The Comics Bureau

Josie Fraser posts up;

Really delighted have spoken at Rus­sell Dav­ies’s Inter­est­ing this year. It’s eas­ily one of my favor­ite con­fer­ences — enter­tain­ing, edu­ca­tional, cre­at­ive, unpre­dict­able and inspiring.

My topic was psy­cho­lo­gical viol­ence in late 1970s/early 1980s girls com­ics, & here are the notes. Enjoy!

A favour­ite part for me was the excerpt of the Stew­art Lee/Alan Moore inter­view from Radio 4’s Chain Reac­tion show;

Pat Mills and John Wag­ner had pre­vi­ously spent eleven years work­ing on the Brit­ish girls com­ics. They had grown cyn­ical and pos­sibly actu­ally evil dur­ing this time. I think it was John who used to write a script called “The Blind Baller­ina” and as the title sug­ges­ted it was about a baller­ina who was blind. John would just try to put her in to increas­ingly worse situ­ations. At the end of each epis­ode you’d have her evil Uncle say­ing, “Yes, come with me. You’re going out on to the stage of the Albert Hall where you’re going to give your premier per­form­ance” and it’s the fast lane of the M1. And she’s sort of pirou­et­ting and there’s trucks bear­ing down on her.