Sally Cinnamon.

sallyhead, originally uploaded by mithering.

Given the obsessive, list-making, desire for clarity and rediscovery that drives so many comics fans it's amazing how little information about or passion for 'girls' comics there is. Granted, the fare served up in many of them was pretty weak - Bunty and Tammy in particular - but some of the more war-centred boys comics suffered from a similar lack of tone.

There are exceptions to this. Girls' horror comic Misty has managed to maintain a high profile based on the back of how many boys read their sister's copy during it's two year run between February 78 and January 1980. I know, I was one of them. That said, I had been reading girls' comics since the early 70s due to being at the end of a long chain of handed-down titles which because it had both boys and girls contributing meant I got my hands on Bunty, Valentine and June as well as The Beano, The Valiant and Scorcher, amongst others.

A couple of summers back I picked up a couple of hundred comics from a car boot sale in North Wales to get my hands on a few copies of The Valiant. I intended to sell on the rest at some point, mainly a large number of Tammy comics, and a handful of other girls' titles. One of which was Sally, 'The Paper for Adventure-Loving Girls'.

On further inspection, Sally, which was published by Fleetway, and ran for 94 issues between June '69 and March '71, was pretty interesting. The subject matter of the strips was similar to that in many girls' comics of the period - misery, subjugation and dealing with your mischevious younger brother or unsympathetic stepmother - but the settings were different. Instead of the usual public school or domestic worlds, the characters in Sally operate in something closer to that favoured in non-war, non-comedy, boys' comics. So we have The Cat Girl, the acrobatic, agile daughter of a private detective dad, Legion of Super Slaves, a group of girls enslaved by evil genius 'The Grand Termite' to help him take over the world, Tiny Tania in Space (the title speaks for itself), The Justice of Justine, in which the title character gains super powers from a mysterious cloak and The Girl From Tomorrow which features a girl from the future who gets into various scrapes.

It's not all space and ray guns - Farm Boss Fanny is traditional and class-obsessed, The Castle Kids and The Very Important Cow is as dull as it sounds, and Daddy Come Home! brilliantly plays on youngsters' fears of parental abandonment in a World War Two setting.



Anyhow, have a look for yourselves. I've uploaded a complete scan of this issue in CBR format, which is a full-screen image reader usually used for reading comics and magazines on computer screens. CDisplay Comic Reader can be downloaded, for free, here: CDisplay details and download. An issue of Sally from August 1969 can be downloaded by clicking http://www.mediafire.com/?rzyntzcbmnz

Let me know what you think.

Up Against The Wall IV

1 Ball King Dong, Higher Broughton, originally uploaded by mithering.

This particular piece of Salford graffiti is perhaps where my interest in stupid and ineffectual wall-daubings began. From what I remember, it was added in the mid-70s when I lived a couple of streets away. There used to be steps and an opening on the right, so this was a shortcut from home (Wellington Street West) or my maternal grandparents house (Kipling Street) to the papershop or the Chinese Chippy whose backyard is to the left of this image.

There was a 70s porn star, reputed to have a particularly large member, called Long Dong Silver and I've always assumed that this was a joke on that. Although, as with most of the other graffiti I've posted, you have to wonder why somebody went out of their way to paint it on a wall.

When I moved back to Salford in the late 80s it was obscured by wall-climbing plants. For all I knew, it had gone forever. That's the nature of graffiti - 'Victoire Vietnam' on the side of The Manchester Tennis and Racquet Club is slowly slipping away, 'Heath Out!' near the tip the other side of Drinkwater Park has vanished behind brambles for the time being, and 'Anita Hepburn Is A Coppers Nark' has been cleaned up.

Then, about a year ago I was passing the site and saw that the buddleia or ivy or whatever it was had been cleared away. Why, I don't know. Another fan of 1 Ball King Dong desperate for a nostalgia fix? Either way, there it was again, in its full glory. 1 Ball King Dong. I'd been meaning to get a picture of it since then, but the only time I passed it was in the car and I kept forgetting to take the camera, or forgetting to ask the driver to stop, or not having enough time to stop, snap and go get the kids.

Recently, though, I've taken up an interest-free loan from work in order to buy a bike. It's been liberating, and my route of choice into work takes me through my old territory. Down streets I've passed along so many times you could take a swab from them and clone me from the DNA. It was a natural to pop a camera in my bag and head there. There's a locked gate across the bottom of the entry now, so I couldn't get as close as I wanted, but I did manage to squeeze the lens through and get my shot.

Up Against The Wall.

M. TITLEY the FAT SLAG, originally uploaded by mithering.

I love this sort of graffiti. Petty, childish, frustrated outpourings of anger. We should all get a go at it one day. Get something off our collective chests.

When I was growing up in Salford in the 70s somebody had daubed 'One Ball King Dong' in two-foot high letters onto the wall of a ginnel near the chip shop. To this day, I have no idea why, but I do know that 'Anita Hepburn is a coppers nark'.