Misty - The Cult Girls' Comic Comes Back from the Mists.

Misty

Published by Rebellion Developments, 2016

                Rebellion’s revival of British comics from the seventies is not just an exercise in nostalgia.  This edition collects two complete serials from the short-lived girls’ comic Misty (1978-80), both of which deserve re-publication for the quality of their storytelling as well as for their obvious historical interest.  In his foreword, co-creator Pat Mills tells of how the girls’ comic scene had been thriving in the seventies when he proposed a female-friendly equivalent of 2000AD, complete with fictional editor, which focused on the supernatural rather than on science-fiction.  And thus Misty was born.

                The first story in the collection, Moonchild, written by Mills and drawn by John Armstrong, follows the travails of Rosemary, a twelve-year-old victim of school bullies, who discovers she has telekinetic powers. In the second story, The Four Faces of Eve, by Malcolm Shaw and Brian Delaney, the eponymous heroine wakes up in a high-security wing of a hospital, unable to remember anything about her past and suspicious of the couple who claim to be her parents.

                Both tales contain echoes of Carrie and The Prisoner and occasionally lapse into the farcical, but for the most part they are tightly plotted with plausible characters.  Those unfamiliar with girls’ comics (like this writer was) will notice some major differences from the action/adventure style – there is a much stronger element of the psychological,  and facial expressions (often beautifully drawn and close to photo-realistic) take precedence over backgrounds. Some of the panels showing the heroines in deep, and often unvoiced, distress, have a haunting quality, especially as the locations (classrooms, cafes, bedrooms) are so familiar and ordinary.   There is also a greater emphasis on friendship and on deciding on whom one can trust – rarely that important in 2000AD and the other boys’ comics, where scowling bounty hunters and fascist policemen were more concerned with exterminating enemies.

                The Misty stories have dated well - though there are some amusing anachronisms such as when Rosemary’s teacher punishes nasty Norma by getting her to write five hundred times, ‘I am a half-wit – I play silly games with matches’ – and it will be interesting to see if future collections from Rebellion’s recently acquired vault of classic comics will have the same freshness and readability.

A second collection of Misty strips is due for publication in late 2017.