The BBC’s Women’s Hour series of five 15-minute dramas this past week offered a sequence of five plays entitled “43 Years in the Third Form”, by Jane Purcell, that interweaves the story of three generations of women with dramatized segments from the girls comics they read. Along the way, the series offered tacit and sometimes explicit comment on the changing expectations and opportunities for girls.

1. Elizabeth, in 1952, strives to be chosen as a Girl Adventurer by Girl Magazine, exemplar of the virtues of selflessness and domestic helpfulness, an ambition she achieves with the help of her brother, who recognizes the sacrifices she makes for her family. In her own way she returns the favour, via the laxative-laced toffee she prepares in her resentment at his receiving the education she is denied, which turns him into a legend at his hated boarding school.
2. By 1968, Elizabeth is herself a mother, anxiously schooling her lively daughter to give safely conventional responses in her interview for admission to grammar school. Expectations have changed, and Bea’s ambition to be a poet, and if not a poet, a ballerina, or a spy – inspired by her reading of Bunty magazine – are welcomed by her prospective headmistress. Do the arithmetic, and interpret Elizabeth’s intense instructions to Bea as to how to avoid the subject of her father, and one fills in the consequence of the neglect obvious in the first segment – teenage pregnancy and single motherhood.
3. The third segment, set in 1976, belongs to Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Mary, who finds ironic amusement in the breathless advice and exortations of Jackie magazine when set against the experience of a divorcée whose husband left her for his male lover. The gulf between magazine romance and the reality of girls’ lives is revealed when her daughter’s worldly young friend Mandy proves to be as desperately uniformed of “the facts of life” as any child of the previous generation, and Mary steps forward with some frank talk and much needed nurturing.
4. The next segment features Mary’s twins, baby-sitting each other and scaring each other silly with ghost stories from Misty, on the night of Margaret Thatcher’s election, in 1979.
5. And in the final segment, set in 2007 after the era of girls comics is over, Elizabeth, her daughter, and her cellphone-affixed granddaughter, return to her childhood home after Elizabeth’s brother’s death, there to rediscover the stack of old magazines, reminisce about their lives, and bring the story full circle.

I am one of those who grew up on those comics. Specifically Princess Tina, Tammy, Sally (borrowed copies), Bunty, Jinty, Mandy, and Jackie (in no particular order). I remember most fondly the stories during the spy/superhero/space era of the late sixties, which gave a distaff spin to the prevalent cultural heroes: a female James Bond (Jane Bond, of course, albeit sans sex), three space stewardesses (who always saved the day, particularly the brainy brunette), an athlete kidnapped and brainwashed (unsuccessfully) into an all female army bent on world domination (I can still remember the rhyme; I won’t repeat it). Then there was the usual school and sports stories – “Bella at the Bar” was one, about a working-class girl who becomes a champion gymnast, despite opposition from family and establishment, and her own bolshie temperament.

I wish that our transatlantic moves hadn’t separated me from my stacks of old comics. It would be great – ok, since it’s comics I’m talking about, enormous – fun to reread them. Wince-making at times, I’m sure, but I have a sense they could be read as delightfully subversive, in the way that a genre can be subversive when it is regarded as “that rubbish” and beneath notice of the arbitors of culture. Writer Jane Purcell and academic Mel Gibson were interviewed for Woman’s Hour about girls comics as a social phenomenon at the start of the series. They discussed comics as an expression of girls’ bedroom culture, something to be read in private, yet shared between friends (each comic had an estimated 6 readers). Comics promoted values of heroism, friendship, upward mobility, and aspirations towards education and career, although their heroines were often shunned and misunderstood, except by the reader. As Jane Purcell said, she was presented with a much wider range of role models than today’s girls are offered by magazines concentrating on diet, boyfriends and celebrities. Mel Gibson examined the decline of girls’ comics for her PhD thesis*. They pretty much vanished during the ‘eighties/nineties, and although there are nostalgia sites for boy’s comics, there are few for girls’ comics. The BBC cult site 2000AD and British Comics, has a positively pink page on Paper worlds: Why girls’ comics were wonderful, by Jac Rayner, but I can wish, can’t I, that some web-savvy woman who didn’t move across the Atlantic three times before she was sixteen will emulate the affictionados of The Trigan Empire, and bring them back to life.

* Published paper: Reading as Rebellion: The Case of the Girl’s Comic in Britain,” International Journal of Comic Art 2.2. (Fall 2000): 135-51, via comicsresearch.org.