Unhappy Families

Discuss all the girls comics that have appeared over the years. Excellent titles like Bunty, Misty, Spellbound, Tammy and June, amongst many others, can all be remembered here.

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Marionette
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Unhappy Families

Post by Marionette »

Rather than sidetrack the Sally thread, I thought I'd start a separate one to look at all those bad, inevitably adopted/foster/step parents that appear so often in girls' comics. I can see it as a way of distancing the character from the family; they aren't her real parents so it's possible to escape them in a way that is much less messy than if it's her real father that's being abusive. And it allows for the possibility that her real parents are much nicer, and probably rich.
The Tammy Project: Documenting the classic British girls' comic, one serial at a time.

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

Wicked uncles and aunts also featured. One example is The Changeling from Jinty. A bit unusual in which the abusive uncle appears only in the first and last episodes. In the first the girl runs away from him and tries to find a new life by stealing another girl's identity. In the last she returns with the couple she tried to ingratiate herself with but now owned up. When they see what a monster he is they take her away and adopt her. Perhaps the most infamous example of wicked aunts and uncles in girls' comics is Aunt Gert and Uncle Jed from Bella Barlow. And they aren't even blood relatives; the connection is through Gert's marriage to her first husband, and not with Jed.

Not surprisingly, abusive guardians are sometimes criminals as well, such as in Misty's Whistle and I'll Come.... Jed and Gert committed a few crimes as well and served jail time for a while.
Last edited by Tammyfan on 09 Aug 2013, 07:58, edited 1 time in total.

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

The Cinderella theme was one of the lynchpins of any girls comic, so naturally we had loads of them. That's how Bella Barlow was born. Changes in editorship meant the Cinderella stories had faded from Tammy by the late 1970s but still went strong in the DCT titles. Strangley, I think they had faded from Bunty as well during her last years. If anyone thinks differently, I'd like to hear what Cinderella stories she still had in the 1990s.

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

The first scanned sample for this thread. Does it strike you that the way the Millers were landed with Mandy sounds a bit like how Squeers from Nicholas Nickelby was landed with Smike? Anyway, art is by Ana Rodrigues.

Image

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

Sometimes it's just one guardian who's cruel; the other suffers as much as the heroine. Or in this case, hero: The Leopard from Lime Street (Buster). Billy's Uncle Charlie is lazy, abusive and squanders the family's money - even at Christmas. Aunt Joan (who is crippled) takes the brunt. (Has you wondering why they even married in the first place.) It's up to Billy and his leopard powers to come to the rescue.

Raven
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Raven »

Marionette wrote:Rather than sidetrack the Sally thread, I thought I'd start a separate one to look at all those bad, inevitably adopted/foster/step parents that appear so often in girls' comics. I can see it as a way of distancing the character from the family; they aren't her real parents so it's possible to escape them in a way that is much less messy than if it's her real father that's being abusive. And it allows for the possibility that her real parents are much nicer, and probably rich.
Of course, it's a tradition that goes back to fairy tales - the Cinderella theme, as Tammyfan says - and I remember Marina Warner going through a few interesting theories about these motifs in her book 'From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers': how they can play to a child's hankering after better, nobler, richer origins (like you say, Marionette), and fantasies about being a princess in disguise (the 'Freudian family romance': "Through fantasy, the developing individual liberates himself from the constraints of family by imagining himself to be an orphan or a b****** and his "real" parents to be more noble than the "foster'' family in which he is growing up," Marian Hirsch - EDIT: that formerly standard, quoted adjective was censored by the board's built-in censor, not me, by the way!)

There's a theory that young children sometimes need to split the image of their parent into its benevolent and threatening aspects to feel fully sheltered by the former; i.e. the foster/step parent is a solution to the deadlock of their parent suddenly becoming a lookalike "imposter" when he/she gets angry. Maybe these theories help explain the roots of these absent parent/wicked replacement themes.

In girls' comics did the wicked adult figure most often tend to be female (as in many fairy tales) or male, or was it an even split?

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

Raven wrote:
Marionette wrote:Rather than sidetrack the Sally thread, I thought I'd start a separate one to look at all those bad, inevitably adopted/foster/step parents that appear so often in girls' comics. I can see it as a way of distancing the character from the family; they aren't her real parents so it's possible to escape them in a way that is much less messy than if it's her real father that's being abusive. And it allows for the possibility that her real parents are much nicer, and probably rich.
Of course, it's a tradition that goes back to fairy tales - the Cinderella theme, as Tammyfan says - and I remember Marina Warner going through a few interesting theories about these motifs in her book 'From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers': how they can play to a child's hankering after better, nobler, richer origins (like you say, Marionette), and fantasies about being a princess in disguise (the 'Freudian family romance': "Through fantasy, the developing individual liberates himself from the constraints of family by imagining himself to be an orphan or a b****** and his "real" parents to be more noble than the "foster'' family in which he is growing up," Marian Hirsch - that formerly standard, quoted adjective was censored by the board's built-in censor, not me, by the way!)

There's a theory that young children sometimes need to split the image of their parent into its benevolent and threatening aspects to feel fully sheltered by the former; i.e. the foster/step parent is a solution to the deadlock of their parent suddenly becoming a lookalike "imposter" when he/she gets angry. Maybe these theories help explain the roots of these absent parent/wicked replacement themes.

In girls' comics did the wicked adult figure most often tend to be female (as in many fairy tales) or male, or was it an even split?
In most cases, fairly even I think. In some cases, one parent suffers as much as the heroine against a cruel guardian. One example is Whistle and I'll Come, where it is just the stepfather who is cruel. The mother suffers (and later dies in the story), leaving the heroine to fend for herself against the stepfather (well, not quite - she still has her dog, who has come back as a ghost). Or one guardian is not quite as bad as the other, as in No Cheers for Cherry (Jinty). The aunt is the more wicked of the two; the uncle is not quite as bad, though he is still far from a decent uncle.

And there are guardians who are not downright cruel; they are just too strict, over-protective or have serious attitude problems. In Jinty's The Four-Footed Friends it is the mother who is the problem. Though not cruel or abusive, she is far too protective of her daughter and hates 'common' people to the point of persecuting them. The father is wiser and tries to get his wife to see reason.

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philcom55
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by philcom55 »

It kind of reminds me of the oft-quoted opening to Anna Karenina: 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. '

Of course, another variation on the evil sibling can be found in the half-brother or half-sister who shares just one parent with the hero/heroine. The classic example is Thor's evil half-brother Loki (I seem to remember he was the result of Odin's wild fling with a female Frost Giant! :shock: ).

- Phil R.
Last edited by philcom55 on 09 Aug 2013, 19:22, edited 1 time in total.

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peace355
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by peace355 »

Sandra Wilson in Judy, had a horrible step-mother who intended to send her to work in a factory, luckily she got kidnapped to join the Secret Ballet.

There was also a heap of evil aunts and uncles that were ready to make money off their orphaned nieces/nephews.

http://misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/tr3.jpg

http://misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/tr4.jpg

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

Lisa the Lonely Ballerina had a perennial evil aunt who was always out to scupper her ballet ambitions.

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

There was one strip where the concept was turned on its head. A cartoonist creates "Sad Sarah", who puts up with ill-treatment from her guardians rather than worry her sick mother. But he does not know that Sarah is materialising in his house - only this Sarah is evil and causing trouble for his daughter! I can't remember where it appeared. It was a MacGilivray story.

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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Marionette »

Tammyfan wrote:There was one strip where the concept was turned on its head. A cartoonist creates "Sad Sarah", who puts up with ill-treatment from her guardians rather than worry her sick mother. But he does not know that Sarah is materialising in his house - only this Sarah is evil and causing trouble for his daughter! I can't remember where it appeared. It was a MacGilivray story.
How very meta. I'd like to see that.
The Tammy Project: Documenting the classic British girls' comic, one serial at a time.

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

Marionette wrote:
Tammyfan wrote:There was one strip where the concept was turned on its head. A cartoonist creates "Sad Sarah", who puts up with ill-treatment from her guardians rather than worry her sick mother. But he does not know that Sarah is materialising in his house - only this Sarah is evil and causing trouble for his daughter! I can't remember where it appeared. It was a MacGilivray story.
How very meta. I'd like to see that.

Maybe an appeal on the forum will turn it up. I don't remember its title or the comic it appeared in.

Tammyfan
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by Tammyfan »

Sometimes it's a family of children who suffers, as in Slaves of the Singing Kettle and Sheila the Sham, both from Tracy. The eldest is the one who takes the worst while trying to protect the younger ones or trying to find the key to liberation.

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peace355
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Re: Unhappy Families

Post by peace355 »

Tammyfan wrote:
Marionette wrote:
Tammyfan wrote:There was one strip where the concept was turned on its head. A cartoonist creates "Sad Sarah", who puts up with ill-treatment from her guardians rather than worry her sick mother. But he does not know that Sarah is materialising in his house - only this Sarah is evil and causing trouble for his daughter! I can't remember where it appeared. It was a MacGilivray story.
How very meta. I'd like to see that.

Maybe an appeal on the forum will turn it up. I don't remember its title or the comic it appeared in.
I loved that story! It was called "The Double Life of Sad Sarah" it appeared in Mandy around issue 1039.

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