Main Page Girls Comics

British girls’ comics flourished in the United Kingdom from the 1950s through the 1970s, before beginning to decline in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Publishers known for their girls’ comics included DC Thomson and Fleetway/IPC. Most titles appeared weekly, with the content primarily in picture-story format. The majority of the stories were serialized, with two or three pages per issue, over eight to twelve issues. They were marketed toward young teen girls.

British girls’ comics were often titled after common girls’ names. Examples include Judy, Diana, Jackie, June, Penelope, Mandy, Tina, Sally, Tammy, Sandie, Debbie, Misty, Emma, Penny, Tracy, Suzy, and Nikki.

Long-running titles included Bunty, Mandy, and Judy (all DC Thomson) and Tammy (IPC).

Girls’ comics were the natural evolution of a trend that started with story papers. As boys’ story papers like The Magnet and The Gem gained readerships of young teens, publishers like Amalgamated Press looked to expand the market by producing story papers for girls. Titles like School Friend, Schoolgirls’ Own, and The Schoolgirl, all launched in the period 1919–1922, established a girls’ market.

By the end of World War II, story papers were phasing out in favor of comic books and television. The first girls’ comics, Amalgamated Press’ School Friend and Hulton Press’ Girl, appeared in the early 1950s. (The School Friend comic was in fact the descendant of the School Friend story paper from the 1920s.) The girls’ comics trend took off in the latter half of the 1950s, with the long-running titles Bunty and Judy, as well as titles like Boyfriend and Princess, all debuting in the years 1956–1960. (British romance comics, marketed toward older teen girls and young women, also flourished from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Other than a few examples, however, romance titles had petered out by the mid-1970s.)

DC Thompson had published its first girls’ magazine, Bunty, in 1958. The success of this title led the company to publish Judy, which was also successful: between them, Bunty and Judy achieved a circulation of over one million. DC Thompson went on to launch other similar titles in the 1960s, including Jackie (1964), Diana (1965), and Mandy (1967).

By 1980, there were eleven girls’ comics titles in publication (not counting the slicks, which had much less comics content), but the last girls’ comics of any note to debut happened in 1985: Nikki for Girls, which only lasted until 1989. Even DC Thomson’s girls’ titles fell victim to “merger mania”: Mandy, which began in 1967, absorbed Debbie (which itself had previously absorbed Spellbound, published 1976–1978)[13] in early 1983. Suzy (published 1982–1987) merged into Bunty. And by the time Mandy merged with Judy (launched in 1960) in 1991, that title had previously absorbed Emma (1978–1979) and Tracy (1979–1985).[14]

By 1990, only four girls’ comics were in publication, all published by DC Thomson: Bunty, Mandy, Judy, and Twinkle (the latter was a separate category of comics for “little girls”). The last girls’ title, Bunty, was canceled in 2001.

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