'Misty' and the Horrible Hidden History of British Comics (2 of 3) by Julia Round

Unlike other girls’ comics, which would often have a few ‘regular’ serials that lasted for their entire run, such as ‘The Four Marys’ in Bunty (DC Thomson, 1958-2001), Misty kept its serials short (averaging around 10 instalments) and seldom revisited characters. Its serial stories revolve heavily around a mystery theme, and all follow the same rough template as we are introduced to a female protagonist who quickly develops a spooky problem of some kind. This may be the intrusion of a supernatural power (visions, telekinesis, telepathy), or the discovery of a mysterious or magical object (a box of paints, a ring, a mirror, a car, a swimsuit). Alternatively the protagonist may find herself trapped in an unhappy situation (a new family, school or world) or become aware of some deception (a secret prisoner or plot of some kind). The plot then develops as the character discovers new information relating to the item or their situation. One common feature is the focus on a protagonist who has to accept or overcome some aspect of their self, and thus the stories can be read as bildungsroman narratives in which characters negotiate unexpected changes and circumstance (a clear metaphor for adolescence) and ultimately accept their new identity or surroundings. For example, in ‘The Four Faces of Eve’ (Malcolm Shaw and Brian Delaney), Eve has no memories of her past and is plagued by terrifying nightmares of death. She ultimately discovers that she has been made from the bodies of four different girls and is experiencing visions of their memories. The story revolves around her search for a friend (‘I’m so lonely. I’ve got no friends, no memories, and now, it seems, no family!’, #21) and attempts to solve the mystery of her origins. She despairs (‘I’m a freak, a monster!’, #29), but when she finally tells her story to the circus folk she has met, they not only believe her but also show her the way out of her situation, as her friend Carol’s father informally adopts her, saying ‘I’ve got two daughters now.’ (#31)

‘The Four Faces of Eve’, Misty #22. Written by Malcolm Shaw, art by Brian Delaney.

Misty combined these serial instalments with one-off single stories: generally wicked four-page cautionary tales where a delinquent protagonist would be dramatically punished for a misdeed. A short selection might include: Cathy cons an old lady out of a moodstone ring which then sucks all the colour out of her life (‘Moodstone’, #1); a gossip columnist is crushed to death by the books of names and notes she has kept on her acquaintances (‘Sticks and Stones’, #16); clothes-thief Ann is turned into a fashion dummy (‘When the Lights go Out!’, #18); cruel siblings Vivien and Steve trap a mouse in a maze until it dies of exhaustion but are in turn locked in a maze by sentient apes (‘The Pet Shop’, #24); Sally awakens a real ghost while teasing her scared cousin (‘The Last Laugh’, #29); mugger Cath causes an old lady to be hit by a bus but is then run over herself (‘Dead End’, #34); Sue takes a creepy mask to win a Halloween competition but then cannot remove it (‘Mask of Fear’, #39); Rita steals a jigsaw but ends up trapped in one (‘The Final Piece’, #44); Lisa steals a clock but discovers she will have to wind it forever (‘Slave of Time’, #55); Olivia summons the spirits of her teachers to cheat on a test but they will not leave (‘The Disembodied’ #68); cheat Alison is given a magic pen but continues to cheat so it breaks and covers her with irremovable ink (‘A Stain on her Character’, #72); Sally destroys her dad’s snail experiments, but the snails trap and immerse her (‘House of Snails’, #77); Kate scares her little sister with monster stories and is attacked by a monster herself (‘Monster Movie’, #87); vandals break some stained glass windows and end up trapped in the new ones (‘Crystal Clear’, #99); and jealous Roma drugs her cousin and cuts off her beautiful hair, but is then consumed by ghostly hair growing out of the floor (‘Crowning Glory’ #101). 

Alongside this were single-page comedy series: Miss T (a hapless witch), Wendy the Witch, and Cilla the Chiller (who appears in the annuals). Miss T was created, written and drawn by Joe Collins, who had created a number of other comedy strips for different titles, such as ‘The Kitty Café Cats’ (Girl), ‘Snoopa’ (Penny, Jinty and Penny), and ‘Edie the Ed’s Niece’ (Tammy). Miss T features regularly in the weekly issues of Misty and even takes over from her on occasion: welcoming the reader on the inside cover (#91) and often appearing and addressing readers on the ‘Write to Misty’ letters page (#16). Her bulging eyes, tangled wiry hair, bulbous nose and warty face should make her a repulsive character, but the little witch exudes innocence and is generally trying to do good (despite unintentional mishaps), making her an appealing heroine. Her battered witch’s hat and oversized shoes also contribute to a visual sense of guileless chaos, and the strip enhances this by being heavy on effects: using emanata such as motion lines, and sound effects (‘Glop’, ‘Burp’). When she is critiqued by a reader in the letters page of #79 (‘I think she’s STUPID and ought to be in stupid comics, not yours’) a lively debate continues for three issues (#89-#91). In the final count Misty claims that 270 people support Miss T with just twenty-six against: ‘a victory for the little witch of more than ten to one’.

‘Miss T’, Misty #70. Written and drawn by Joe Collins.

Wendy the Witch (by Mike Brown) was a reprint from Sandie (1972-73), aimed at slightly younger readers. Wendy’s spells often help her to revenge herself on bullies, although they may go awry. Her strips often make heavy use of puns (‘She’s had her chips now, eh, monster?’, #60) and editorial asides. The supporting cast of characters (which include Enid, Nellie, Rosie, and Nosey Nelly) give the strip a feel similar to The Beano’s ‘Bash Street Kids’ (Leo Baxendale), or ‘Dennis the Menace’ (devised by George Moonie, David Law and Ian Chisholm) as Wendy gets ‘the slipper’ from her mum (Misty Annual 1979).  

Cilla the Chiller, a schoolgirl ghost who haunts a stately home and plays tricks on its visitors, appears only in the Misty annuals. Its creators are unknown, and the strip has a similar feel to the other two comedies: puns are common, and the art is in a typical British comics style: reminiscent of the work of Reg Partlett or Leo Baxendale.

‘Wendy the Witch’, Misty #55. Art by Mike Brown.

Julia Round’s research examines the intersections of Gothic, comics and children’s literature. Her books include Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics (2019), Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (2014), and the co-edited collection Real Lives Celebrity Stories. She is a Principal Lecturer at Bournemouth University, co-editor of Studies in Comics journal (Intellect) and the book series Encapsulations (University of Nebraska Press), and co-organiser of the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference (IGNCC). Her new book on Gothic for Girls and Misty is accompanied by a searchable database, creator interviews, and other open access notes and resources, available at www.juliaround.com.

'Misty' and the Horrible Hidden History of British Comics (Part 1 of 3) by Julia Round

British comics, especially those for girls, dominated children’s entertainment in the last century but have been all but forgotten today. When remembered, there is a perception that the boys’ titles were all about heroic adventures and space travel, while the girls got stories about horses and boarding schools. Nothing could be further from the truth! – these comics were not for the fainthearted and tales could often include murderous animals, football violence, Nazi soldiers, cursed choirs, deals with the devil, schoolgirl sacrifice, parallel worlds, monsters, possession, criminals and more.. 

Misty is an important part of this lost history. It was a weekly anthology comic for girls that told tales with supernatural or spooky themes. It was published by Fleetway and ran for 101 issues between February 1978 and January 1980.  It appeared at the end of a decade in which British comics had started to dwindle due to competing entertainment media (cheap paperback books, television, early computer games), and publishers’ exploitation of their audience.  

Cover, Misty #1. (1978)

Despite its short run, Misty is one of the best-remembered British comics. But its stories and themes were not unique. Spooky stories had featured prominently from the earliest days of British comics, such as ‘The Phantom Ballerina’ or ‘Jane and the Ghostly Hound’ in Amalgamated Press’s School Friend (1950-65). IPC’s great rivals DC Thomson had also made prominent use of the theme in comics such as Diana (1963-76), and particularly in their mystery title Spellbound (1976-78), which would be cancelled just as Misty was set to launch.  

But a number of things made Misty stand out from the rest of the crowd. Firstly, its ethereal and seductive cover girl/editor: Misty herself, who welcomed readers to each issue, answered letters on the ‘Write to Misty’ letters page, and sometimes introduced stories in bookending panels (but only in the annuals and specials). Misty was the brainchild of the comic’s editorial team. Its sub editor, Bill Harrington, suggested that the comic should have a host type character: a spooky looking fellow called ‘Nathan somebody’. Nathan was rejected as too creepy, and Misty instead came to life: imagined by the comic’s first editor and co-creator, Wilf Prigmore. The team initially devised her as a ghostly looking character, but she quickly evolved into more of a spirit guide: a ‘child of the mists’ whose role is to present tales for our delight. Misty’s appearance was created by Shirley Bellwood, a portraitist and veteran of the older romance comics, and who based Misty closely on herself. With long black hair, flowing robes and a star charm, she resembles the new age witch of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Her welcomes to readers draw extensively on images of the body and the journey (see further below) as we are constantly urged to ‘walk’, ‘journey’, ‘quest’, ‘venture’, ‘step’ or ‘follow’ Misty elsewhere – crossing into another world.

Inside cover from Misty #16. Art by Shirley Bellwood, words by Malcolm Shaw, lettering and page design by Jack Cunningham.

Misty’s appeal is acknowledged by the comic’s first creator, writer Pat Mills, who says: ‘Misty worked well […] she is this beautiful witch-like character and I’m sure it would have had an appeal to a lot of readers and – being a little cynical about it – possibly the more middle-class kids, or middle-class mum would see it as “safe” whereas if they had seen the kind of covers I had in mind they might have said “Oh no, I don't want my Daisy reading this kind of nonsense!” Mills is credited with suggesting the initial idea for a girls’ horror comic as a vehicle for his lead serial, the Carrie adaptation ‘Moonchild’. He also had a key role in shaping the look of the comic, which drew on the innovations that he and art editor Doug Church had used in 2000AD. This included spreading stories over four pages rather than the usual three, allowing for one big panel or splash page to introduce each instalment.

‘Winner Loses All!’, Misty #79. Art by Mario Capaldi, writer unknown.

Misty’s dynamic page layouts are the second reason for its impact – as part of my research into this comic I instigated a small-scale research project (funded by Bournemouth University’s Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Communication) into these layouts. This was devised and conducted by Dr Paul Fisher Davies, who tagged layout features in ten randomised issues, Tags included panel features such as angled borders, round borders, open borders, jagged borders, and so forth, along with page layout features such as arrows, colour, inset panels, and splash pages. The pages were also categorized in terms of their relationship to a standard ‘grid’ or number of tiers.

‘A Scream in the Night’, Misty #47. Art by Jorge Badia Romero, writer unknown.

The findings were remarkable. Misty’s pages are continually transgressive and dynamic – in the sample of 241 pages there were no pages that received no tags – even those that appear simple and perpendicular still have at least one dynamic feature, such as an open panel border or staggered tier. Panel borders are varied and experimental in form: they are often angled, liminal or indeterminate (ragged, misty) or broken in some way. The most common feature found was the borderless panel, achieved either by using blank space to create an implied border, or by overlaying consecutive images so they appear contiguous. Another significant page feature noted was transgression, where character limbs or other objects break an enclosing panel border or other spatial container, which occurs on ninety-three pages (39%). These exciting formats are most often used for a purely decorative purpose with no clear narrative meaning, although in some instances they are modalising (i.e. have ties to the story content, such as a cloud shape to indicate a dream or memory). When modalising features appear, they tend towards the emotional and symbolic rather than the prosaic – for example indicating heightened emotion (jagged border) or reinforcing the central motifs of the story (representational border). 

The study’s findings also helped us reflect on the usefulness of current comics theory, using the notion of the ‘tier’, which is an important organizational principle of the comics page and is prominent in francophone discussion of bande dessinée (as ‘bandes’ or ‘strips’ are integral to the French name for the medium). The work of Benoît Peeters (1991), Thierry Groensteen (2009, 2012), and Renaud Chavanne (2010) supports the search for tiered patterns as a principle in the Misty layouts. However, this project found that while tiers do seem to be an organizing principle for most Misty pages, this seldom takes the form of a straightforward grid. Variations such as staggering (where the upper and lower edges of panels in sequence do not line up) and tilting (where the baseline that defines reading progression is at an angle rather than horizontal) are extremely common: appearing on ninety-six pages (40%) and eighty-nine pages (37%) respectively. 

The dramatic and dynamic page design also has much to do with Misty’s art editorial team: art editor Jack Cunningham and art assistant Ted Andrews, who both worked on the comic for its entire run. The art was commissioned from Spain, drawing on artists from three main studios (Selecciones Ilustradas, Creaciones Editoriales/Bruguera, and Art Bardon), and sometimes manipulated heavily to fit house style. Cunningham recalls that when it was received it would be in various sizes, so the first thing to do was to ‘make a standard size that every artist worked to, and it used to appear as quite simply as square frame, square frame, square frame, and as we got a better idea we perhaps started off with some figures that were outside of the frame, run the titles across two pages, and break it all up, bit by bit […] I didn’t go through the whole script of course, but I designed what the opening page should look like and the end page should look like. And then here and there indicate where it would be better to leave a frame open perhaps. Because it’s very static, and very difficult to get any feeling of movement.’ Some artists also designed their own page layouts, with the extra page allowed for each story giving them space to shine.

 The Spanish artists who worked on Misty and many of the other British girls’ and boys’ comics of the time were powerhouses of talent, and their skill is the third reason that Misty had such an impact. These artists had defined the look of 1950s British romance comics, dominating Fleetway’s catalogue of titles (such as Valentine, Mirabelle, Roxy and Marilyn), and glamorising their content. While it has often been assumed that the Spanish artists were used because they were cheap, artist and researcher David Roach (Masters of Spanish Comic Book Art) states categorically that ‘They weren’t used because they were cheap, they were used because they were the best!’  Many worked for the American industry at the same time. Isidre Mones remembers Misty fondly, saying ‘I always had a suspicion that there is a sector of British women between forty and forty-five years old traumatized by those comics that I drew. I overlapped them with my Warren work, and I did not disguise the terrifying aspect very much!’

 Stories were not signed and original art was not returned, so the identification of artists is an ongoing task conducted by fans and scholars online. For those interested in learning more, a searchable database of all the Misty artists’ names and story summaries is available at www.juliaround.com/misty. Recycling and ‘bodging’ was used extensively to get the most out of an expensive piece of quality art. While almost all of the content of the weekly issues was original, the annuals and specials would reprint these stories, alongside reprints from earlier titles. The accepted wisdom was that stories could be recycled every few years as the audience would have moved on, although this was not always the case.

 Misty’s fourth great strength was in its highly skilled writing team and its combination of different story types. As creators were not credited it is hard to identify the authors of stories, although its editorial team (editor Malcolm Shaw, and sub editor Bill Harrington) would have written many of these. Malcolm Shaw and Pat Mills had worked together previously, launching Jinty in 1974, before it was taken over by Mavis Miller when she left June.  Shaw took over from Misty’s initial editor Wilf Prigmore after just a few issues, and served for almost the comic’s entire run. Although Malcolm Shaw wrote for many girls’ titles, the Misty stories were a perfect fit for his interests in science fiction and myth, and allowed him to push the boundaries of fiction for girls. He was passionate about the title and was its lead editor for the bulk of its run.

Julia Round’s research examines the intersections of Gothic, comics and children’s literature. Her books include Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics (2019), Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (2014), and the co-edited collection Real Lives Celebrity Stories. She is a Principal Lecturer at Bournemouth University, co-editor of Studies in Comics journal (Intellect) and the book series Encapsulations (University of Nebraska Press), and co-organiser of the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference (IGNCC). Her new book on Gothic for Girls and Misty is accompanied by a searchable database, creator interviews, and other open access notes and resources, available at www.juliaround.com.

Comics, Childhood and Memory—An Autobiography (Part 3 of 3) by Melanie Gibson

Comics, Childhood and Memory: An Autobiography (Part 3 of 3)

Melanie Gibson

A very contrasting example, which moves away from the concept of agency and glamour and reflects the move towards learning through difficulty and emotional turmoil, is seen in Figure 9, a story which featured in Tammy from 1974 to 1984.

As noted above stories in British girls’ comics generally became bleaker as the twentieth century progressed, and made extensive use of the victim heroine motif. Here, as well as incorporating the increasingly fashionable activity of gymnastics, popularized through television coverage of the Olympic Games in the 1970s, especially through the figure of Olga Korbut, the story features a main character who is another working class outsider. As with the school stories mentioned earlier, the focus is on Bella’s trials and challenges, initially at the hands of relatives who want her to use her skills to steal on their behalf, and later on the part of the gymnastic establishment, as the example below shows. However, in contrast to the adult male characters her body constantly breaks the frame and the images seem to celebrate the inability of the form of the comic to control her moving figure. The narrative also celebrates her class position, rather than attempting to direct her into becoming a middle-class girl, and locates her as thriving, rather than simply surviving.

Bella at the Bar’ (Tammy, IPC, Jan. 15 1983, pp. 14-16)

To conclude, the general cultural consensus, or rather, stereotype, about British girls’ comics was that they were less significant than comics for boys, or other types of comic, specifically because they had been created for a young female audience.

In some ways I adopted that stereotype, as it was not the British girl’s titles that I was drawn to in becoming an ‘aca-fan’, but the superhero titles from the USA. I was influenced in this initial choices of focus by what had become a life-long engagement with that specific genre. However, in writing this article, I recognize that I did not exclusively read in that genre, but like most children in Britain, across a range, including the girls’ comic.

In looking at examples from material that I had at the time, rather than titles came into my growing comics collection as an ‘aca-fan’, when I became interested in exploring women’s memories of comics, I can see a number of links across the two genres that dominated my childhood reading, a few of which I have started to draw out above.

What surprises me most in revisiting my childhood reading, is how much the body in movement and physicality, much like superhero titles, is significant in girls’ comics, whether through activities seen as specifically signifying girlhood, or simply through being adventurous and engaged with others.

Finally, returning to memory, revisiting these titles evokes an emotional response, as they bring back discomfort with notions of traditional femininity, as well as tensions around school. I have a clearer understanding, perhaps, of why I rejected girls’ comics generally, but I can see that some were, and are, important and positive aspects of my reading history.

Bibliography

Bunty (DC Thomson) 1958-2001

Girl (Hulton Press) 1951-1964

Jackie (DC Thomson) 1964-1993.

June (Fleetway) 1961-1974.

Lady Penelope (City) 1966-1969.

Mandy (DC Thomson) 1967-1997.

Roxy (AP) 1958-1963.

School Friend (AP) ran from 1919-1929 as a story paper and 1950-1965 as a comic.

Tammy (IPC) 1971-1984.

Twinkle (DC Thomson) 1968-1999.

Gibson, M. (2015) Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood. University of Leuven Press. 

Gibson, M. (2008) ‘Nobody, somebody, everybody: ballet, girlhood, class, femininity and comics in 1950s Britain’. In: Girlhood Studies. 1, 2, pp. 108-128  

Gibson, M. (2008) ‘From 'Susan of St. Brides' to 'Heartbreak Hospital': nurses and nursing in the girls' comic from the 1950s to the 1980s’. In: The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies. 5, 2, pp. 104-126 

Gifford, D. (1975) The British Comic catalogue 1874-1974. Mansell. 

Kuhn, A. (1995) Family Secrets: Acts of memory and imagination. London: Verso. 

__________

Dr Mel Gibson is an Associate Professor at Northumbria University, UK, specializing in teaching and research relating to comics, graphic novels, picturebooks and fiction for children. She has published widely in these areas, including the monograph (2015) Remembered Reading, on British women's memories of their girlhood comics reading. Her most recent work focuses on girlhoods, agency and contemporary comics. Mel has also run training and promotional events about comics, manga and graphic novels for schools and other organizations since 1993 when she contributed to Graphic Account, a publication that focused on developing graphic novels collections for 16-25 year olds, which was published by the Youth Libraries Group in the UK.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is edited by Dr William Proctor and Dr Julia Round.

Comics, Childhood and Memory—An Autobiography (Part 2 of 3) by Melanie Gibson

Comics, Childhood and Memory: An Autobiography (Part 2 of 3)

Mel Gibson

I next turn to the most popular of the titles for pre-teens in the late 1950s and on, Bunty, which I experienced entirely as a ‘pass-along reader’. The following images all come from that periodical. I chose to use a single edition here to show different styles of illustration, the use of color and the mixture of new and reprinted material.

Unlike School Friend and Girl, the key difference was that in Bunty the publisher aimed to create comics that they hoped would appeal to working class readers, so developing new markets by further differentiating the audience by class as well as age. Again, as with Girl, the actual audience read across class lines. Familiar tropes and narratives were given new twists in Bunty, most notably, perhaps, in schoolgirl stories. This was the case in ‘The Four Marys’, where one of the ‘Marys’ was a working-class scholarship pupil. This was the narrative most often mentioned by respondents in my 2015 book on memories of comics, and had an impact on several generations of readers. It was reported as about community, unity and friendship, and as enabling girls to overcome obstacles, a narrative of productive and positive inclusion, as is implied by aspects of the story in Figure 4.

However, this approach could be double-edged given that this narrative, like many others, focused on the problems of being a working-class outsider. The stories tended to be concerned with the struggle of such outsiders to deal with the snobbery of, and bullying by, both staff and other pupils. So, on the one hand, one might become one of a very close-knit group of friends, but on the other, one might be victimized because of a perceived difference from the school ‘norm’. As someone who had been severely bullied in school by a teacher before the age of eleven, such stories were far too close to my actual experience to be pleasant reading, again resulting in rejection, especially as I was unconvinced that I would eventually win out as the heroines in the comics did.

These particular genre stories, then, can be interpreted in very different ways. The example below, which appeared in the early 1970s, is a reprint of a much earlier story, as the style of art suggests, along with the uniforms and the dress of the teachers. Here the focus is inter-school sports rivalry and about the consequences of being a ‘show-off’, in this case about a school having superior sports facilities. There is, all the same, a sub-narrative about who is included on the team, with snobbery playing a major part in tensions within the school.

‘The Four Marys’ (Bunty, DC Thomson, 832, Dec. 22 1973, pp. 16-17)

The next two images, also from Bunty, are included to illustrate the domestic and everyday life aspects of the title. The first is the title page featuring the ‘Bunty’ picture story which was an often humorous and affectionate account of the titular Bunty’s life. The anthropomorphized dog in the top corner, whilst a surreal addition, is based on Bunty’s dog, which appears in a more normal form in other stories. Many of these comics had a title which was a girls’ name and the contents and cover were, in effect, a summation of a form of girlhood and of the inferred age and gender suitable interests of the potential reader. As with the Twinkle narrative above there are captions, but no speech balloons, so Figure 5 also shows how British comics for girls maintained a range of modes of address.

Bunty front cover (Bunty, DC Thomson, 832, Dec. 22 1973, p. 1)

The last page of the same edition, featured what was also described in interview (2015) as one of the best remembered aspects of the title across the whole period of the publication of the title, the cut out doll. These pages were often seasonally themed, as is the case here, given that the reader is asked to choose an outfit for a Christmas party. Note also that despite the very different styles of drawing the girls on the front and back cover are both meant to be Bunty, emphasizing the overall identity of the periodical. To actually play with the dolls, in an era before photocopying or scanning were commonplace, meant that the reader had to destroy the ending of the final story, forcing a choice of what was more important to them as individuals. The title was, then, interactive to an extent and this activity serves to point out the agency of the reader.

Bunty Cut out doll (Bunty, DC Thomson, 832, Dec. 22 1973, p. 32)

There were, as mentioned above a number of narratives that featured girls with powers of one kind or another. One of the most popular was Valda (Figure 7) who featured in Mandy from the late 1960s into the 1980s. Many of the narratives focus on adventures, which makes the character increasingly distinct from the domestic and the victim heroine in the comics. Others feature her skills and prowess in a number of sports, including ice skating, tennis and diving. However, she also fights evil and rescues those in difficulty, the latter as shown in Figure 7. She takes her power in part from the crystal depicted around her neck in the main panel, but also has to bathe regularly in the flames of the ‘fire of life’, ensuring the continuation of her skills and youthful appearance, despite being over 200 years old. As a child, what particularly impressed me about this particular story, in one of the few girls’ annuals that I owned, was the abrupt way in which the narrative was introduced. To simply dismiss the concerns and questions of adult males in favor of following one’s own agenda sounded wonderful. Here, then, is another point of contact between girls’ comics and my preferred superhero comics, in what can be recognized as a non-costumed female hero with powers who is assertive and independent. Here the directive aspects, or the focus on suffering, that appeared in other narratives is absent, offering space for celebration, rather than modification, of the self.

‘Valda’ (Mandy Annual, DC Thomson, 1976, p.2)

What the examples above indicate is that there was generally a quite self-contained world, or model, of girlhood (with various age and class inflections) in each of these titles. This was, on the part of some publishers, purposive in maintaining a space between younger girls and popular culture. Popular culture was seen as potentially corrupting, especially for girls, in the mid twentieth century. That comics could be seen as part of that culture was contained by publishers through incorporating content that could be read by adult gatekeepers such as parents as protecting girls from its worst excesses. Comics were consequently not generally part of the synergy around other forms of popular culture and so became lower profile, increasingly detached from the more consumerist model of girlhood offered in magazines.

However, this protectionist stance was not consistently followed. The mage below offers an example of a very different approach, given that another way of reading the self-contained worlds of many girls’ comics is not as protection of the girl reader, but as a failure to capitalize on the marketing of other cultural products. The chosen example illustrates the practice of closely shadowing popular television programs from the mid-1960s on. There were comics like Lady Penelope (City, 1966-1969), which in addition to its obvious commitment to Thunderbirds also featured strips on The Monkees and Bewitched (Gifford, 1975, p.95). However, this example is from June, a comic that included strips based on television, but was not dominated by them. ‘The Growing up of Emma Peel’ offers an extension to the series, in what might now be called a prequel. The unfortunate cook that features on the page is later explained to be Emma’s trainer in a number of forms of combat and his role is rather like that of Alfred in Batman. The dialogue serves to suggest that Emma’s father does not take her seriously, but her exclamation ‘Got it! At last!’ is used to show the reader that, far from being a dilettante, she is determined and committed. Here too there is an underlying positioning of the girl as to be shaped, in this case indicating the need for self-discipline in achieving aims. The adult Emma is shown in the photograph that leads into the story, and the assumption is that the reader will be aware of the series, but the emphasis is on what is needed to achieve both her glamorousness and her capacity for action.

‘The Growing up of Emma Peel’ (June, Fleetway, Jan. 29 1966, p. 24)

Dr Mel Gibson is an Associate Professor at Northumbria University, UK, specializing in teaching and research relating to comics, graphic novels, picturebooks and fiction for children. She has published widely in these areas, including the monograph (2015) Remembered Reading, on British women's memories of their girlhood comics reading. Her most recent work focuses on girlhoods, agency and contemporary comics. Mel has also run training and promotional events about comics, manga and graphic novels for schools and other organizations since 1993 when she contributed to Graphic Account, a publication that focused on developing graphic novels collections for 16-25 year olds, which was published by the Youth Libraries Group in the UK.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is edited by Dr William Proctor and Dr Julia Round.

Comics, Childhood and Memory—An Autobiography (Part I of 3) by Mel Gibson

Comics, Childhood and Memory: An Autobiography (1 of 3)

Mel Gibson

Everyone writes and re-writes their autobiographies as they remember, in a continual process of selection and construction. As Annette Kuhn (1995) described it, memory is ‘driven by two sets of concerns. The first has to do with the ways memory shapes the stories we tell, in the present, about the past-especially stories about our own lives. The second has to do with what it is that makes us remember: the prompts, the pretexts of memory; the reminders of the past that remain in the present (p.3). Some of my childhood memories are anchored by what I was reading to a specific place and time, in line with what Kuhn suggests, as having been an enthusiastic comic reader generally means that I have a timeline of my childhood, given that they were typically bought new or second-hand shortly after publication. It also means that comics are tied in a direct way to memory, something which as an ‘aca-fan’ became linked with the practice of object elicitation, of using comics as objects in interview.

As a British child born in 1963 in the North East of England my memories of comics incorporate a wide range of texts, including material like Rupert the Bear and Teddy Tail, anthropomorphic narratives which originated as newspaper strips. I also had access to imported superhero comics, which my father bought for me (or perhaps for himself with me as a secondary, pass-along, audience). These were exclusively DC titles, especially Batman, The Flash and Justice League of America. They were aimed at an audience much older than I was when I first read them, with him, as an under five year old. The combination of comics featuring adult characters and a parent who was around only intermittently, given that he was studying art in London, was potent, giving those comics a heightened significance. That he also used elements of them in art works stressed their importance too and may have contributed to my interest in comics as an ‘aca-fan’.

However, I also had access to comics in the form of annuals that had been gifts for my mother as a child. These annuals related to a gender specific title called Girl, a weekly periodical which had specific class and gender signifiers. More costly than many of the other titles available, and partly printed in four colour rotogravure on comparatively high quality paper, it was also a broadsheet. The majority of titles for girls, in contrast, were tabloid and although they might feature a cover in colour, were usually printed in black and white, with occasional uses of red as a spot colour (see Figure 4 for an illustration of this). All of these physical qualities attached to Girl could be seen as signifying the middle-class nature of the periodical. Who the audience actually was is not so fixed, but the intention was, whoever the reader, to guide their aspirations. It is Girl and the genre that it belonged to, the British girls’ comic, which will be the focus of the majority of this article. I would add that I am focusing down further still, on titles that were aimed largely at younger readers, rather than those in their teens.

The robust annuals, part of the wider culture and marketing around comics, along with toys and a range of other materials and events, were a staple Christmas gift in British households throughout the late twentieth century. The annuals I got to read had been published in the 1950s and contained a mixture of other materials alongside comic strips, including prose narratives. These earlier British publications linked me with both my mother and grandmother through forming the basis of some of our shared reading and family history. As Kuhn states, ‘an image, images, or memories are at the heart of a radiating web of associations, reflections and interpretations’ (1995, p.4).

Engaging with both the superhero comic and the girls’ comic, two very different comic traditions, meant that they became juxtaposed in my mind. Both inhabited what seemed to be gendered spaces and readerships and, indeed, almost appeared to be capable of being used as tools to mold me into a ‘proper’ girl or boy. Both also seemed to contain characters whose activities were linked with gender. I was, however, most drawn to stories in Justice League of America and to one in particular in Girl, entitled ‘Belle of the Ballet’. Whilst the content is very different, what drew me in was that the male and female characters had shared aims and objectives.

The example shown below, which I have analysed in depth elsewhere (2008), is a complete short story from an annual (in the British weekly anthology comics stories could run for twelve weeks or more, each week ending with a cliff-hanger). What is important in this context is that David, the male dance student is a regular character who trains and performs alongside Belle and Marie. He does not dominate the stories, but is simply part of their friendship group. In this example the friends investigate a dance focused mystery where class and the acceptability of dance are also key themes.

This narrative and others about Belle and her friends, the encouragement of family members and the increased cultural interest in ballet as a socially appropriate activity resulted in my taking ballet classes when I was around five. This ended rather swiftly when stage fright and the theft of my Twinkle comics from the dressing room after a performance resulted in my refusing to go back to classes again (or read that comic).

‘Belle of the Ballet in Little Miss Nobody’. (Girl Annual 3, Hulton, 1954, pp. 81-84)

The stolen copies of Twinkle flag up another set of references, as well as memories. It was a British weekly title which was sporadically bought for me and formed a dramatic contrast with the superhero titles. It was an important title for very young girls and, I believe, the only nursery comic that consciously addressed a gendered audience, as indicated by the way that the strap-line after the title ran, ‘specially for little girls’. Accordingly, it often had similar content to titles for older girls, including a focus on work. For instance, Twinkle featured a narrative about ‘Nancy the Little Nurse’, who helped her grandfather mend toys. I returned to this comic and that narrative in 2008, in writing about the many tales about nurses that appeared in British girls’ comics. Twinkle also featured a number of magical friend stories and a range of activities including a cut out doll.

‘Nancy the Little Nurse’ (Twinkle, No. 362, 28th Dec 1974)

I fear that as a child I felt the material in the girls’ titles was somehow constraining in comparison to the content of superhero comics. It was only later, in researching girls and comics, that I became fully aware of the diverse narratives that existed and that these titles were often ground-breaking in terms of both approach and content. Engaging with girls’ comics as an academic, in hoping to understand what these texts meant to readers, helped me grasp the complex nature of the genre and how readers understood those comics, using them as identifiers of self, often in opposition to monolithic readings of girlhood and the girls comic. However, as a child with limited funds to draw on, I simply opted for what I saw as more exciting and less directive. The full color in the superhero titles was also, I admit, an attraction.

However, to return to memory, in largely rejecting British girls’ comics as a slightly older child (preferring, by the mid-1970s, as I entered my teens, the X-Men and Franco-Belgian albums in translation, particularly Asterix, Lucky Luke and Tintin) I was consciously cutting myself off from what was a major genre and shared cultural experience. I now suspect it was also an attempt to disengage from British girlhood and what I saw as the expectations surrounding it. It was also about this time that I became an avid reader of science fiction for adults, which further moved me away from girls’ culture.

To put the scale of this rejection in context, British girls’ comics existed for every age group, as the depiction of the characters in the two narratives above suggests. These weekly anthology publications formed the majority of reading of most British girls between the 1950s and 1990s, with over fifty titles existing through this period and major ones circulating between 800,000 and a million per week. It was, in effect, the dominant form of comic aimed at girls, and created a potential feminine reading trajectory that ran from Twinkle, through Bunty and similar titles aimed at those under twelve, to titles for older readers focused on heterosexual romance and popular culture such as Roxy in the 1950s, and later Jackie and on to magazines. What is also significant about these narratives is that romance only featured in titles for older readers and the worlds depicted in girls comics were about their friendships and rivalries, not about boys.

The narratives they included changed over time especially from the late 1970s to 1990s, some becoming rather bleaker and horror-inflected and others opting for realism via the inclusion of photo stories. Further, a number were slowly converted into magazines, reflecting what were seen as changing interests amongst girls. This shift also served to emphasize that comics were for boys, which the sales figures for girls’ titles actually contradicted. However, as I became a teenager, I was increasingly uncomfortable about talking about my interest in comics, as cultural assumptions about reading meant that I was often told to read magazines for older girls or women instead. Additionally, actively seeking out superhero comics put me firmly in a male zone, including one specialist shop where I was known as ‘the girl’, and seen as a rarity. This meant that I inhabited a liminal zone around popular periodical reading and gender.

To return to the kinds of narratives that existed, the titles for younger readers featured a number of dominant types. There were schoolgirl investigators, school stories of various kinds, work related stories, those tied to popular activities like ballet, ice skating, horse riding or gymnastics and ones about friendships. They also contained ghost stories, ones where girls had magical friends, rags to riches narratives, and tales about animals of various kinds. There were, in addition, forays into science fiction and fantasy, with a number containing heroines with magical or other powers. The umbrella of the girls’ comic, then, had a very diverse range of material beneath it. The following examples give a small indication of some of what was available.

I begin with ‘The Silent Three’, an example of the girl investigator narrative and one of the most popular narratives in what was one of the most popular titles for girls in the 1950s. Whilst the majority of girl investigator narratives do not incorporate costumes, here the three friends wear matching domino masks and cloaks. The friends’ activities are also part of a type of secret society at school. Consequently, investigative narratives in this particular story run alongside ones about everyday school life, including school bullies attempting to either find out about or discredit those in the society. This has some obvious links with concepts in the superhero titles including the vulnerability of the hero and the secret identity. This is despite the private all-girl school and middle (or upper middle) class context of the narrative. The villains, as suggested in the images below, as well as the school bullies, may also be, like those in some Enid Blyton books, class ‘others’.

‘The Silent Three’. (School Friend Annual, AP, 1958, p. 7)

Dr Mel Gibson is an Associate Professor at Northumbria University, UK, specializing in teaching and research relating to comics, graphic novels, picturebooks and fiction for children. She has published widely in these areas, including the monograph (2015) Remembered Reading, on British women's memories of their girlhood comics reading. Her most recent work focuses on girlhoods, agency and contemporary comics. Mel has also run training and promotional events about comics, manga and graphic novels for schools and other organizations since 1993 when she contributed to Graphic Account, a publication that focused on developing graphic novels collections for 16-25 year olds, which was published by the Youth Libraries Group in the UK.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is edited by Dr William Proctor and Dr Julia Round.

Remembering UK Comics: A Conversation with William Proctor and Julia Round (Part II)

‘THE BASH STREET KIDS,’ THE BEANO

JR

When I was reading comics like Jackie I don’t remember any credits at all though, and I certainly didn’t know enough about the creators to follow anyone in particular. I barely recognized celebrities in the photos strips! (and there were some fairly big names, though often before they were famous - that’s George Michael below). Jackie always felt more like a magazine than a comic to me though - I mostly remember its articles (on anything from anorexia to crafting), pop music features and interviews, and of course tons of quizzes (how else would I have known what sort of personality I had or how to attract the right sort of boy?!)

George Michael stars in this photo strip from Jackie

So my awareness of British comics creators has been almost entirely retrospective, a bit like yours I think. It’s been an amazing journey of discovery! I’m still not great at recognizing art, but the range of styles and techniques and layouts in these comics is spectacular. Some of the pages are mind-blowing! — notions like tiers and grids simply didn’t seem to exist for these artists. 

‘The Chase’, Misty #40 (art by Douglas Perry, writer unknown)

‘The Loving Cup’, Misty #71 (art by Brian Delaney, writer unknown)

WP

That’s a great point about artistic styles, Julia. Again, at the time it would have just seemed typical to me, and while breaking the structural ‘rules’ of grids and tiers has become quite common nowadays, often with critics describing such exploits as innovative (especially in superhero comics). But it’s not something I’ve given much consideration to be honest (and certainly not at the time).  

JR

There’s a lot of variety! Some artists did always go in for quite static layouts of course - regular rectangular panels laid out in three tiers. Some of the DC Thomson titles in particular might include things like a snippet of dialogue captioning the whole page (‘Dad! You can’t mean it!’) - for me, this can make the events feel a bit more like summaries and slows the pace. But a lot of the girls’ comics had crazy layouts! All those gymnasts and swimmers meant dynamic action that could be used to break up the page. Doug Church’s role as art editor of 2000AD led a big push towards splash pages and large opening panels that definitely fed into titles like Misty in the late 1970s, but I think the impetus was always there. 

‘Bella’, Tammy (written by Primrose Cumming, art by John Armstrong)

WP

Thanks to Professor Martin Barker, I now have a complete run of the 1970s’ comic Action, which caused quite a controversy stirred by the media ‘harm brigade’ (the more things change, and all that). It is my favorite UK comic overall, but that came much later after I read Barker’s Comics, Ideology and its Critics (1989). I won’t go into that here as we have an essay upcoming focused on the title, and an interview with Martin Barker himself, but I think it’s interesting that comics tapped into successful films, much in the same way that so-called ‘exploitation’ cinema did. Spielberg’s Jaws led to a cycle of ‘Sharksploitation’ and ‘nature-run-amok’ films, like William Girdler’s Grizzly (1976) -- which lifts its plot from Jaws, but replaces the Great White with an 18-foot tall grizzly bear! -- Michael Anderson’s Orca (1977), Joe Dante’s Piranha (2000),and many, many more, all the way into the new millennium with the Sharknado franchise. But UK comics tapped into successful film cycles as well, like Action’s ‘Hookjaw,’ a bloody intertextual remix of Moby Dick and Jaws.

‘Hookjaw’ from Action

It seems to me — and I’m sure scholars have mentioned this before me--that comics also drew from the exploitation model of latching onto the coat-tails of popular cinema. Another example that springs to mind comes out of your research into Misty, Julia! I’m thinking of the strip titled ‘Moonchild’ by Pat Mills and John Armstrong, which is a thinly-veiled riff on Stephen King’s Carrie; although as Simon Brown points out in his Screening Stephen King, without Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation, King probably wouldn’t be the house-hold name he is today! So I’m guessing that it was De Palma’s film that ‘Moonchild’ is responding to rather than King (at least directly). 

JR

Absolutely — the Misty serials in particular seemed to rearticulate texts from all over the place. As well as ‘Moonchild,’ Pat Mills wrote a serial called ‘Hush, Hush, Sweet Rachel’, which takes its plot from Frank De Felitta’s Audrey Rose (1975, also adapted into a film in 1977). ‘End of the Line’ (Malcolm Shaw and John Richardson, #28–42) draw on the movie Death Line (1972), where people are kidnapped by the cannibalistic descendants of a group of Victorian tube tunnel workers trapped underground. Of course, sometimes the recycling is little more than a name-check to create an atmosphere: ‘Whistle and I’ll Come,’ which recalls M.R. James’s ghost story ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (1904) which was made into a UK television adaptation in 1968). ‘Hush, Hush, Sweet Rachel’ is a portmanteau of the movie Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), a psychological thriller about infidelity and a falsely accused murderess, and the TV movie Sweet, Sweet Rachel (1971), a pilot for a series about a murderer who uses extrasensory perception. And ‘The Four Faces of Eve’ (Malcolm Shaw and Brian Delaney) name-checks the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve, which is about dissociative identity disorder. So intertextual references were very common, even if only used as a knowing nod to source material or to conjure a mood. 

WP

Although I’m aware of academic work on UK Comics—James Chapman’s British Comics, Mel Gibson’s Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood, and Martin Barker’s Comics, Ideology and its Critics are three of my personal favourites—I often wonder if some of the UK Comics’ history is in danger of being forgotten. There are surely reams of publications that have yet to receive academic treatment (I am unaware of work on comics like Champ and Scream, two of my nostalgic objects). Of course, you have your new book on Misty coming out soon as well! Mazel tov!

Is that a fair assessment of the field do you think, Julia?  Are we in danger of losing our national memory about UK Comics to some degree?

 JR 

Definitely. Few people thought any of these comics (particularly the girls’ titles) were worth preserving or collecting, and I’ve heard loads of horror stories of original artwork being used as cutting boards, or comics being used to mop up archive floors, or thrown into skips (when Fleetway moved offices), or just given away outside conventions. Mel Gibson’s research into readers’ memories and oral histories actually started because she found that the comics themselves were so hard to get hold of! When big private collections have appeared (such as Denis Gifford’s, after his death) they’ve been split up and sold off. I’ve been part of a number of (rejected) bids to try and get some national research money behind preserving some of these collections, and I’m speaking at a public event next weekend (Saturday 2 November) at the Cartoon Museum in London that is trying yet again to drum up some interest in this. We need to protect and preserve these publications and their ephemera, whether through digitisation or creation of a physical archive. There isn’t anything about today that looks or feels (or smells!) like old British comics — they really are relics of a bygone age, not to mention an important part of our national memory. They have so much to tell us about society from almost every angle — ideology, gender roles, politics, economics, social norms, other media, and much much more. 

 Plus, did I mention that the stories and artwork are awesome?!

BP 

It’s certainly a history that is worth preserving, and I’m sure that there are many titles that have fallen through the academic gap (and perhaps will continue to do so). And yes, the stories and artwork are awesome (sublime, even)! 

I’m sure some readers may find the idea of ‘smell’ quite odd, but when I sniff an old comic, I am immediately catapulted back through time as if at 88 miles per hour in a Delorean; back to a simpler time, of a childhood spent indiscriminately gorging on a bevvy of titles, often picked up at a jumble sale hosted by a local church (in my experience). I remember ink-stained fingers as I delivered comics and newspapers—and the odd porn magazine—on my paper route. I remember Dennis the Menace terrorizing his dad, who would react spectacularly by chasing Dennis with his weaponized slippers. I remember Judge Dredd shooting up another block party, Slaine slicing and dicing his enemies, a thinly-veiled analogue of Robert E. Howard’s Conan. I remember laughing at the various strips in Whizzer and Chips, Cor!, Buster, etc.; gasping at the latest twists and turns in Roy of the Rovers; shivering in terror at ‘The Thirteenth Floor.’  I remember reading my sister’s Jackie, Mandy, and Bunty. Gender didn’t matter in what I read—I was and remain a comic book omnivore— yet it mattered enough not to openly declare my eclecticism to friends for fear of masculine reprisal in the school playground. I remember it as the best of times during the worst of times (I grew up in Thatcher’s Britain, so nuff said). 

DENNIS THE MENACE AND GNASHER FROM THE BEANO

At the beginning of this conversation, I did caution that I would be likely to wax lyrical! My memories of reading as a child, and as a teen, are precious. Without the education provided by comics, I’m not sure I would be such an energetic and avid reader as I have been throughout my adult life. (Bryan Talbot once said that he learned to read through comics, so I know I’m in good company.)  

STRONTIUM DOG FROM 2000AD, ART BY CARLOS EZQUERRA

In essence, this series of essays on UK Comics aims to spotlight at least some of the medium’s history. As such, we have curated a lively series of essays that will hopefully reach those readers for whom UK Comics are forgotten relics, or to share a range of perspectives on a medium that people may not be aware of. We hope you’ll join us on our voyage into the dog-eared, pulp-inflected, yellow-stained past as we remember the wonderful, eclectic, intelligent, and insane world of UK Comics.  

Next week, we begin with Dr Mel Gibson on girl’s comics.  Join us, won’t you?

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on various topics related to popular culture, including Batman. James Bond, Stephen King, Star Wars and more. William is a leading expert on franchise reboots, and is currently writing his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, and Transmedia Histories (forthcoming, Palgrave). He is the co-editor of Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth (with Matthew Freeman, Routledge 2018), and Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch, University of Iowa Press 2019).

Dr Julia Round is a Principal Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK. She is one of the editors of Studies in Comics journal (Intellect Books) and a co-organiser of the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference (IGNCC). Her first book was Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (McFarland, 2014), followed by the edited collection Real Lives, Celebrity Stories (Bloomsbury, 2014). In 2015 she received the Inge Award for Comics Scholarship for her research, which focuses on Gothic, comics, and children’s literature. She has recently completed two AHRC-funded studies examining how digital transformations affect young people's reading. Her new book Misty and Gothic for Girls in British Comics (forthcoming from UP Mississippi, 2019) examines the presence of Gothic themes and aesthetics in children’s comics, and is accompanied by a searchable database of all the stories (with summaries, previously unknown creator credits, and origins), available at her website www.juliaround.com.

Remembering UK Comics: A Conversation with William Proctor and Julia Round (Part I)

Editor’s Note: Most American comic fans know of the so-called British Invasion as creators such as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller, among others, represented new voices in U.S. comics. But few have taken the time to understand the larger British comics culture — the context which these and many other gifted pop culture auteurs emerged. But more than that, we should know more about everyday comics culture — what British youth read, what forms these publications took, how stories circulated in their “ordinary” lives, and so forth.

When I first came to England in the early 1990s, I came back with a suitcase full of magazines and comics, fascinated by a parallel world of popular culture in English which was little known in America. I had read my Angela McRobbie and Martin Barker and even George Orwell’s work on the comic postcard, and wanted to understand this tradition better. I had no idea that British comics was sputtering well before I got there.

When Billy Proctor proposed a series of interviews, conversations, and essays on the British comics tradition, I jumped at the chance. I had first met Billy through our shared interests in the works of Bryan Talbot, having spent a wonderful afternoon at the home of one of the UK’s leading comics artists. I felt more of us around the world should know of this history and so for the next few weeks, I am turning control of my blog over to Proctor, who organized the “Cult Conversations” series a while back, and his colleague, comics scholar Julia Round, for a deep dive into this particular comics culture.

In the coming year, I hope to do more here on comics and comics studies as we ramp up to the release of my book, Comics and Stuff, coming in 2020 from New York University Press

=================

WP

I should state that I am likely to wax nostalgic about UK Comics, or at least, comics I read in my salad years. It seems that my childhood was a period where comic books were in abundance (I was born in 1974). Scanning the shelves of local newsagents these days fills me with sadness, to be honest, although perhaps I’m peering into the past with rose-tinted spectacles. Perhaps not. It’s not that there are no UK comics any longer—far from it. As the image below attests, shelves are teeming with British comics. But to my eyes, they all seem to be for children, less so for anyone over the age of five or six. And what counts as a ‘childrens’ comic’ seems to have shifted quite significantly since around the 1990s.

Here’s an image of UK comics’ shelves in retailer, WHSmith.

Comics were a huge part of my reading life from childhood through to my teens. Of course, I continued to read comics as an adult as well, but gravitated towards more ‘mature’ fare. Maybe it was a rite of passage, generally speaking. Many of us started out reading The Beano, The Dandy, Whizzer and Chips, Cor, etc. then moved onto titles like Victor, Action, The Eagle, Warlord, Scream, Champ, and, of course, 2000AD. I’m talking mainly here about boys' comics, but I also read girls’ comics too! I would never have bought them nor admitted to reading them to my friends though! Even at a young age, boys were dunked in the petri-dish of masculinity, learning to become MEN. If I’d finished reading my weekly purchases, I’d certainly dip into my sister’s Jackie, Bunty, and Tammy, as well as her magazines such as Look-In and Smash Hits.

 Am I romanticizing our youth Julia?

JR   

Not at all! — in fact, I really like the idea that working your way through the British comics, from youngest to oldest, was a rite of passage. Sadly though it seems that often it ended in the denigration and ultimate rejection of comics - I’m wondering if this attitude was almost culturally ingrained. Memory is a strange beast - if you’d asked me twenty years ago if I read British comics as a kid I think I might have said not really - not because I was lying, I just didn’t really remember much about them or how significant they were to me. But I did read them, and part of the joy of immersing myself in them again for research purposes has been having all these half-formed memories flooding back.

JACKIE (1980)

I had a long hiatus from girls’ comics after a particularly scary encounter with Misty when I was about 7 or 8 (for more on that check out our podcast!), but I read Jackie for years afterwards, well into my early teens, and lots before that as well. I think I started on Twinkle, and I definitely read The Beano and The Dandy enough to get some annuals for Christmas. I also distinctly remember a comic from my pre-teen years called BIG that nobody at all remembers (the lack of exclamation mark was very important since there was another pop magazine called BIG! which my newsagent always used to produce for me instead). I’ve often doubted it existed, but a spot of internet research turned up this, and tells me that it was a reprint title, collecting the best of comics such as Cor!, Buster, Whizzer and Chips, and so on. Reprinting and recycling was common practice in the British comics - not just in the souvenir hardback ‘annuals’ which would be released every year in time for well-meaning relatives to buy you for Christmas, but also between titles. Publishers believed that kids only read comics for a few years, meaning that their entire audience would be renewed every 8 years or so, which meant that popular serials that had originally appeared in one title would often be recycled into another one some years later, or collected together under a different name, like BIG.

One of the most interesting things about the British comics was the sheer range of titles. Ones for the very young, like Twinkle, with simple layouts and stories about fairies and flowers and talking animals. The anarchic comedy titles like Beano, Dandy, Cor! and the others. The war, sports and sf titles for boys that you’ve mentioned, and the school and ballet stories for girls (June and School Friend, Bunty), not to mention the romance titles of the 1950s. But as the medium developed and the number of weekly publications increased, it’s worth stressing that these were definitely not all cosy Enid Blyton-style tales - horrific bullying, ghostly happenings, mistaken identities, kidnappings, and much much more graced the pages of the British girls’ comics, and things got dark — really dark! — before the industry faltered in the 1970/80s and finally collapsed in the 1990s.  

It still boggles me that an industry that at its peak was publishing hundreds of weekly titles, with circulation figures up in the millions, can have so completely collapsed! And it didn’t have anything to do with censorship or a Code like in America. British comics publishing was completely dominated by two main companies: DC Thomson, a family-run firm based in Dundee, Scotland, and Fleetway Publications (originally known as Amalgamated Press, and later renamed as the holding company International Publishing Corporation, which also gobbled up many smaller publishers such as Odhams and Newnes). These two companies were engaged in fierce competition which went on for decades. They poached each other’s creators, copied each other’s titles, kept prices low, increased free gifts, and constantly sought to outdo each other for drama and excitement - we, the readers, definitely befitted from their creativity and innovation!  

The strongest memories for me are of absolutely nail-biting stories, combined with crazy layouts and amazing artwork. Fleetway sourced most of this from Spanish artists, many of whom (I found out much later) also worked for publishers like Warren in America. I didn’t know enough about the writers or artists to recognise this at the time, of course, and the British comics stories were completely uncredited for many years, which didn’t help either! Do you remember any particular artists or writers Billy/what are your strongest memories of the ones you read? 

WP 

That’s an interesting question! I think it was only when I started to read 2000AD that artists and writers came to the fore. The comics I read in junior school (ages 7-11) were mostly the humor comics such as The Beano, The Dandy, and later, Champ and Scream. It was only later that I went back and recognized certain writers and artists—Alan Moore was involved in writing ‘Monster’ for Scream, which was a short-lived anthology comic that absolutely terrified me! (I’ve since bought the complete 15-issue run from Ebay.) It was in secondary school (ages 11-16) when I gravitated to 2000AD. I worked at the local newsagents as a paper-boy then, and I even remember the address where I delivered 2000AD on a weekly basis! Unbeknownst to both the addressee and the newsagent, they wouldn’t receive their copy on the day of release, but the day after. I would take the comic home to read before delivering the next day, hoping that I wouldn’t be caught for doing so. At school, there were a few kids who also read 2000AD—and I mean a few. It’s plausible that many teens read 2000AD regularly, but perhaps we were at an age where that wasn’t to be admitted in public. (Puberty came with unwritten rules after all, and comics should have been in the rear-view mirror by that time.)  

But there was one boy who had a massive back catalogue of 2000AD comics, and we became fast friends. He would lend me older issues in chronological order so I could read full stories from beginning to end. Then as now, 2000AD worked on a kind of rotation. The flagship strip was, and remains,  ‘Judge Dredd.’ Dredd would feature in every issue at the front of the comic, but other strips would run for a number of weeks until the story was finished, then depart for a while, replaced by other stories on a rotating basis. I distinctly remember the first time I started to recognize artists’ styles without looking at the credits. The story was ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ and the run that introduced me to the character was by Bryan Talbot. The detail is incredible, with the technique of cross-hatching used to magnificent effect. (I once spoke to Talbot about departing from that style later in his long and illustrious career and he simply remarked: “it takes bloody ages, that’s why I stopped!”) And to this day, ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ remains my absolute favorite UK comic, bar none.

Other artists, such as Brian Bolland and Kevin O’Neill, also became instantly recognizable.  

Of course, this was the era when the ‘big two’ US publishers, Marvel and DC, would start offering work to UK writers and artists, many of whom cut their teeth on 2000AD. In effect, 2000AD became a breeding ground for talent, with now-familiar names crossing the Atlantic to work as hired hands for the big two: Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Peter Milligan, Warren Ellis, Jamie Delano, etc. This is often referred to as ‘The British Invasion.’  

Art by Brian Bolland, who would go on to pencil Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke for DC.

It was much later, however, that writers and artists became sovereign (at least for me). So while I may be au fait with many artists’ styles nowadays, that occurred retroactively, and even more so when I began studying comics as an academic. I must say that my scholarly work, however, is focused more on US superhero comics than UK comics, although I hope that I’ll rectify that in future—I’ve been keen on doing some work on Scream as it seems broadly neglected in academic spheres. 

In a nutshell, my strongest memories are of excitement and horror! Roy of the Rovers always left me gasping with exertion, as did ‘We are United’ in Champ. I was an avid football fan, and these strips seemed akin to the real thing—perhaps more so!  

Also in Champ was ‘The Sinister World of Mr Pendragon.’ I would read it under the bed covers (with a flashlight), and would be so paralyzed with fright that I wouldn’t dare go to the bathroom in case the monsters ate me! ‘The Dracula Files’ in Scream had a similar effect.  

What about you Julia?  Did you recognize artists or follow a particular writer? As you said, of course, many strips went uncredited at the time, but I believe Action and 2000AD instigated a shift towards proper accreditation (I may be wrong about that but I’m sure you’ll tell me!)

SCREAM’S ‘THE DRACULA FILE’

JR   

If you go back far enough, there actually used to be credits in British comics - you can find them in Eagle (1950–69) and some of the romance titles of a similar era, but by the 1970s this wasn’t standard practice any more. Some smaller companies like Top Shelf did carry on crediting their artists and writers, but the British Big Two definitely did not. Part of each comic’s editorial team’s job was actually to paint over any signatures that artists dared to add to their work! - of course this led to lots of more subtle signatures and references bring inserted, and it can be lots of fun to try and spot these. The artist John Armstrong was particularly good at hiding his initials in his artwork! 

I think 2000AD was the comic responsible for bringing creator credits back when it launched in 1977 - its art editor Kevin O’Neill basically said ‘This is bullsh*t’, put them on, and told Fleetway management they were experimenting. They’ve been there ever since! The idea was then picked up by Tammy editor Wilf Prigmore (credits first appeared in Tammy on July 17, 1982, and continued until February 11, 1984). He remembers this move as also being driven by one of his writers, Anne Digby, as the comic was serialising an adaptation of her Trebizon school story novels and she thought adding her name might help them sell. 

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on various topics related to popular culture, including Batman. James Bond, Stephen King, Star Wars and more. William is a leading expert on franchise reboots, and is currently writing his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, and Transmedia Histories (forthcoming, Palgrave). He is the co-editor of Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth (with Matthew Freeman, Routledge 2018), and Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch, University of Iowa Press 2019).

Dr Julia Round is a Principal Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK. She is one of the editors of Studies in Comics journal (Intellect Books) and a co-organiser of the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference (IGNCC). Her first book was Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (McFarland, 2014), followed by the edited collection Real Lives, Celebrity Stories (Bloomsbury, 2014). In 2015 she received the Inge Award for Comics Scholarship for her research, which focuses on Gothic, comics, and children’s literature. She has recently completed two AHRC-funded studies examining how digital transformations affect young people's reading. Her new book Misty and Gothic for Girls in British Comics (forthcoming from UP Mississippi, 2019) examines the presence of Gothic themes and aesthetics in children’s comics, and is accompanied by a searchable database of all the stories (with summaries, previously unknown creator credits, and origins), available at her website www.juliaround.com.

Interview with Morgan G. Ames on 'The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child' (Part III)

You note that many of the accounts that link the OLPC with cultural imperialism discount the cultural agency of the child users. What do these accounts miss? 

Other analyses of OLPC provide some really insightful critiques about the project's potential effects, but nearly all of them just don't have any on-the-ground experience with how OLPC's XO laptops were actually used. Without seeing what kids were doing with the laptops, I feel like they're missing half the story -- in particular, almost none of the kids cared at all about OLPC's vision or the constructionist software on the machine. If they used the laptop at all, they pursued their own interests with it.  

There were also some features of the laptop -- its mesh network, for instance -- that generated a lot of excitement early on, but really did not work in practice. The XO laptops were just too slow and their batteries drained too fast to make mesh networking possible; the capability was in fact removed from an update to the Sugar software. 

At the same time, I don't want to let OLPC off the hook when it comes to cultural imperialism. OLPC's leaders said all sorts of things about kids leapfrogging past all the adults in their lives, teaching themselves English and programming, and ultimately transforming their cultures. But what does it mean to frame kids as the primary agents of change? Negroponte often said just this in his talks: "We have to leverage kids as the agents of change." Not schools, not governments, not infrastructures, not even parents -- kids.  

One problem with this is that it assumes that kids are not really fully within their cultures. This fits with many of our social imaginaries of children as closer to nature and more noble for it -- they aren't mired in the petty concerns of adulthood yet. OLPC hoped to capture children's "natural" interests and steer them toward computing cultures and away from the cultures they were born into. In addition to being a sneakier form of cultural imperialism, this of course didn't work -- my results corroborated what researchers in education and social science know very well: that learning is socially-motivated and culturally-embedded.  

A second, and much more fundamental, problem comes from the model of cultural change this promotes, which centers on children. It means that these projects are under-resourced from the beginning, because they weren't really thinking about infrastructural or institutional change -- they were focused on individual change and just hoping that larger changes flow from that. And when that change fails to happen, it becomes the fault of those individuals. Failure becomes the fault of the children. 

This meant, for one, that when way more laptops were breaking than One Laptop per Child expected, it was at least at first seen as the responsibility of the kids to repair them. OLPC shipped an extra 1% of laptops, but just over a year after laptops had been handed out in Paraguay, 15% were inoperable, and at least another 15% had dead pixels, missing keys, and other hardware problems. This really blindsided Paraguay Educa -- OLPC leaders had told them that these laptops were so rugged they could withstand being tossed around. Negroponte loved to toss XOs across stages and then turn them on in his presentations. Moreover, OLPC leaders said that kids would be able to repair any issue that would come up. Papert himself had said, "An eight-year old is capable of doing 90% of tech support and a 12 year old 100%. And this is not exploiting the children: it is giving them a powerful learning experience."

Paraguay Educa soon realized, however, that this was not the kinds of breakage that kids could fix on their own. And, moreover, they needed way more spare parts than OLPC had provided. They found temporary workarounds, but once their funding started to run dry, the broken laptops started to really stack up. When I returned in 2013 for some follow-up fieldwork, one participant estimated that counted generously, only 40% of the project's laptops were usable at all, and most of those were rarely used. 

It's these kinds of details that one can only really get from spending some time on the ground. In the early days of the project, many were deeply worried about theft and a laptop black market -- but this problem was basically nonexistent. Breakage, however, was a major problem, and was not adequately anticipated.

Broken XO

You traced what happened to some of the “success stories’ from OLPC. What outcomes did you find? What factors shaped the long term impact of their engagement with computing and programming? 

I was really interested in finding any cases that OLPC would likely define as "success" -- and while I didn't find many, I did find a handful! A few were interested in Scratch or eToys, two of the constructionist programs on the machine. Others photoblogged or learned some basic technical skills. When I returned for follow-up fieldwork in 2013, some were part of a Saturday programming club run by Paraguay Educa. 

What was striking about these kids, though, was that all of them were encouraged by their caretakers -- generally mothers or aunts -- to take their laptop use beyond the media consumption of their peers. These kids' learning was clearly socially-motivated -- and they were, in essence, practicing the other half of connected learning that was missing for most kids. Many of them also already had a computer at home, which was rare in Paraguay more generally, at least in 2010. 

However, most of them ran into various structural limitations in this use. A big one was the English-centric nature of the Internet and of nearly all programming languages. Another involved the kinds of opportunities available in their provincial town. While I am generally very critical of "deficit" models of learning, I also can't ignore the ways that historical and present conditions at times actively marginalized those few interested children. In the end, I think their lives were enriched by the project, but they were not transformed.

Let me end by posing one of your own driving questions. What is the alternative to Charisma-driven models of technological and cultural change? 

In an ideal world, I'd love for projects to honestly assess the resources needed for even incremental change, and to engage in really culturally-embedded cooperatively-run projects led by local leaders, with long-term support for making incremental improvements. Because that's just what is actually realistic here. I'm deeply tired of the technologists on tech-centric projects like this one assuming they're the smartest people in the room and that they don't need to consult with anyone else -- we can clearly see the consequences on that not just with One Laptop per Child but, really, in the many moral crises across the technology industry as a whole.  

I recognize that this would be a pretty drastic transformation from how many tech-centered development and education projects tend to be run -- at least, those that tend to get the most attention and resources. So as a first step, I would ask that those involved in these projects at least recognize that the "moonshot" model of technology-driven social change -- where projects are encouraged to think big, to "disrupt" everything, to "fail fast and often" in hopes that one day they'll really transform the world -- is not only unrealistic, it has some real negative consequences. People involved in developing these technologies are often blinded themselves by their charisma -- they're part of that project because they've bought into the vision too. At the very least, I hope my account can help them stay a bit more grounded, keep their eyes and ears open, and keep their hearts just a little more humble.

____________

Morgan G. Ames researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world, with a focus on utopianism, childhood, and learning. Her book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019) draws on archival research and a seven-month ethnography in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project -- and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals. Morgan is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in Data Science and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies."

Interview with Morgan G. Ames on 'The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child' (Part II)

You root the OLPC project in a particular conception of the relationship between technology and childhood in the thinking of Seymour Papert. What do you see as some of the core assumptions shaping this vision of ‘the technically precocious boy”?

Nicholas Negroponte was certainly the public face of One Laptop per Child, but he readily admitted in his marathon of talks in the early days of OLPC that the very idea for the project was actually Papert's, even though Papert was already retired when OLPC was announced. He often said that the whole project was "the life's work of Seymour Papert." 

And when you read through all of Papert's public writing, from the late 1960s through the early 2000s, you can clearly see that connection. Papert started writing about the liberatory potential of giving kids free access to computers not long after after he joined MIT in the 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, he was a central figure in developing the LOGO programming environment. The branch he worked on, which ended up being the dominant branch, was built around the ideals of what he called "constructionism," as a tool for kids to use to explore mathematical and technical concepts in a grounded, playful way. He kept advocating these same views throughout the 1980s and 1990s, even as LOGO lost steam after many of the really grand utopian promises attached to it failed to materialize.

Seymour Papert

I argue that one of the reasons for this failure is that LOGO and many constructionist projects are built around a number of assumptions about childhood and technology that just aren't true for all children -- and in fact are only true for a particular set of children, mostly boys, who have a lot of support to explore technical systems.  

Some of this support comes from their immediate environment: they have parents who bought them a computer, who helped them figure it out, who were there to troubleshoot, who supported their technical interests. If it wasn't a parent, it was someone else they could turn to with questions. The programmers I've interviewed who proudly say they are self-taught had a whole constellation of resources like this to help them along. 

But some of this support also comes from the cultural messages that we hear, and often propagate, about children. Messages about boys' supposedly "natural" interest in tinkering with machines goes back at least 100 years -- there's this great volume called The Boy Mechanic: 700 Things for Boys to Do that was published in 1913! Then there's transistor radio culture, engineering competitions, and a whole host of technical toys specifically marketed to boys in the decades following. Amy Ogata, Susan Douglas, Ruth Oldenziel, and many other fantastic historical scholars have traced these histories in depth. With the rise of computing, this same boy-centered engineering culture gets connected to programming, displacing all of the women who had been doing that work as low-paid clerical workers around and after World War II, as Nathan Ensmenger and Mar Hicks have shown. The same boy-centered culture also defined the video game industry in the 1980s.  

From all of this, at every turn boys -- and particularly white middle-class boys -- are told that they belong in this culture, that they are (or can be) naturals at programming. Everyone else has to account for themselves in these worlds, and everyone else faces ostracism, harassment, and worse if they dare to stick around. It's something I became pretty familiar with myself throughout my computer science major.

When I talk about the "technically precocious boy," it's both of these pieces -- the specific material and social support certain kids get, but also the larger cultural messages they live with and have to make sense of in their own lives. This is what social scientists call a "social imaginary," or a coherent and shared vision that helps define a group.  

Unless projects very actively reject and counter these social imaginaries, they ride the wave of them. One Laptop per Child is one of these, just as Papert's other projects were. Even though these projects tended to speak inclusively about "girls and boys" and "many ways of knowing," they then turned around and extolled the virtues of video games and talked about technical tinkering in ways that wholly relied on this century of cultural messaging, which had long been incredibly exclusionary.

Did this conception constitute a blind spot when applied, unproblematically, to childhoods lived in other parts of the world? How might we characterize the childhoods of the people who were encountering these devices in Latin America? 

The biggest issue with relying on the social imaginary of the technically precocious boy is that the kids who identified with it have always made up a very small part of the population. If you think back to the youths of many of those who contributed to OLPC, who were discussing its similarities with the Commodores or Apple IIs of their childhoods -- most of their peers couldn't care less about computers. So to assume that somehow all or most kids across the Global South, or anywhere in the world, would care when this kind of passion is idiosyncratic even in places that have long had decent access to computers is a bit baffling to me.  

When I've said as much to friends who worked on OLPC, I often heard something along the lines of, "well, those past machines maybe only appealed to some kids, but this one will have much more universal appeal!" And Papert wrote about the universal potential of computers too -- he called them the "Proteus of machines," with something to appeal to everyone. I see similar stories in movements to teach all kids to code.  

But the majority of the kids I got to know in Paraguay -- as well as those I met in Uruguay and Peru -- just weren't very interested in these under-powered laptops. I found that over half of kids in Paraguay would rather play with friends or spend time with their families, and didn't find anything all that compelling about the device. The one third of students who did use their laptops much at all liked to connect to the Internet, play little games, watch videos, listen to music -- pretty similar to what many kids I know in the U.S. like to do with computers. This is not to erase the cultural differences that were there, much less the legacy of imperialism still very much present across the region. But it really drives home just how wrong the assumption was that kids in the Global South would be drawn to these machines in a way that differed fundamentally from most kids in the Global North, that they'd really want to learn to program.

You correctly note that the metaphor of the school as a factory often results in a dismissal of teacher’s role in the educational process. Yet, the OLPC and other Media Lab projects have depended heavily upon teachers and other educators to help motivate adaption and use of these new platforms and practices. How have these two ideas been reconciled in practice? 

The social imaginary of school-as-factory is a perfect foil for the social imaginary of the naturally creative child (and the technically-precocious boy as an offshoot of it). We certainly see messages all the time that portray schools with derision and contempt -- in spite of a long and well-documented history of school reform, schools are often talked about as hopelessly outdated, mechanistic, and antithetical to children's creativity. (This is not to say that I think schools are perfect as they are -- I certainly dislike drill-and-test practices, for one -- but they are complicated and culturally-embedded institutions, often asked to create impossibly large cultural changes with impossibly scant resources.) When One Laptop per Child, or other Media Lab projects, echo some of these sentiments, they hardly need explain themselves -- the school-as-factory social imaginary readily comes to hand.  

But you're right that how schools relate to teachers, and how teachers relate to these projects, is much more complicated. In his writing Papert very clearly condemns schools, but is much more equivocal about teachers, often casting them as "co-learners" even as they are charged with steering children's learning toward mathematical ends. Other OLPC leaders said some terrible things about teachers early on -- more than one said that most teachers were drunk or absentee, for instance -- but local projects, including Paraguay Educa (the local NGO in charge the OLPC project in Paraguay), conducted teacher training sessions and expected teachers to use the laptops in classrooms. At the same time, OLPC and many local OLPC projects, including Paraguay Educa's, talked about how the most interesting things kids would do with their laptops would probably happen outside of classrooms, and that they would soon leapfrog past their teachers in ability. 

I can't fully resolve this paradox, but I can say that keeping the social imaginary of the school-as-factory alive is pretty valuable to many ed-tech projects that promise to overhaul an educational system that seems to be both in urgent need of fixing and receptive to quick technological fixes. However, it's one thing to paint a rosy picture of the possibilities for technologically-driven educational reform without the need for teacher buy-in -- but then when it comes down to actually implementing a reform effort, teachers become a necessary part of the project, because ultimately they are a necessary part of learning.

What are some of the important differences between the schools described in the rhetoric around OLPC and the actual schools you encountered on the ground? 

Negroponte exhibited some very wishful thinking in justifying the costs of the program. He'd tell governments that they should think of this as equivalent to a textbook, and put their textbook budget into this program. Amortized over five years, he said, a hundred-dollar laptop would be equivalent to the twenty dollars per year per student that Brazil, China, and other places budgeted for textbooks. But I found only one school in Paraguay that consistently used textbooks, and it was because they were sponsored by an evangelical church in Texas. If schools had any, they had some very old textbooks that were kept in the front office for teachers' reference only. Most teachers wrote lessons on a blackboard, and students copied them into notebooks that they were responsible for buying. 

Papert had a version of this analogy as well -- but instead of textbooks, he equated computers with pencils. You wouldn't give a classroom one pencil to share, he would say derisively -- but even if OLPC's XO laptop had actually been $100 rather than close to $200, that's a far cry from a ten-cent pencil. Moreover, even ten-cent pencils were items that not all Paraguayan students could consistently afford. A good portion of Paraguay's population are subsistence farmers and the Paraguayan school system has been underfunded for many decades now; some schools don't have working toilets, and none provide photocopiers, paper, or even toilet paper or soap. Most classrooms did not have plugs for charging laptops or WiFi routers -- the schools, with the help of local project leaders and parent volunteers, had to install those. And in some cases, the wiring that they used was mislabeled, so the plugs failed.

Despite these rough conditions, many teachers really did care about teaching -- they were not "drunk or absent entirely," as Negroponte once claimed. But much like teachers in the U.S., they were beset from all sides by demands for their time, they were very underpaid, and many exhibited signs of burnout. Even so, some were really excited about the project, but most really didn't have the time they would have needed to integrate a difficult-to-use laptop into their curriculum. In the book I include several vignettes from my fieldwork that describe in detail how these teachers would struggle to use laptops for lessons in spite of broken machines, uninstalled software, slow networks, and quickly-draining batteries. It's no wonder that nearly all gave up in time.

The Constructionist paradigm leads us to see the web and media use as “distractions” from the core OLPC mission at the same time as the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative was emphasizing the kinds of learning which could take place around games, social media, and participatory culture more generally. How would your results look if read through this different frame? 

Aside from some fairly abstract discussions of the virtues of videogames, constructionism generally doesn't really discuss media use -- it seems to exist in a cultural vacuum where students encounter a Platonic (or perhaps Papertian?) ideal of a computer with nothing but LOGO, and maybe Wikipedia, on it. But the connected learning framework -- which, in the spirit of cultural studies, takes children's interests and media worlds seriously as ideal starting-points for learning -- was very much on my own mind throughout my fieldwork and analysis. And I was deeply impressed by the ways some kids found innovative ways around the XO's hardware and software limitations, and the ways that a new video or music file would spread, student to student, through schools. 

The piece that was largely missing, though, was a way to bridge those interests with learning outcomes like literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking that are important for effectively navigating the world. A handful of parents and teachers had ideas about how to shape their children's interests toward more learning-oriented ends, and I have a chapter devoted to their stories. But they were the exception, not the norm.  

Moreover, I would bring a critical media studies lens to this as well, and ask just what kind of influence advertisers including Nestle, Nickelodeon, and more should have in children's educations. These companies developed content specifically for the XO laptop that was widely popular during my fieldwork, and thus had preferential access to children via an avenue that most considered "educational." While I love the connected learning approach of really centering children's cultures in the learning process, I am very critical of companies' efforts to make money off of that.  

__________

Morgan G. Ames researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world, with a focus on utopianism, childhood, and learning. Her book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019) draws on archival research and a seven-month ethnography in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project -- and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals. Morgan is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in Data Science and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies."

Interview with Morgan G. Ames on 'The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child' (Part I)

Earlier this year, I met Morgan G. Ames, who has recently published The Charisma Machine, which deals with the MIT Media Lab and the one-laptop-per-child initiative, which was perhaps the iconic project at the lab during the time I was at MIT. Our brief conversation brought back a flood of memories of my interactions with faculty and students there and of some of the intellectual debates I was having at the time these projects were unfolding. Reading her book brought back an even more intense flood of memories. So, I approached her about doing this interview months ago.

Her writing is fair-minded and generous but also critical of the project and how it worked on the ground in Latin America. She digs deep into the thinking behind the project, its links to a particular way of thinking about computing, its demonstration of the limits of a certain top-down mindset that is common to many U.S. based technology--based learning initiatives, and the gap between the Global North and South in terms of the realities of what happens inside and outside schools. The questions here are important ones that need to be considered both within the Media Lab and far beyond it.

I've hesitated about sharing this interview right now given the current turmoil the Lab is undergoing in the wake of the news of its affiliations with Jeffrey Epstein. I don't want this discussion, which has nothing to do with that one, to be understood as piling on. I admire the courage of Ethan Zuckerman and others at the lab who have publicly protested the choices made by the Lab and MIT leadership in this case. I celebrate the women who have stepped up to confront the misogyny that permeates many aspects of MIT culture. Yet, I also maintain fondness for old friends who have found themselves caught up in this mess and who have in some cases made some really bad decisions. This interview focuses on a different moment in the Lab's history and reflects a conversation being held before this scandal erupted.

________________

Explain the book’s title. In what sense was the One Laptop Per Child  “a Charisma Machine”? What are the implications of applying a term like Charisma, which has historically been so closely associated with the qualities of human leaders, to talk about technologies?

When I first started following the One Laptop per Child project way back in 2008, I was fascinated by how alluring the project's "XO" laptop seemed to be for many contributors and others across the tech industry. OLPC had very ambitious ideas for how its laptop should be used by children across the Global South, and what the results would be -- and I found that the laptop itself came to stand for those ideas for many people. I started thinking about how the laptop began to have its own kind of authority in these circles: even mentioning it came to stand in for a particular kind of joyful, technically deep experience they wanted more children to have with computers.  

I turned to sociological theory to help make sense of this, going all the way back to one of the founders of modern sociology -- Max Weber -- who outlined and described different kinds of authority. Charismatic authority is something that religious or cult leaders may have -- they may not have the weight of an institution like the government behind them, or the weight of tradition to lean on, yet they still seem to command a following.  

On the one hand, some of OLPC's leaders were certainly charismatic -- Nicholas Negroponte in particular has been the public face of the project, and his charisma was important for promoting it, just as his charisma helped build the MIT Media Lab in its first two decades. But in many of the places OLPC was taken up, Negroponte wasn't necessarily well-known or, in some cases, really known at all. In these cases, OLPC's "XO" laptop itself came to stand for OLPC's ideas. 

When I think about how "charisma" might apply to machines, I think about how science and technology studies (or STS) has shown that machines can have agency: they can take on meanings and act on the world beyond the intentions of their designers. I also think about how STS, and the social sciences more broadly, discuss authority not as some kind of divine or "natural" thing, but something that is produced by a whole set of social choices and technical constraints that already exist. So when I call OLPC's laptop "charismatic," it's not in a hero-worship kind of sense -- it's a first step in calling attention to the ways that many have taken its allure for granted, and how that allure was created. 

You note that African countries were resistant from the start to the OLPC project and that 80 percent of the laptops produced were deployed to Latin American countries. Why were Latin American countries more receptive than African countries, given Negroponte’s project to transform the Global South?

 At the flashy debut of what was then the "hundred dollar laptop" at 2005 World Summit on the Information Society, the African delegation immediately voiced concerns about the environmental impacts of these machines and their very real potential to further the ongoing imperialism of the Global North across Africa. Moreover, the governments of many African countries OLPC approached in the years following just didn't have the budget to put toward this project -- and that's even just buying the laptops, not the significant infrastructural and maintenance costs that were required to sustain it. (Though Negroponte repeatedly said that governments could "give out laptops and walk away," most clearly knew that that wasn't realistic.) The one non-pilot project in Africa was in Rwanda, which did eventually buy some 250,000 of OLPC's "XO" laptops. But that's a far cry from the hundreds of millions of laptops that OLPC had initially aimed for. 

In Latin America, however, OLPC's mission fit very well with a longstanding interest in open-source software, and most Latin American countries are at least "middle-income" by World Bank measures. So while OLPC's early promotional photos often featured smiling African children, it was mostly Latin American countries with the resources and interest to take it up. And even within Latin America, it's really two countries -- Uruguay and Peru -- that together purchased nearly three quarters of the XO's in the world, around one million laptops each. Other projects -- including Paraguay's, where I spent by far the most time doing fieldwork -- were much smaller, generally on the order of tens of thousands of laptops. 

The MIT Media Lab has long been celebrated for its roles in “inventing the future,” yet your analysis focuses a lot on the nostalgic dimensions of the devices it created. In what senses was OLPC nostalgic? What was it nostalgic for? How do we reconcile the competing pulls towards futurism and nostalgia? 

This was one of the great ironies of this project, and of many charismatic technology projects, especially in education. These charismatic projects may paint visions of a utopian future, but in order to be charismatic they have to appeal to parts of the world that are familiar to those they want to reach.  

For OLPC, that was the childhood experiences with computers that many techies, especially those who consider themselves part of the "hacker" community, fondly recount from their own childhoods. In the early years of OLPC, I read through dozens, even hundreds of discussions about OLPC among project contributors and across the web that directly compared OLPC's XO laptop to Commodores, Amigas, Apple IIs, and other early computing systems that many of them had used decades before.

The specifications of these older systems were even used, in part, to justify making the XO laptop really underpowered. Reducing the laptop's energy usage was a driving goal, but the justification I heard was that these old systems didn't need fancy graphics or lots of memory to be captivating, so why does the XO need them? This ended up creating huge problems in use, though -- most kids today don't really care about those older systems, after all. They want a computer that could take advantage of the media-rich web, and the XO just couldn't deliver there.

In this way, as I argue throughout the book, charisma is ultimately "conservative" -- it may promise to quickly and painlessly transform our lives for the better, but it is appealing because it just amplifies existing values and ideologies. In OLPC's case, it promoted a vision of the world where children across the Global South would have the opportunity to have the same kinds of formative experiences with a computer that these adults remembered having.

__________

Morgan G. Ames researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world, with a focus on utopianism, childhood, and learning. Her book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019) draws on archival research and a seven-month ethnography in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project -- and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals. Morgan is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in Data Science and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies."