TRAGEDY OF THE RETURN OF BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE BRITISH GIRLS COMICS

Now with exposition!
The British girls comics industry cranked out weekly after weekly from the 1950s until the early 1990s, with thousands and thousands of pages about plucky young girls and horses and parties and school chums and ballet and pop music and discos and whatever it was that middle-aged men thought young girls wanted to read about. But as our research has discovered, what girls wanted was tragedy. Complicated, exposition-heavy, back-storied soap opera style tragedy happening to young girls... just about YOUR age...


This one cuts right to the chase. It's about Sarah and her sorrows, one of which involves being sold. Here's a hint Sarah; if someone's asking nine pounds for you, you ARE a slave being sold in a market.


I remember that time I got in an accident and my dog felt responsible so he ran away. That's why dogs run away, they feel responsible. You have to breed them specially for the guilt, though.


Sometimes your ballet career is cut short by a tragic car accident that kills your family and leaves you a cripple and your evil relatives are stealing your disability checks and they're sending your toddler brother out to work with the construction crew next door. I hate when that happens.


And yet more evil relatives forcing their nieces to fake disabilities for cash. How much money are we really talking about here? Get a job, Evil Aunt And Uncle! Oh wait, this is 1970s Britain.


"Just what do you two think you're doing? This isn't that kind of a comic!!"


I imagine the life of a penniless orphan in Victorian England was pretty tragic. Luckily our heroine has the requisite music-hall skills to survive. There's always room for a girl who can sing along with birds!


And if all else fails, find an amusement park and pretend to be a ghost.


Even the photo-stories were chock full of heartbreak and sorrow. If only those British dads could keep out of jail or out from in front of cars! Won't somebody think of the children?


Ballerina aspirations + escaped jailbird dad = heartbreak! Also notice giant exposition-assisting headline.


Thatcher-era Britain becomes the battleground for one family's struggle to survive! SPOILERS: Dad, unable to attend night school because he can't get his wheelchair up the stairs, goes to Lorna's school and gets his 'O' levels in accounting. They get evicted, Mom overworks the cleaning job and gets sent to hospital and the kids get sent to a children's home while Dad's in assisted living. However, somehow everything turns out all right in the end. No thanks to Thatcher.


"Bella" combines gymnastics, car accidents, and amnesia! Also check out the fetish-tastic artwork in our next sample:


As Bella comes across another barely pubescent girl contorting her tightly clothed body, she's reminded of some Robert Crumb comics she saw once. EWw!!

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