Abstract
Focusing on comics aimed at British girls, this book recovers a neglected yet important aspect of British popular culture, which appeared in the 1950s, had its heyday in the 1960s and largely died out by the 1990s. As Gibson points out, reader surveys from the period show that up to 60% of girls were regular readers of comics, making this a genre worth investigating. Tackling girls’ comics requires navigating several distinct scholarly literatures, including children’s literature, media and cultural studies, education studies and librarianship. Gibson uses her first chapter to locate her study vis-a-vis each of these bodies of work, while emphasizing that her main inspiration comes from audience studies. Despite this focus on audiences, Gibson does not neglect other relevant aspects of girls’ comics, including their production, dissemination and history. The second chapter thus provides an overview of the historical development of the genre, its key characteristics, as well as its role in British post-war girls’ culture and leisure. This chapter also tackles the question of why girls’ comics declined and eventually disappeared; Gibson points to a range of factors, including the rise of the magazine as the dominant vehicle of girlhood and femininity, which proved to be better attuned to the exigencies of consumer culture and the advertising-driven publishing industries. The third chapter charts the role of different institutions and professions involved in the mediating comics (teachers, academics and librarians), and thereby outlines the context in which readers’ engagement with comics took place. Chapters 4 and 5 then move on to examining readers’ experiences, noting how reading choices were linked to issues of class and femininity. Among other things, Gibson also challenges the assumption that girls only read girls’ comics, and instead examines the particular pleasures derived from engaging with comics designed for boys. Although empirically focused on the British context, Gibson’s study should be of interest to a wider audience interested in historical research on popular media and culture, and in the changing mediation of girlhood.