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: Diana Annual 1979

I've selected three stories from the Diana Annual of 1979, that again illustrate the quality of British girls' comics of the 1950s through the 80s. This first story illustrates the hassle girls of (just???) the 1970s had to endure from being continuously hit on by guys. The story also made me think again of how just like animals people can be if they don't consciously transcend the biological urges of their bodies. The boys in this story are, typically, driven by their hormones and instincts to reproduce. They're trying to best each other at impressing the female on heat, although she's not fully receptive to their advances. Maybe there's a cool subject here for a David Attenborough documentary - the reproductive behavior of the human mammal, from the perspective of visiting alien scientists. Probably already been done. Anyway, some nice art that looks like it's by one of the Spanish artists.

This next story does a makeover on a popular topic in 1960s girls' comics - the beauty pageant and modeling. The artwork is a little different, and quite good in places. Interesting story line - the protagonist has been raised in a single parent household, but what happened to her father? Why wasn't he in the picture? Well the answer lies in one of those favorite soap opera devices, but you're gonna have to read it to find out which!

Finally, "For Love of Leni" is a girls' romantic sci-fi set in the future, with a kind of X-Men swipe in that it has some of the population having mutated to possess special powers. This art is nice, and is by an artist who drew a girls' sci-fi feature in Diana called The Fabulous Four, again a bit of a Marvel rip-off in terms of the title, but story-wise is more like a female version of the Flash Gordon sort of space adventure. I'll post a little collection of those soon. This love story here involves that age-old problem of cross-cultural or inter-racial (or in this case, inter sub-species) relationships.

If only we hadn't, as a society, been corrupted by media corporations and misguided concepts of so-called freedom such that stories like these wouldn't appear beneath the sexually over-exposed interest of today's youth! For me, the story of romance comics, including these girls' comics, illustrates the moral decline that in the end made society as a whole, as well as the younger generation's taste in entertainment, more degraded than the standards mainstream comic publishers were willing or able to sink to.