Fran of the Floods

The 1960s and 1970s were the great age of disaster strips in comics. The term "cozy catastrophe" was coined by Brian Aldiss to describe a couple of novels by John Wyndham, but has broadened over the years to encompass any post-apocalypse novel where the protagonist survives relatively unscathed in a world that has been emptied through disaster or invasion; you might also add that rebuilding the world seems to fall to a group of middle class folk, who immediately hole up in a deserted mansion and start growing vegetables and raising free range chickens.

No such luck for Fran, where freak weather has turned even the Sahara desert into a tropical rain forest and in suburban Hazelford the rivers are on the rise. Frances "Fran" Scott and her best friend Jill take advantage of the weather to get away from her fractious family and have some fun sailing a raft. Fran's scientifically-minded headmistress asserts that the ice caps are melting and this is the end of the world as we know it. She has been trying to keep the children's minds off the problem by organising a concert, while Fran's parents have been stockpiling food.

Towns around the Fens have disappeared underwater... and then the Thames bursts its banks. Meanwhile, tensions spill over in the Scott household and Fran's sister, June, leaves her job and escapes to Scotland. The relentless rain causes a rush on food and when the supermarket runs out, neighbours break into Fran's house after hearing about their stockpile. The Scott's are saved by Rod Pearson and a gang of his friends.

June is safe in Scotland, according to a letter, bit Hazelford is about to be destroyed as the reservoir cracks under the weight of water and sends a flood tumbling down onto the town and to the school just as Fran takes her turn on the stage at the school concert.

Alan Davidson's apocalyptic tale originally appeared in the pages of Jinty in 1976 and is being touted as an early example of cli-fi, although it is not man-made climate change that causes this disaster but the sun burning a little hotter. The intense heat and tropical jungles growing in England are more reminiscent of The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard (1962) than, say, Forty Days of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson (2004).

It is not a tale that shies away from some of the grimmer aspects of disaster: people's fear, frustration, anger and resentment all spill out on the pages of the story. The grief in Fran's face as Rosie is swept away by the waters, her fear that she is the only survivor, and the knowledge that – having discovered a young girl and her pet – that the pet might be the only source of food they have... all are chillingly depicted by Phil Gascoine, a veteran of girls' comics who knew not to hold back with emotions.

Which was fortunate, because there is an emotional roller-coaster to get through before this tale is told. Fran and Jill (who has also survived) are captured by the Black Circle, who are using captives as slave labour to survive; then there's the eerie, guarded village that Fran breaks into only to find herself in a quarantine zone for an unrecognised plague and the community living in the limestone caves beneath the Pennines; finally – and it might indeed be the last thing they do – they meet the extraordinary David, King of Glasgow.

While disaster stories were popular in boys' comics (Buster was home to many, including one entitled 'The Drowned World' in 1964), few had anything like the same kind of emotional resonance as 'Fran of the Floods'. Fran also played a significant role in the history of Jinty, which had launched in the spring of 1974 with the usual mix of girls' adventure strips. Fran's adventures proved so popular, the strip ran for seven months and started a trend in Jinty for the kind of science fiction stories it was to become most remembered for, including other early environmental yarns and cosy catastrophies.

This is another superb choice of stories from Rebellion's Treasure of British Comics range of titles. Let's hope there are many more of the same to come.

Fran of the Floods. Rebellion ISBN  9781781086728, 21 March 2019, 112pp, £12.99. Available via Amazon.