the bullying of Staff Nurse Fisher. In the weekly comics, Susan's adventures in nursing were dished up in small installments, the whole story perhaps running for months. In the annuals the reader was given more pages than the usual two in the weekly comic, but a shorter story overall, complete for the big book. This particular story here is a multicultural effort. I noticed that the British girls comics of the 50s and 60s tended to contain some stories, text or comic, that had British girls or women interacting in a friendly way with females of color from different parts of the world, usually corners of the British Commonwealth, but in this case a Japanese woman. It is necessary to overlook the slightly patronizing tone, and the characterization involving the broken English, but for the times this was a fairly respectful rendition:

Next let's look at this two-page illustrated text feature about the life of an air hostess. It's clearly no accident that representatives of certain careers appear in comics for girls in this period. Think Marvel's career girl funnies of the 40s and 50s - Nellie the Nurse, Millie the Model, Tessie the Typist, or some of the romance comics of the early to mid-60s featuring nurses (Young Love), air hostesses (Bonnie Taylor in Young Romance), or Hollywood starlets. There were certain stereotypes of professional women that contributed to these stock images that offered girls role models:

Indeed, what about a career in modeling?

Now here's one of those adventures reserved for the well-to-do. You need a bit of money to be able to attend private school and go horse riding in your free time. The problem in this story is that some absolute cad is trying to withdraw the sports facilities used by the school. Although a girl, Wendy has an all-round education that includes knowledge of gender segregated sports for men, specifically cricket. Thus she is able to outwit that rotter whose greed seeks to spoil their fun!

Here's another short story that illustrates that it pays to be middle class if you want an adventurous life.This time you have to have had parents who could afford to give you yachting experience, either directly with the family's own boat, or through extra-curricular activities at your private school. In this story drawn by Charles Paine, the three heroines are a dab hand at handling a sailing craft, without which their vacation could well have been quite dull:

A weekly feature in Girl comic was a cartoon strip entitled Lettice Leefe, about the zany goings on in the life of a somewhat eccentric young female. There are two pages of this Girl Annual 6 given over to Lettice:

Girl is quite a varied salad, and I've only given a brief introduction here. The text items expand the scope of the book, but I'm really just focusing on the comics. As a final example from this annual, here's a true life story of one of the greatest figures in British history, the Celtic Queen Boudicca (Boadicea), whose memory is preserved by a truly powerful, regal statue on the Thames Embankment in London:

So there you have an introduction to the most prominent British comic for girls in the 1950s and into the early 60s. Readers may be interested in this excellent article by Dr. Mel Gibson (coincidence, huh!?) of Sunderland University, which gives a really insightful introduction to the study of British girls' comics:

http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/05/05/23/mel_gibson.pdf