#mario capaldi

Vintage Comic - Zorro #01

Pencils: Mario Capaldi

Inks: Mario Capaldi

Clearly inspired by the same 70s/80s Britain as 2000AD, collections like this do  a good job of proving that girls comics were not just for girls. As the likes of Pat Mills have said in interviews, some of these titles had stories just as good, if not better, than any of their boys comics equivalents, proving that any preconceptions we might have about the nature of girls comics is questionable at best.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that they channeled stereotypes of the era, so that where a comic aimed at boys was all about sport, action and varying degrees of violence, channeling the testosterone loaded thrills that defined masculinity, a girls comic must therefore be fluffy and sedate, probably romantic and designed to reinforce the notions of domesticity and subservience being the feminine ideal that were still trying to dominate the culture of the time. But, as the ‘Punks Rule OK?’ graffiti in the above opening page reminds us, things were changing. Like the tower blocks dwarfing the dilapidated looking houses in front of them, the old was slowly being replaced by the new- let’s ignore the fact that most tower blocks ended up being a fucking disaster in terms of urban planning though, eh? At one point, they were a very positive change for people.

The Sentinels, with this opening text caption, sounds like a horror story, with the tower blocks a pair of twins, one comforting and homely, the other vacant and evil, for reasons as yet unknown. Misty certainly had horror elements to it, but it transpires this is more of a sci-fi tale, involving a parallel universe where the Nazis won the war, and now rule Britain (and presumably much of the earth, as in The Man In The High Castle). What appear to be menacing doppelgangers, conjured up by the tower to terrorise and endanger its inhabitants, are actually people from this other Britain, and the plot involves resolving this crossover of realities to get everyone back to their rightful place (more or less) and stop the Nazis spreading their dominion over another reality.

Were it not for the female protagonist, this could easily have featured in some of the more adventurous boys comics- I struggle to think of many female leads in that context at this time, so assume the general assumption was boys will only read about boys, meaning this series presumably wasn’t directly intended for them, although I am sure there was more crossover in terms of readerships than was assumed by parents and publishers- and you can see that there must have been some sort of common goal for the likes of Misty and 2000AD in terms of what they wanted to do to reinvigorate comics, bringing something fresh to the industry instead of the same old traditional values that the old guard represented. This is no real surprise when you consider that the likes of Mills and Malcolm Shaw (who also edited Misty for a time) worked on both books, along with other less long-lived titles, such as Starlord and Action. It seems fair to conclude that they were all, to some extent, ‘punk’, trying to offer something new to the next generation of readers, and give them a voice rather than just replicating those of previous generations.