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!

"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]