Misty Vol.2

The first volume of Misty reprints appeared a year ago and I read the book with great enthusiasm. I did not read Misty first time around, so the stories were new to me... well, new but familiar, as you'll see if you read my review. I said then that I hoped Rebellion would publish more from Misty's pages, and they've rewarded me (and you, and others) with a second volume.

Let's dive straight in. 'The Sentinels' are a pair of 26-storey tower blocks, one of which is occupied, one of which is deserted, run-down and the source of many local rumours about disappearing families. The story tapped into the distrust people had of tower blocks, the story appearing only a decade after the partial collapse at Ronan Point in Canning Town killed four. The clean, compact flats of the Sixties were run-down eye-sores by the late Seventies and deep-seated distrust of tenants that landlords were failing to maintain buildings – lifts were broken, lights were never replaced leaving corridors in pools of darkness – added to the undercurrent of fear that surrounded them. Little wonder that J. G. Ballard wrote High-Rise in 1975.

'The Sentinels' embraces the air of menace that these tower blocks seemed to enshrine and added to it through the kind of local legends that kids create around abandoned buildings: that it is haunted by ghosts, that it is evil... and that's where Jan's family are about to move into, thanks to the landlord of their aunt and uncle. Thinking they are sub-letting, Jan's family – dad, mum and two younger siblings – are being turfed out onto the street. 26 floors of unoccupied flats suddenly seems attractive to Dave, who dismisses the horror stories as superstitious nonsense.

But strange things begin to occur to the squatters: Jan sees her school burn down from a window, only to find it fine when she gets down to the street; she and her family seem to be stalked by doubles of themselves; and, finally, walking through a doorway to a flat on the floors above leads Jan to an alternate world where Nazis conquered the UK in 1940. The tower block isn't haunted... it's a gateway to another world.

Not only does Jan find herself displaced in the universe, her family are too, as the story plays out against the housing shortage and unemployment of the 1970s. Because of this, the story feels like it could have been written yesterday, not thirty years ago.

In 'End of the Line', Ann Summerton's father has been killed whilst building the Windsor Line but during the inaugural trip on the new line, built twice as deep as other underground lines, Ann sees her father amongst a group of ragged men, still digging in the tunnel. Investigating further, she learns of the old Prince Albert line, a Victorian line that was closed up when an entire train was lost in a tunnel collapse.

Journalists investigating why Ann pulled the emergency brake during her journey along the tunnel disappear but still her mother and step-father-to-be believe Ann is imagining things and take her to a psychiatrist, who recommends hospitalisation. Running away, Ann finds that the suspected route of the Prince Albert line intersects the Windsor Line between Packer Street and Side Vale. She persuades the editor of the Daily Globe that the tunnel needs investigation, but nothing is found by the police despite Ann seeing the captive journalists.

Although confined to a countryside clinic, Ann manages to escape back to London and the tunnel, where she is almost snatched. She follows her would-be captives and discovers not only the location of the Prince Albert line but also an even more incredible sight.

'End of the Line' has the same timeless quality to it: while back in 1979 we had the opening of the Jubilee Line, now we have Crossrail being completed; back then we had Margaret Thatcher spouting Victorian values, which presumably included the housing shortage, a huge gap between richest and poorest and child poverty that went with Victorian values; today we have Theresa May overseeing the lack of affordable housing, the increasing wealth gap and food banks. Mrs Thatcher would be proud. Might I suggest you buy Misty volume 2 to take your mind off such horrors.

Misty Vol.2, Rebellion ISBN 978-1781-08600-1, 16 November 2016, 114pp, £13.99. Available from Amazon.

Misty

Misty holds something of a privileged position amongst British comics' fans in these days of websites, chat groups and file sharing. It was one of the first girls' titles that the curious fan could read, dipping into stories they—the widely skewed towards male audience for file sharing comics—would almost certainly not have read back in 1978 to 1980 when Misty was originally appearing.

There is a familiarity to Misty that is attractive to those of us who grew up on 2000AD—the longer stories, the splash panels (or even splash pages) that dramatically introduce each episode... it's a title that anyone reading boys' comics from that period will find comfortably familiar.

Perhaps not surprising, as the creator behind Misty was none other than Pat Mills, who helped launch Battle Picture Weekly, Action, 2000AD... he also had a hand in Jinty and Misty, building on the work of Gerry Finley-Day and Wilf Prigmore who helped revolutionise the content, throwing out stories featuring ponies and fashion models and installing creepy, Gothic horror yarns and tales of sacrifice and determination as young girls overcome tragic circumstances and terrible accidents to win through in the end.

From the perspective of a fifty-something man rather than a twelve-year-old girl, the source material for "Moonchild", the opening story in this new collection, is rather obvious. Rosemary Black lives in a house without electricity of modern conveniences, which makes her a target for bullies at school who think she is weird and that her mother is a witch. Rosemary’s widowed mum is a stern disciplinarian, convinced her daughter has wickedness in her and that beating her is the only solution, despite being warned by the courts about her violence.

After a nasty prank by bully Norma Sykes goes horribly wrong, resulting in her hair catching fire, Rosemary is seen by the school nurse, who asks about the crescent-shaped scar on her forehead, which seems to be hot to the touch. Rosemary herself feels a power coursing through her at times of stress, causing a bookshelf to fall on Norma and the bike of her friend Anne to jerk aside when she is almost hit by a lorry. A doctor tests her and discovers she has telekinetic powers that seem to be growing stronger as Rosemary learns about her grandmother who also had a similar scar.

Meanwhile, Norma and her gang are planning to make Rosemary suffer through making one of her dreams come true: a birthday party that they plan to make very special.

After only a couple of episodes, the debt to Stephen King's Carrie was so obvious that the reader is left waiting for Rosemary to go "the full Carrie" which undercuts any surprise the ending may have. Of course, the 12-year-old audience wouldn't have that problem, but it probably explains why I thought "The Four Faces of Eve" was by far the better of the two stories here.

The set up is genuinely mysterious: Eve Marshall dreams of an aircrash, a young girl crying for help as the plane explodes… the same dream every night for six months. Her mother says the dream is a consequence of the fire at their home that left Eve needing skin grafts during her year-long hospital stay. Although she struggles to remember anything, she is suspicious that her mum and dad lack any parental affection and wonders why no friends have visited. The hospital is like a prison.

Her parents whisk her away to a remote country house one night where the sparse decoration of her new bedroom reminds her—her first memory of the past—that she once had cat posters on the wall. Her mother seems to only guess at what posters she once had and her father’s tax returns reveal he has no daughter…!

There is genuine tension in the story. Eve is isolated: no friends, no family and no memories. The plot unfolds slowly. A burglary at the home reveals that fingerprints match those of a Margaret Hawthorne, who died with her family in a car accident a year earlier. Later, she discovers she is the spitting image of another girl, Lucy Bartram, who was run over by a bus around the same time.

The truth is eked out over the 12 episodes and it will keep you gripped right to the end.

The artwork for the stories has the clarity, dynamism and motion typical of British artists John Armstrong and Brian Delaney, who were both superb at capturing the emotional range of the girls' comics (far greater than the gritted teeth and surprise required of most boys' comics).

Hopefully the two reprints here will do well enough for Rebellion to consider more of the same now that they own the rights to Misty and its many companions from the 1970s and 1980s.

Misty, Rebellion ISBN 978-1781-08452-6, 8 September 2016, 112pp, £14.99, available from Amazon.