Update 23/01/08 – I've emailed a few people who've shown (or casually expressed) interest in FIZZOO! to discuss format, structure, page & word count etc. If anyone else fancies getting involved please email me (or leave a comment below) and I'll forward details on to you. Remember, it's very much an amateur exercise. So come one, come alll.

A new year. A new project.

After sampling anew the girls' comic delights that have been on show here o'er the last few months, Tuppenceworth's luverly Simon McGarr (a recent McDaddy) mailed me with a proposal.

Like me he grew up supplementing his regular comics intake with surreptitious dips into the wonderful worlds of Bunty, Misty, Mandy et al. These dips have left lasting impressions – ensuring that he and I remain committed fans of the "girl comic" and all its conventions.

And so…after some thought (about 10 minutes' worth) we've decided to create FIZZOO! A Girls' Comic…by Boys (and maybe some girls).¹

Fizoo! will (when/if it gets going) be hosted online here, feature 1-2 page collaborations between interested writers and artists, and attempt to offer askew (or even twisted) takes on such girls' comic staples as…gothic horror, schoolgirl misery, orphans, ponies, supernatural companions etc., etc.

Such a venture does, of course, run the risk of wandering into territory covered ad nauseam by Viz. A concerted-ish effort needs, then, to be made to avoid Viz's tried and tested goofy scatologica. In other words, don't expect to see something like…em…"Mavis McGog and her vomiting Dog". Actually, that's pretty funny…so ignore all previous remarks.

The first two stories will be tackled by Simon and myself – with art likely to be supplied by the fabulous "Q". To keep it going we're going to need fresh blood and fresher imaginations. If any of you regular (or irregular) readers fancy having a go at either d'writing or d'illustrating of a story then please leave a message below (or email me…see sidebar).

The aim is to be fairly slavishly faithful to the feel of Bunty, Mandy (et al) but with (as I said) a dirty twist or two.

Let us know what ye think.

P.S: I wrote the above after 2 pints of Guinness, 2 glasses of red wine, a brandy and a hot port…so if I gobble my gook please forgive me.

P. P. S: In other news – Greetings Earthlings has finally been updated.

1. Name subject to the whims of change. [back]

From Bunty for Girls 1983 (the contents of which this blog milked dry) we move on by moving back – ten years that is, to Mandy for Girls 1973.

While none of this volume's stories manage to scale the bonkers heights of Bunty's classic "Flights of Flopear", they do demonstrate the persistence/popularity of certain themes & scenarios – Girl with magical object ("Carol's Cauldron"), Girl with exotic animal companion ("Elsie's Elephant", "Mona's Monkey") etc.

Also present and correct is the kind of single concept tale that Viz once routinely parodied – "Late Kate"…a high-larious narrative about the girl who's "Never on Time!" (plenty of scope for development there).

None of the above, however, are to be the main focus of today. Instead I'd like to record for posterity a story so spectacularly ill-conceived (and offensive) that it simply leaps from the page demanding to be critiqued. Here's a portion of panel one:

A young (somewhat overweight) girl arrives at a new boarding school with all the usual anxieties and concerns about fitting in or standing out. Are we to see a sensitively-handled yarn about bigotry and (ultimate) acceptance? Any confidence one might have about the progressiveness of the writer's agenda must be tempered by the fact that the story's title is (rather unbelievably) "Tessa Pulls Her Weight". On we go:

I think you can guess where this is leading (hint: not to hand-shakes and pledges of undying friendship)…

And so it goes. Constant bullying. Constant ridicule. Until, though she can scarcely believe it, Tessa is picked for a school sport's team. The sucker punch is duly delivered however, as a mortified Tessa realises she's been lined up to "pull her weight" in the Tug-of-War. The results are (predictably) calamitous, with Tessa's eagerness to please costing the school the competition. Cue universal scorn and derision.

Then, when all hope of acceptance seems long gone, a sea-side outing riding ponies (beside a cliff!) lurches suddenly towards tragedy. A pony bolts. Young Christine (the 4th form captain) can't control it and off it goes on a mad dash for the cliff edge. Tessa springs into action, grabbing the reins before…being dragged, sickeningly, over rocky ground. Christine is saved, but Tessa is horribly wounded, as a disturbing panel gruesomely reveals:

So what's the moral here? Well, since it is (presumably) Tessa's weight that prevents the pony from flinging itself (and Christine) into the sea, one might imagine that it's a muddled message about how everyone can make a difference (using those "talents" peculiar to themselves). Or how "Bravery and selflessness are not the preserve of the conventionally good-looking".

At the very least you'd expect Tessa's bullying class-mates to be whistling a different tune. As she arrives back from a five-month stay in hospital it seems that a new attitude is, indeed, in the air:

The ambulance door opens to reveal…a denouement of flabbergasting nastiness!

Splutter! A cynical and cowardly retreat by the Mandy hacks. The solution to bullying by body fascists is, it seems, to get dragged behind a horse, suffer terrible injuries, and spend 5 months at death's door in hospital. It might sound drastic girls, but at least you'll be skinny and popular!

Two weeks ago we revisited the jolly adventures of "Belle" and a ball that "had developed remarkable powers after being treated by space travellers from the planet Orbis".

As is the case with many such powerful, "paranormal" objects, ownership passes (over the centuries) from person to person. A quick bit of detective work (by myself and Jess) revealed the identities of the previous and current guardians – Sylvia Plath, and the Cruise/Holmes child-bot:

Thanks to the good people over at the Comics UK forums I've been reminded that narratives about young girls and "uncanny balls" were by no means rare or unusual. Take, for example, this brief excerpt from "The Ball of Hate"¹ – kindly uploaded by "steelclaw":

A demonic glass ball that tells young Ms. Thorpe seductive (and destructive) untruths = fantastic stuff. It's not clear who/what "treated" (or possessed) this particular ball, but the fact that it's difficult to get rid of clearly marks it out as a thing of evil. Perhaps the dark gods of "Orbis" are responsible?

Speaking of evil, any discussion of uncanny balls and young girls must make mention of Mario Bava's Operazione Paura (a.k.a. Kill, Baby… Kill!) – a film in which…

"…the townsfolk of a backwards Carpathian village are bedevilled by the spectre of a young girl with long blonde hair, whose ghostly visitations are announced by the arrival of a white ball that rolls into the scene, seemingly with a will of its own."

The Movie Morlocks article "Follow the Bouncing Ball" (source of the above quote) also reminds us that Fellini borrowed the image for "Toby Dammit" ("his contribution to the horror anthology Spirits of the Dead"). Behold:

Creepy and scarifying, but I've saved the best till last. Not a ball this time, though not far off. Courtesy of that man "philcom55″ (over at Comics UK) comes this slice of freakiness, scanned straight from the pages of Bunty No. 1471 (March 22, 1986). You'll need to click on the image for the full effect…

That's some intuitive leap by young Katherine. Her town is hit by a "violent storm" and she becomes convinced that the blame lies with her sister's "strange balloon".² Hmmm…her logic is not like our Earth logic. Still, given that some people believe the Twin Towers were felled by missiles hidden inside holograms of planes, I suppose it's not totally outrageous. I mean, look at its face for God's sake!

Since "philcom55″ himself has succinctly captured the unease the page generates (even among adult readers/viewers) I'll leave the penultimate words to him:

I'm particularly struck by the way in which a symbol of childish joy and wonder is transformed into something so horrifically sinister (rather in the style of Ray Bradbury's 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'); what's more the effect is cleverly enhanced by limiting any colour to the balloon itself while everything else is depicted in black and white.

Amen, brother.

1. Drawn by Dudley Wynn, from Mandy I think? [back]
2. I should add that the "Balloon of Doom" artist is none other than Robert Macgillivray, he of "The Flights of Flopear". [back]

"The Flights of Flopear",¹ for those unfamiliar with Bunty's bonkers slice of Sci-Fi, told the story of young "Tessa Worth", who had been "transported from Earth inside a wonderful rabbit-shaped space-ship called Flopear". The circumstances which led to her being thus "transported" are unclear, but reading between the narrative's lines (and panels) one can't escape the feeling that some form of child abduction was at play.

The introduction initially paints a vivid (and charming) picture of interplanetary adventure by informing us that "Tessa and Flopear were ‘planet-hopping’ from one strange world to the next". In the same "breath", however, we are reminded that Tessa is, in fact, "Stranded in outer-space…trying to track down a piece of the elusive fire-crystal which would provide them with the power to make the long journey back to Earth". Suddenly it doesn't sound like such a laugh…

Those who quickly grew tired of Star Trek's dreary fourth incarnation, Voyager, will no doubt see a familiar narrative structure at work. Our heroes/heroines are lost far from home. Their journey's end is routinely promised but the means to secure this return is always just (by story's end) out of their grasp. Next week they try again…and so it goes, ensuring an endlessly forestalled resolution.

A curious feature of "The Flights of Flopear" is that Flopear exists both as the ship itself…

…and as a sort of avatar of himself within the ship's computer:

Mention should be made both of the above panel's tasty bit of shorthand intertextuality (Dr. Who, TARDIS) and Flopear's rather unimpressive array of in-flight entertainments. Space Invaders might be a seminal part of gaming history, but one might expect more from a rabbit who'd perfected the art of interstellar travel. Tessa is certainly not overly enthused, a point not lost on an increasingly disturbing (and disturbed) Flopear…

We're heading into the dark territory of the abuser/abused relationship here. Wolfgang Priklopil and Natascha Kampusch (in space) come suddenly to mind.

The rest of the tale is straight out of The Odyssey's "Land of the Lotus Eaters". Flopear detects a fire-crystal on the planet "Smarnia". They land. Tessa meets a slave race (with noses) and a ruling class (without noses). She becomes intoxicated by the smell of the Smarnian flowers and soon forgets all about fire-crystals, choosing instead to stay on Smarnia and become a lackey to the nose-less ones. Flopear is not amused:

After overhearing Smarnia's queen telling her cohorts "No visitor ever leaves Smarnia…The perfume makes them forget there are other worlds, beyond ours. They are content to remain here working for us", Flopear decides, "Feck this", and prepares to flee Smarnia leaving Tessa to her fate. However…

One enforced bout of sense-recovering hay fever later (long story) and Tessa is snapped out of her stupor. Back aboard Flopear she hops. But what of the precious fire-crystal?

So much for the (apparently) compassionate Flopear. Here he reverts to his established "I'll always find excuses why you can never leave me" form.

And so the search continued, deep into the blackness of outer-space…

Update 23/10/07: The mighty "philcom55″, over at the comicsuk.co.uk forums, has just uploaded the first page of the first ever Flopear story for us. Click here.

1. Drawn, I've been reliably informed, by Robert Macgillivray. [back]

Since local supplies of shoddy, cheap toys remain limited and undependable, I thought it might prove vaguely amusing to launch a new series on the blog formerly known as fustar.org.

Since its inception Fústar's subtitle has been (the uncatchy) "Recycling Cultural Waste Since 2005…" and while I've generally tried to make the blog live up (or down) to these words the slogan has gone through spells of lurking in the shadowed background. With the help of the the shiny new (or, better yet, dusty, musty & old) "Museum of Cultural Waste" I hope to shove the blog's subtitle centre stage and to the front of the class.

The practises and theoretical foundations of the "Museum" are simple…and no doubt readily familiar to regular readers of Manky Toy Monday. Every so often (hopefully once a week/fortnight) I'll traipse into Limerick city centre and scour the charity shops, market stalls, second-hand establishments (etc) for discarded items in need of a good home. Pottery, board games, books, items of clothing, ornaments, commemorative objects – none shall be denied a place on the museum's shelves (where they shall be celebrated and discussed). The only criterion for inclusion is that they "speak to me"…either figuratively or literally.

First up (courtesy of J. J. Secondhand's High St. Bookshop) is a battered (but lovely) Bunty Book for Girls 1983.

The first thing that should be noted (or admitted) is how instantly familiar all of the volume's stories are to me. Given a limited supply of pocket money, a voracious appetite for comics, and two comic-buying sisters, I (like many a young fella I'd imagine) routinely devoured the contents of Bunty, Misty et al. Not only did this pursuit enable me to sate my comics addiction, it also (so I thought) allowed me to gaze through a forbidden window into the female world. What I saw there confirmed that "they" valued the following: hockey, horses, ballet, dolls, animals, gothic romance etc. It was like being in drag and going undercover.

The focus today, however, will not be on such "jolly hockey sticks" Bunty staples as "The Four Marys"¹ (captivating as that was), but rather on the more obscure, soft-Sci-Fi adventures of "Belle of the Ball". Here's how Bunty '83 sums up what Belle was all about:

Belle Brown owned a ball that had developed remarkable powers after being treated by space travellers from the planet Orbis.

The inhabitants of Orbis clearly seem to work in mysterious ways their wonders to perform. Their quest for knowledge of Earth ways shows little respect for the traditional Sunday lie-in.

The ball starts to glow. A sign, as Belle tells us, that "a message from the spacemen is coming through". Like many messages of extraterrestrial origin, it is disappointingly mundane…

Off goes Belle to the river, where (as promised) there is much fishing and messing about in boats. One of these boats, however, contains a "business man", his wife, and a snotty, evil-minded son. Evil son tells father to splash fishermen on the bank. Father obliges. Son celebrates and topples into the water. Belle's Ball flies out of her hands and into the water where (after he grabs it in terror) it returns the brat to the safety of the river bank. Instead of being grateful the capitalist pig of a father sees an opportunity for a fast buck:

Capitalist Dad pays little heed to Belle's claims and promptly grabs the ball while Mrs. Capitalist opens the throttle and zooms off. From the safety of mid-river he demonstrates a time-honoured approach to things industry/science does not understand:

2 seconds later and Capitalist Dad is, predictably, humbled. His knife bends ("It's buckled the blade! It's as hard as a cannonball!) before the Orbisian ball forces his boat to run aground. "That's taught those river hogs a lesson!" exclaims a delighted fisherman. Hoorah!

Like many good aliens before them the Orbisians clearly have a penchant for exposing (and punishing) human greed, ignorance and folly. Sanctimonious bastards…

More from the museum soon.

1. Mary Radleigh, Mary Cotter, Mary Simpson and Mary Field for those who need to know. [back]