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Misty
Jul 4, 2014 17:08:28 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 4, 2014 17:08:28 GMT
Before moving on to Misty issue 5, a quick look at the 1983 Misty Annual. Here's the cover and two Moonchild pages. They look good in the annual, I think, (with its whiter paper). The annual isn't difficult to find. When I checked this morning, I found eight copies available from Amazon sellers.
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Misty
Jul 5, 2014 19:05:11 GMT
Post by pulphack on Jul 5, 2014 19:05:11 GMT
Oops, of course it should have been 2000AD (my typing skills strike again), although a Roman based comic would have been fun! And yes, the idea of 'the future' being so close in years and yet so 'futuristic' is amusing now. One of my favourite shows is Gerry Anderson's UFO, and when I saw it as a child back in 1970, then 1980 seemed impossibly distant... watching it now, I still wonder why there are no gull-winged gold cars that look like Ed Straker's (of course this means nothing if you haven't seen the show for years, or at all). I always wanted one of those. Still do - and I can't even drive! I haven't got the figure for the cat suits, though...
Pat Mills and John Wagner were behind 'Jinty' just before starting the plans for 'Action', and frankly 'Jinty' has aged better, judging by the annuals I had for both. Justin will be agog, but sadly it's true.
You're right about the annuals serving the art better - it's obvious just from those scans of the Moonchild 'scream' page. I suppose its that old thing about the annuals being 'for keeps' as presents, while the weeklies were just ephemera, designed to be thrown away, and so were on much cheaper and therefore more perishable paper. More porous, too, so that fine line work gets lost in the ink bleed. The same is true of American comics, where the colourist's work suffered most.
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Misty
Jul 5, 2014 22:57:18 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 5, 2014 22:57:18 GMT
UFO was a great show -- not least for the silver catsuits and purple wigs. Sylvia Anderson's sense of style! It's true that the annuals were designed to keep, and the weekly comics to throw away. In spite of that, a lot of readers seem to have kept their comics, not least Misty. (Thank goodness!) The Summer Holiday Specials are, of course, the issues that survived least well. I've seen it surmised that the original owners read the Specials whilst away on holiday and, more often than not, didn't fetch them home afterwards. Anyway, on with the show... which is to say Misty issue 5. I don't think the cover works too well. Perhaps it's because Salamander Girl looks too doll-like. Open the cover, though, and Paint it Black, on page 3, looks satisfactorily creepy. Paint it Black ran for the first eighteen issues but has, I believe, never been reprinted. Perhaps (at 18 installments) it was a bit too long for the annuals. It was the longest running serial Misty ever printed. The Cult of the Cat includes some very fine artwork. There's some excellent haunting imagery in this double page spread.
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Misty
Jul 7, 2014 5:16:21 GMT
Post by pulphack on Jul 7, 2014 5:16:21 GMT
Slight tangent, but... UFO! I still wonder why the purple wigs, apart from the fact they look great. What purpose did they serve? In 'Close-Up' we see Gaye Ellis (Gabrielle Drake) back on earth, and minus the wig, sporting a very 1969 hairstyle. Being a teeny Thunderbirds fan, it was UFO that convinced me age 6 that I loved sci-fi. Sadly, most of what came after was a let-down, apart from the likes of Moorcock.
On the seaside thread you mentioned Schoolfriend - had quite a few of the annuals from the fifties/early sixties, as well as some Girls Crystal annuals. Mostly text-based, but with a much better standard of story telling than boy's annuals from the period. If you look back further to the days of the Gem, Magnet and the Schoolgirl's Own, it has to be said that even then the girl's storypapers and annuals had a better quality of writing and depth of character. There are still people who lionise Charles Hamilton (aka Frank Richards, etc) and although I can still enjoy the occasional story, his humour based around schoolboy pranks and the constant repetition of events and language can be tiring. He might have invented Bessie Bunter and Cliff House schools, but when other writers got their hands on it, they had much better results. It's always been the same - boys have supposed short attention span and need constant ACTION!!, whereas girls are considered more reflective (possibly) and so get the greater depth.
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Misty
Jul 7, 2014 10:24:43 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 7, 2014 10:24:43 GMT
Slight tangent, but... UFO! I still wonder why the purple wigs, apart from the fact they look great. What purpose did they serve? In 'Close-Up' we see Gaye Ellis (Gabrielle Drake) back on earth, and minus the wig, sporting a very 1969 hairstyle. Being a teeny Thunderbirds fan, it was UFO that convinced me age 6 that I loved sci-fi. Sadly, most of what came after was a let-down, apart from the likes of Moorcock. On the seaside thread you mentioned Schoolfriend - had quite a few of the annuals from the fifties/early sixties, as well as some Girls Crystal annuals. Mostly text-based, but with a much better standard of story telling than boy's annuals from the period. If you look back further to the days of the Gem, Magnet and the Schoolgirl's Own, it has to be said that even then the girl's storypapers and annuals had a better quality of writing and depth of character. There are still people who lionise Charles Hamilton (aka Frank Richards, etc) and although I can still enjoy the occasional story, his humour based around schoolboy pranks and the constant repetition of events and language can be tiring. He might have invented Bessie Bunter and Cliff House schools, but when other writers got their hands on it, they had much better results. It's always been the same - boys have supposed short attention span and need constant ACTION!!, whereas girls are considered more reflective (possibly) and so get the greater depth. The purple wigs were bizarre. And, indeed, Gabrielle Drake only wore hers on Moonbase, not back on earth. I remember saying of Space 1999: "This is a bit far-fetched. How could women survive on the moon without purple wigs?" (Space 1999! Another futuristic date now long in the past.) I think you're right, the difference between girls' and boys' comics stems from boys supposedly having a shorter attention span and girls having a reputation for being more reflective. I wonder to what extent these relate to innate sexual differences and how far they were self-fulfilling prophecies. School Friend (from 1950) was the first UK girls' comic. It's fair to say that early issues were very different from 1970s girls' comics. For one thing, they had one foot in the world of comics and the other still in that of story papers. (But, in the early 1950s, even the Dandy and Beano were partly story paper.) As to the stories in early issues of School Friend... I attach the cover of the oldest such comic in my collection. It's issue 86 from January 5th 1952. The yellow panel at the start (perhaps not legible in my picture) reads: "Heather croft and her chum Kay Richards had spent their Christmas holidays at Abbotsfield School. They learnt that there was mysterious plot against the new sports mistress, Miss Vanessa Dale, and believed that an unpopular prefect -- Imogen Kirby -- was involved in it. Heather and Kay admired the pretty young sports mistress immensely and were resolved to back her up in her plans for sport at Abbotsfield." Miss Dale may be seen in the bottom left panel, so you may judge for yourself how young and pretty she was. This story is (obviously) very different from those run by Misty. It is also (I imagine) significantly different from those that would have been run by contemporary boys' comics. An unpopular prefect involved in a mysterious plot against a handsome young sports master? Probably not, I'd have thought. (Note: If you click on the picture, you can see it in larger size.) Attachments:
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Misty
Jul 7, 2014 10:48:21 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 7, 2014 10:48:21 GMT
Looking at the cover of that 1952 School Friend now, the thing that strikes me most forcibly is how much Sybil Courtland in the right centre panel (she's a supporter of the tyrannical Imogen Kirby) looks like a film noir vamp. Hair style, the way she wears her beret, and the pose with head cocked to one side, hand on hip. It looks as though Sybil Courtland will grow up to be an interesting bad girl. She adds a curiously adult element to this tale of boarding school intrigue.
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Misty
Jul 8, 2014 7:40:17 GMT
Post by pulphack on Jul 8, 2014 7:40:17 GMT
I often suspect the writers and artists of amusing themselves on the sly in these old comics - certainly the bloke who wrote as 'Ida Melbourne' was a bit of a character. I have some stuff about him in one of Mary Cadogan's books about girl's fiction and comics - I'll have a look later. Fleetway were a bit more worldly than DC Thompson, whose editors seemed to rule with an iron hand. I have a fondness for 'The Silent Three', the daftness of which is wonderful - three schoolgirls don cloaks and hoods and become fighters against wrong in small school and NEVER talk or get recognised??!! Great art, though.
I remember some of the Thompson boy's papers still running the odd text story in the early seventies, though later mentions in reference books lead me to believe these were reprints of old material rather than written at time of publication.
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Misty
Jul 8, 2014 7:43:32 GMT
Post by pulphack on Jul 8, 2014 7:43:32 GMT
As for boys having short attention spans and girls being more reflective, I think it's a bit of both - there are, obviously, some differences that come from nature as with differences between people within in one sex, but I do think these have been exaggerated over the years culturally to the point where they become much more clearly defined with less cross-over - something which suits any power structure, be it ideological or financial.
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Misty
Jul 9, 2014 9:25:01 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 9, 2014 9:25:01 GMT
As for boys having short attention spans and girls being more reflective, I think it's a bit of both - there are, obviously, some differences that come from nature as with differences between people within in one sex, but I do think these have been exaggerated over the years culturally to the point where they become much more clearly defined with less cross-over - something which suits any power structure, be it ideological or financial. I agree entirely. There are obviously innate differences between the sexes: most fundamentally, I suppose, in the ability to conceive, carry and give birth to a child. Top male athletes consistently out-perform top female athletes, but the gap between them is not huge. (The huge gap is between a top athlete of either sex and an ordinary person.) As you say, it suits the power structure to emphasise and magnify any difference. But our species is not characterised by strong sexual diamorphism. As a matter of fact, there used to be popular toys specifically designed for boys that called for long attention spans. I think of Meccano and those fiddly plastic construction kits. Meccano was all about tightening large numbers of tiny nuts and bolts with a miniature spanner. No doubt it helped to develop boys into future engineers.
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Misty
Jul 9, 2014 9:52:45 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 9, 2014 9:52:45 GMT
I often suspect the writers and artists of amusing themselves on the sly in these old comics - certainly the bloke who wrote as 'Ida Melbourne' was a bit of a character. I have some stuff about him in one of Mary Cadogan's books about girl's fiction and comics - I'll have a look later. Fleetway were a bit more worldly than DC Thompson, whose editors seemed to rule with an iron hand. I have a fondness for 'The Silent Three', the daftness of which is wonderful - three schoolgirls don cloaks and hoods and become fighters against wrong in small school and NEVER talk or get recognised??!! Great art, though. I remember some of the Thompson boy's papers still running the odd text story in the early seventies, though later mentions in reference books lead me to believe these were reprints of old material rather than written at time of publication. I'd be interested to know which of Mary Cadogan's books it was. After a meeting (of the Just William Society) Mary and I were the only ones to take the train. As a result, I was able to have a proper conversation with her. She's a lovely person, and enormously interesting. Also, my copies of a number of Evadne Price's Jane books are the ones Mary used in editing Jane & Co. They have her occasional penciled marginal notes. It's easy to believe that the powers at Fleetway (and later IPC) were more worldly than their colleagues at D C Thompson. I think that may, in part, account for the great difference between Misty and Spellbound. Yes, the daftness of the early School Friend is quite wonderful. The comic always seemed to feature something daft on the front page. The Silent Three was the great classic, but there was also Secret Friends of the Sports Mistress, Cherry's Alpine Schooldays, Rozana -- Schoolgirl of Mystery and (I expect) quite a number of others. Rozana had a baby elephant called Ta-Om. One might think it would be difficult to remain a schoolgirl of mystery with an elephant in the room. The likes of Hotspur kept running text stories long after the Dandy and Beano had dropped them: old fashioned multiple daunting columns of tiny print. Misty ran text stories, of course, but in a far more user-friendly format.
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Misty
Jul 9, 2014 10:04:46 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 9, 2014 10:04:46 GMT
(Ahem.) On to Misty issue 6. The cover presents an unusual image resembling three frames of a film, as the camera tracks in to her eye. On page three, this issue starts with The Sentinels -- the twin tower blocks dominating the page. In the internal pages I've chosen, we see the cover image in black and white. Opposite is the opening of an episode of Paint it Black with notably strong artwork. To appreciate this, you need to click on the image and view it in larger size.
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Misty
Jul 9, 2014 13:49:17 GMT
Post by pulphack on Jul 9, 2014 13:49:17 GMT
That is a splendid splash page for The Sentinels - very Ballardian! - and the use of the three frame face within the other story page is incredibly effective, perhaps more so than the cover. The layouts on these pages so far shows the artists really went to town on the assignments.
The Mary Cadogan book in question is 'Chin Up Chest Out Jemima', published by Bonnington in 1989 and featuring a number of different aspects of school stories with reprints and features about both the writers and the times that shaped them. An excellent book, but then her work always is - I haven't seen her for a few years now, but used to see her regularly at the London Old Boys Book Club and first knew her through Collectors Digest.
Ida Melbourne was LE Ransome, who was also Elizabeth Chester, Evelyn Day and Stella Stirling as well as writing for boys papers as well. He wrote for Schoolfriend, Schoolgirl and Schoolgirls Own and specialised in anarchic heroines who were full of spirit. Apparently his wife disapproved of his profession, despite the fact that at its peak it made him a fair old whack per week, and when Mary interviewed him around 1970 he had to do it outside the house as his wife had forbidden him to talk about his work! This is not in the book, I realised when I pulled it out, and she must have told me this when we were talking about the book at some point. Even his dotage, apparently, he had an eye for the ladies. Well!
Chin Up... has Angela Brazil, Arthur Marshall (of course), Terence Stamp, Elsie J Oxenham, Elinor Brent Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Marjorie Stanton and Hilda Richards (Horace Phillips in both cases)and of course Ida Melbourne and is well worth searching out if you haven't got it. DFB was the best stylist for my money, but even though EJO is not that great a writer per se, there's something about the complete sincerity and belief and love she has for her characters that make her eminently readable, even with the clunkiness.
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Misty
Jul 11, 2014 16:34:26 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 11, 2014 16:34:26 GMT
That is a splendid splash page for The Sentinels - very Ballardian! - and the use of the three frame face within the other story page is incredibly effective, perhaps more so than the cover. The layouts on these pages so far shows the artists really went to town on the assignments. The Mary Cadogan book in question is 'Chin Up Chest Out Jemima', published by Bonnington in 1989 and featuring a number of different aspects of school stories with reprints and features about both the writers and the times that shaped them. An excellent book, but then her work always is - I haven't seen her for a few years now, but used to see her regularly at the London Old Boys Book Club and first knew her through Collectors Digest. Ida Melbourne was LE Ransome, who was also Elizabeth Chester, Evelyn Day and Stella Stirling as well as writing for boys papers as well. He wrote for Schoolfriend, Schoolgirl and Schoolgirls Own and specialised in anarchic heroines who were full of spirit. Apparently his wife disapproved of his profession, despite the fact that at its peak it made him a fair old whack per week, and when Mary interviewed him around 1970 he had to do it outside the house as his wife had forbidden him to talk about his work! This is not in the book, I realised when I pulled it out, and she must have told me this when we were talking about the book at some point. Even his dotage, apparently, he had an eye for the ladies. Well! Chin Up... has Angela Brazil, Arthur Marshall (of course), Terence Stamp, Elsie J Oxenham, Elinor Brent Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Marjorie Stanton and Hilda Richards (Horace Phillips in both cases)and of course Ida Melbourne and is well worth searching out if you haven't got it. DFB was the best stylist for my money, but even though EJO is not that great a writer per se, there's something about the complete sincerity and belief and love she has for her characters that make her eminently readable, even with the clunkiness. The layouts on these early Misty pages were excellent. I've just looked at the last couple of issues before Misty was merged with Tammy and there's still some outstanding work, although I think the standard has declined somewhat. I haven't seen 'Chin Up Chest Out Jemima', but have now ordered a copy. Thanks for the information on L E Ransome. Interviewing him outside his house, because his wife disapproved of his work, is priceless. I notice that you express an opinion on how well Elsie J Oxenham and Dorita Fairlie Bruce wrote, but not on Angela Brazil who was perhaps the most famous exponent of this sort of fiction. Nor do you say anything of Elinor Brent Dyer's writing. EBD is perhaps the most celebrated girls' school story writer. I think that there are four (or so) Chalet School societies scattered around the world. Buying these books can be an expensive proposition. Very few seem to be available as e-books. Most of the paperback editions (other than from Girls Gone By) are abridged and/or with the text otherwise mutilated.
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Misty
Jul 11, 2014 16:47:23 GMT
Post by redbrain on Jul 11, 2014 16:47:23 GMT
And Misty issue 7... A Paint it Black Cover. I like this so well that I've adopted it as my Facebook avatar. This time, Misty starts with Paint it Black -- an inventive layout, although lacking in startling imagery. By way of internal pages I've selected part of a short story called "The Haunting" (a Nightmare story). It's fair to say that the story isn't really up to the standard of the artwork. But I especially like the way only the first panel of this double page spread is a rectangle, the use of silhouettes, and the face middle row right of the right-hand page.
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Misty
Jul 12, 2014 9:35:37 GMT
Post by pulphack on Jul 12, 2014 9:35:37 GMT
Sorry for the brief reply but a flying visit today... To be honest, I've only ever read one Angela Brazil and have never gone further because I couldn't remember a thing about it afterwards! It put me off further reading, but it's not enough to form a proper opinion. All I do remember is that it was one of the earliest girl's books I've read, being just pre-WWI (1912, I think). And I wouldn't presume an opinion on Elinor Brent-Dyer as for some reason I've never read her beyond the one story that's in 'Chin Up, Chest Out...' I liked that, but have never been right place right time to pick up one of her books, and my internet book buying is sparse (too many charity shop and fairs purchases piling up!). I feel that I should, as she's generally reckoned to be extremely good.
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