The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

“Girls who are boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like theyre girls
Who do girls like theyre boys
Always should be someone whose comics you really love”

(with apologies to Blur)

Here’s a paradox about Crikey!, the Great British Comics Magazine: our subscription list is easily 95% male (and I suspect that least some of the lady subscribers have actually signed up on behalf of their husbands/boyfriends). When I attend events such as the Bristol Expo most of the people we talk to are guys. People who buy Crikey! from the shops are, I am assured, “mostly male”. Yeah – I, too, have weird thought-pictures about that last statement but that’s what I was told by FPI Manchester! (I blame any gender confusion in Manchester on Bevis Musson and his Queen of Diamonds – Joe)

So with that support you would think that the content that would go down the best with Crikey! chums would be science fiction and adventure stuff, mixed in with those great humour titles of our youth. And we do get lost of positive letters about them. We also get lots of letters about our artist profiles and interviews (The Crikey! Chat).

The biggest reponse, however – and here is where I link back to my opening statement – is when we cover girls’ comics. At first I thought it might be because we picked titles that would have boy appeal (no, not THAT kind of appeal). So when we did features on Misty and Spellbound (IPC and DC Thomson scary tales comics) I though the mail was more to do with subject matter than anything else. Then we had a recent article looking at Jinty and Tammy, neither of which can be said to have storylines that you would expect to crossover to boys’ interest. The response to that was amazing. And that was in an issue with articles on Ian Kennedy (Starblazer cover artist), 1950s British horror comics, an article by Dave Gibbons and a look at the career of Mike Noble. And still it was the girls’ comics feature that came head-and-shoulders – if not pig-tails and braids – ahead of the rest.

Most recently (Crikey! #5) we went the whole hog and ran a feature on a late 1950s to early 60s girls’ romance comic called Romeo. This is exactly what it says on the tin (or cover) – ‘exciting stories of love’. No robots. No brave commandos. No stiff upper lip flying aces. Not even a hint of a down-at-heel athlete. Just good, old-fashioned heartache and face-sucking. And it’s turning out to be one of our most popular features yet.

So why are we getting so many positive comments about our occasional coverage of girls’ comics? It’s not anything salacious – these images were conservative when they were originally published, never mind now. Nor is it anything to do with the editorial stance we take on the comics – we treat them with the same respect and appropriate mickey-taking as with the boys’ titles we cover.

Maybe as comics readers we have become jaded with the genres and formulae of our preferred comics. Especially those of us who have been reading them for decades. The girls’ titles offer us an unknown sideways world of comics fascination and once we open the boudoir door, we discover that yes!, girls’ did have action stories, science fiction sagas, superheroines, horror tales, historical adventures and all then other tropes we have come to associated with ‘our’ comics.

(Supercats – curvaceous action women in skintight, revealing costumes, nothing at all like modern comics’ portrayal of women at all)

Of course, it might be that we had always wanted to read those comics but unless you had a sister of the right age it was never going to happen. Now that we are older, we can pick these comics up as collectibles without compromising our sexual identity each time we pop into a newsagent. Looking through the sample pages we run in Crikey! showcases the sometimes weird Franken-strip you can get when you take out the machismo and replace it, literally, with a little heart (well, the great Alan Grant who wrote many a girls’ comic strip is on record as saying girls are smarter because they demand more story, emotion and character in their comics. Maybe we boys get slightly more mature as we age – Joe).

Let’s see what happens when we get round to covering the junior titles – Bimbo, Twinkle, Teddy Bear…

You know you want to!

Issue #5 of Crikey! is out now and can be ordered from the official website or found in your friendly, neighbourhood FPI store.