Misty

I've been reading about British comics recently. I grew up reading British comics: The Eagle, Battle, Roy of the Rover, and Transformers. (Yes, Transformers was British. There was a British comic separate from the American comic.)

Reading an article about British comics in the eighties, I was surprised to learn that there was a girls' horror comic called Misty. In fact, there were several girls' horror comics.

I find this fascinating in itself, but it also "triggered" an important memory from my childhood, which I've mentioned before on this blog.

I don't know exactly how old I was at the time of this memory. I'm not even entirely sure where I was. I know I was in Limerick, visiting my aunt and uncle on their farm, but I don't remember if I was in the car we arrived in, or if I was in the house-- or both.

Anyway, I found a girl's comic, and I had a strong reaction to this-- though I don't remember whether it was subconscious or conscious. I didn't even realize that here were girl's comics. The realization that such a thing existed astonished and delighted me.

That was the same night that I saw more stars than I'd ever seen before or (it seems) that I've ever seen since. It wasn't my first time on the farm, so I'd been away from the light pollution of Dublin. But for some reason my uncle and aunt weren't there when we arrived this time, and we were standing outside the house for quiet a while. I had lesiure to look at the sky. Every time I looked, it seemed there were more stars.

The sense of discovery, wonder and the exotic of both these occurrences-- the girl's comic, and the starry sky-- runs together in my mind, and is best expressed by the famous lines from Keats:

Then felt I like a watcher of the skies
When some new planet swims into his ken..

The funny thing about the girl's comic was that it was so similar, in one way, to the boy's comics that I was familiar with, and yet so different in other ways. Real meaningful diversity seems to me one of the most precious things in the world. And no difference is more primordial than the man-woman difference. I think it's well expressed in Adam's words on first seeing Eve: "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." The first thing Adam expressed was belonging and similarity, not otherness-- as essential as otherness is to the man-woman relation.

(I think whole tracts could be written about the relationship between familiarity and otherness. They seem to need each other, and to blend into each other, without ever collapsing into each other. The progressive notion that "othering" is an act of aggression seems to me like an assault on life and joy.)

But aside from the man-woman aspect, my sense of joy and discovery-- "here is something that was always there, that's a whole world to be explored, but whose existence I didn't even expect"--  is something that I frequently experience in other contexts. I wish there was a word for it. "Discovery" doesn't cover it. "Startling discovery" is better, but doesn't quite do it.

I can barely remember anything of the comic itself, apart from a few significant details. I remember a story about a girl in some sort of Himalayan-type mountain range, that involved some sort of magical monastic character (good or bad, I can't remember), and also featured an avalanche.

I've tried to identify this story using the internet. Obviously, it's not much to go on, but I did learn that Himalayan adventures and magical monastic figures were quite a standard in girl's comics of this time. And this, to me, is very interesting.

I know next to nothing about Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, but it's interesting that we all carry a sort of mental set (in the sense of a film-set or a theatre-set) of this part of the world around with us, as seen through fiction and imagination. I recognized it even when I was a kid. You can call it a set, an atmosphere, an idyll, a stereotype, a cliché, a romanticization-- whatever you choose to call it, I think it greatly enriches life. And such "sets" don't only apply to regional and national cultures, but to everything-- historical periods, ways of life, stages of life, sports, hobbies, political groups, genres of fiction, etc. etc.

I rejoice the more such "sets" there are in the world, and I fret at the loss of them. I think the loss of them is just another name for disenchantment. And the fact that these sort of girl's comics no longer exist-- not to mention their male equivalents-- seems to me a loss of enchantment.

(Although I've just learned of a UK comic called Phoenix which was launched in 2012, and seems very similar to the sort of comics I knew growing up. That's heartening-- especially as it's not a revival aimed at adult, despite the title.)