Sci-Fi strips in girls comics

[helsbels]

Comos also did a comic about a robot girl that start to have feelings of her own and cries... but i don't remember in which magazine was published there...

Tammyfan mentioned this story earlier - "The Robot Who Cried" in Jinty.

[RuthB]

Yes, it might be that. I don't remember how it was called in Spain, probably something like it

[philcom55]

Here's a page from 'The Robot Who Cried'.



Other series involving robots included 'Slaves of the Eye' in Sandie (with art by Juan Boix), the humorous 'Rita's Robots' by Robert MacGillivray in Bunty and 'Boy Blue, the Rockin' Robot' - also in Bunty.

- Phil Rushton

[Tammyfan]

Another popular theme was have an alien infiltrate a school (or household) as part of the aliens' plot to invade Earth. The heroine of the story is the only one who knows this and often has to defeat the alien single-handed. Some stories with this theme are:

The Girl Who Can't Cry (Mandy)
Starla's Spell (Bunty)
Wendy's Web (Bunty)
Sister of Hate (Suzy)
Electra of the Evil Eye (Bunty)

Oriel (Bunty) was a twist on this theme - the story is told from the alien's point of view. Oriel is sent to a girls' boarding school to learn all about human ways. Her people want to know as much as they can about humans before invading them. She has powers to manipulate people and does so to perform experiments on them, see how they react and analyse what she has learned from them. In one episode she tries to break up a friendship and learns that true friendship cannot be broken. In another she manipulates a girl into standing up to a bullying teacher - but it's on her own terms, an experiment to see what happens if the girl is not scared of the teacher. In the end Oriel decides she likes it on Earth, but her people will have none of it. So she recruits the help of the girls to defeat them.

This theme was common in the DC Thomson titles. I don't recall seeing it in IPC titles, thought it might have appeared there.

[matrix]

Phil what annual is the "Space girls" strip from? Nice colourful strip shame it didnt carry on, it did run for five issues after the merger.

As with many comic strips, frozen in time are the thoughts of the writer and artist, in this case talking of life as we know it on Jupiter!

[matrix]

Here is a scan of "The Mysterious Visitors" strip that ran in "Princess" for a few months in 1964. It started when "Girl" joined "Princess" does anyone know if this is reprinted from Girl or original? Thankyou.

[Tammyfan]

Here are links to a Jinty top ten and Tammy top ten. They discuss some of the SF serials in these comics in more detail.

http://www.booksmonthly.co.uk/jinty.html

http://www.booksmonthly.co.uk/tammy.html

[philcom55]

Thanks for those fascinating links Tammyfan - Briony sure knows her stuff!

On the subject of SF strips for girls it's worth noting that superstar writer Alan Moore was also a big Tammy/Misty fan and that, while he never actually wrote any stories for those titles, when he was asked to script an ET-type character for 2000AD in 1983 he deliberately approached it as a Tammy-style series with a young, female protagonist. The result was 'Skizz', drawn by veteran girls' comic artist Jim Baikie (who'd previously illustrated Briony's fifth favourite Jinty story 'Fran'll Fix It').



That Keith Watson 'Space Girls' page is taken from the 1968 Tina annual by the way Matrix - the first one. Presumably it must have been prepared early in 1967 as Watson only drew the first few episodes in the weekly comic. As a matter of interest he was actually colour-blind and much of his artwork for Dan Dare (and possibly here too) was coloured for him by airbrush wizard Eric Eden.

- Phil Rushton

[philcom55]

Another popular theme was have an alien infiltrate a school (or household) as part of the aliens' plot to invade Earth.

Some other examples of this theme in Diana were 'The Strange Ones' where three blue-haired girls from another planet took over a ballet school, and 'The School Under the Rocket' where aliens attempted to sabotage Earth's space programme, using a robot teacher as their agent.

Perhaps the strangest of all, however, was 'The Spaceship in our Kitchen'. Other Families have to deal with infestations of ants or wasps, but the Hugget's were astonished to discover that their kitchen had been taken over by tiny aliens determined to repair their spaceship - and prepared to 'supercallifrate' anyone who got in their way!



By contrast 'The Pink Peril' featured aliens who were essentially benign - though the Earth found itself facing an ecological disaster as a result of their offspring who resembled giant pink butterflies.



- Phil Rushton

[Tammyfan]

Spaceship in Our Kitchen? Boy, did they come up with some really bizarre and hilarious ideas at times!

[peace355]

Some other Bunty sci-fi:

Pinkie- had a girl who would shrink at inconvenient times.
The Incredible Adventures of Mini-Mum similar theme


There was also plenty of alien visitors, that took the humorous approach rather than the invasion approach like:

The Girl From Up There
Boyfriend from Blupo (Andy Tew, I think)
Flower Power
Mojo the Milky Way Dog (Robert Robertson MacGillivray)


Prisoners of the Rainbow 2 sisters get trapped in the bizarre world at the other side of the Rainbow
The Adventures of Ozz An alien comes looking for his brother that landed/crashed on earth


Brassribs A girl is left stranded on an island with her butler robot (who seems to have been influenced by C3P0)


"I Want to Dance!" Set in the future where dance is forbidden

[philcom55]

That's a great selection Peace!

One other series aimed at a slightly older audience was 'A Song For Andrella' which appeared in (of all places) Mirabelle during 1977. Set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future this seemed to anticipate the popularity of 'young adult' novels like The Hunger Games.



The artist was John Richardson. I'm not sure who it was written by but I wouldn't be surprised if either Pat Mills or John Wagner were involved. I must admit it came as something of a shock to see such a gritty storyline in a girls' comic.

- Phil Rushton

[Tammyfan]

Some other Bunty sci-fi:

Pinkie- had a girl who would shrink at inconvenient times.
The Incredible Adventures of Mini-Mum similar theme


There was also plenty of alien visitors, that took the humorous approach rather than the invasion approach like:

The Girl From Up There
Boyfriend from Blupo (Andy Tew, I think)
Flower Power
Mojo the Milky Way Dog (Robert Robertson MacGillivray)


Prisoners of the Rainbow 2 sisters get trapped in the bizarre world at the other side of the Rainbow
The Adventures of Ozz An alien comes looking for his brother that landed/crashed on earth


Brassribs A girl is left stranded on an island with her butler robot (who seems to have been influenced by C3P0)


"I Want to Dance!" Set in the future where dance is forbidden

Yes, there were plenty of robots in girls comics that looked like clones of C3PO and R2D2.

Some SF stories from Mandy:
I-AM-A-ROBOT! A girl has to pretend to be a robot to demonstrate her father's gadgets.
Slave to the Space Princess: a girl thinks she has become a slave to an evil space princess who has stepped straight out of the movie she was watching. In fact the girl is a bully and runaway who happens to look like the princess and is taking advantage.
Freda Who? Who is the mystery girl Freda? It turns out she comes from a future where man has ruined the Earth. Her father sent her on a one-way ticket to the 20th century to save her.
Sleeping Beauty from the Stars: An alien is banished to a harsh penal planet for playing practical jokes. But her prison ship goes awry and she ends up on Earth. The trouble is, her people find out - because they watch Earth television and see her on it!

[philcom55]

Another 'alien visitor' to star in a strip with a humorous approach was the shapeshifting 'Little Menace from Mars' in Diana:



Also, it's worth mentioning that some phenomena which initially seemed to have a supernatural origin - the terrifying 'Balloon of Doom' for example - were eventually exposed as creatures from outer space.



- Phil Rushton

[Marionette]

I have very vague recollections of a school story where it turned out that the teachers were aliens, but I have no clue were it came from or what the title was.

Of course Alan Moore did give us one of the all time classic SF characters in The Ballad of Halo Jones. I only wish he could have finished it.