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MEL GIBSON: The question of what comics are is quite an interesting one because everyone has a common sense understanding. First thing I would say is they are

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a medium rather than a genre. And I say that because you can use a comic to tell any kind of story or to tell nonfiction, to tell factual narratives for any age of person.

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And yet, in various countries, a dominant form of comic will come to be seen as everything, the stereotype of the medium. So in the UK, that's children's humor comics like The Dandy

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And Beano that started in the 1930s. In the USA, it's superhero comics like Superman and Batman, which also started in the 1930s. That means that when you're thinking about comics

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in girlhood, you immediately get into interesting territories because there were titles that were weekly publications if they were in the UK, monthly if they were in the United States. And in the UK they were anthology comics,

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meaning that they had lots of different elements, lots of short stories that continued week to week. Some of those stories could be up to a year long or over a year, but you'd have about seven or eight

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stories in each edition. That's quite a distinctive model. So comics depends on where you are and when you are. Historically, as I say, they tended

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to be pure comic if they were for children, but if they were for girls, they would often include elements that made them a bit more like magazines. So a girls' comic is quite a complex thing

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that involves a huge number of different elements, and that's what makes them fascinating to research. Comics can be used in many different ways in research. What I'm going to talk about is girls comics

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in particular in research. But this applies to almost any kind of comic, and indeed also applies to magazines. The first thing is to look at a particular period.

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What are the concerns that are expressed in the title? What are the constructions, the social constructions of girlhood, that are expressed in that title? So in the 1950s, Girl, which is one of the titles

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in the collection, which ran from about 1951 until the early 1960s, tells you a lot about, amongst other things, the careers that were popular and promoted in that period. There are so many different ones,

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and this is about aspiration on the part of the girl reader. That's what's being encouraged. So you'll have nurses, you'll have what was a very luxurious sort of profession at the time,

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the air hostess. You'll have ballerinas. And all of these narratives, including my favorite Tessa of Television, who begins as a Secretary

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but ends as a television presenter. And this is the 1950s. So it's showing you career trajectories, and it's giving you ideas about what you might aspire to be.

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So it's also presenting the idea of the working young woman, an the independent young woman, which might not be what one might anticipate immediately from the 1950s. Now, I mentioned ballet, which of course,

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became a popular activity for middle class girls in particular in the 1950s. When you come to the 1970s and titles like Tammy, also in the collection, suddenly there's an emphasis

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on gymnastics. There's a huge change between those periods in terms of what is seen as the dominant activities for girls. Gymnastics was offered as a free activity in most schools

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in the 1970s, but the inspiration for some of the key comic strips, particularly Belle at the Bar, which was in Tammy, appears because of the emphasis on gymnastics in the Olympics and the dominance of young Russian gymnasts.

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So that passion is run through. There's also a class difference here in that the gymnastics were focused on working class gymnasts.

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These narratives, they were not necessarily about middle class girls. They were about girls who were having a tough time, who fought and overcame.

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So there's a different kind of aspiration there. There's achievement despite snobbery and bullying and other issues, many of which would speak to us today. But that's only one of the ways you

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can do it, by focusing on the stories in a particular period. These narratives, these texts also had non-fiction elements. So you might see things again about careers. Again, in Girl in the 1950s, there's a character called

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Jackie, who visits farms, who learns to ice skate, who does all sorts of things. And it's a little nonfiction strip about introducing you to unfamiliar lives.

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So you can see in doing that, they're by constructing a core girlhood and then constructing an other girlhood around it. But that's not all.

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These also have adverts, and that's whether they're in the 1950s or the 1970s, often for sweets, often for breakfast cereals. And those materials, you can compare the adverts

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and how they shift over time. You could look at how girls are presented in those adverts as well, of course. But it's really interesting to look

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at the kind of products that were marketed specifically to younger female readers. Another way in which you can look at this is to look at the direct address from the editors to the readers,

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and the interaction between these two groups. Readers were encouraged to send in letters, make suggestions for stories in some cases, and to join in competitions, take part in events.

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Girl, for instance, had its own club that you could join, which allowed you to have access to tickets for events like circuses, but also Christmas Carol festivals. Girl even actually worked with Sadler's Wells

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to offer its own ballet scholarship to readers. That was competitive. So that's a whole other set of ways of thinking about how girlhood is understood and constructed.

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This title in the 1950s didn't necessarily engage hugely with popular culture. A lot of them exist in a kind of world of girls rather than necessarily featuring a lot of pop stars.

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It's much more about what do we do, what is our community, how do we work together and understand each other. And some of the elements work towards developing precisely that girlhood community under the banner of the comics title.

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I'm interested in using comics in two ways within my research. I'm fascinated by what actual readers think about those titles. So I often take collections of comics

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to things like women's institutes or to library events, literature events. And I will share these titles and people then tell me about what they remember about them,

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how affectionate they were about them, whether they were forbidden because comics were sometimes very much disapproved of, all of those things. So I'm interested in what readers actually

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did with the titles as opposed to a media effects model, thinking, well, what did the titles? What did reading these do to readers? So that's part of what I'm interested in.

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I'm also interested in audiences through bringing young people today together with some of these materials, and watching young women getting into titles from the 1970s to the 1950s, and even back to the Girl's own paper

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in the 1880s, is fascinating. I've had people taking photographs of craft activities from the '50s and '70s. And whilst my initial thought was,

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are they laughing about them? They were, no, we're going to make these. And where there were quizzes, they'd do the quizzes. They engaged with them with honor actually.

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It's really quite moving because that would then lead to a conversation with the older adults in the room about all sorts of issues, from bullying, because bullying in a lot of the stories.

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Was it like this when you were that young teacher? All of that kind of discussion would then emerge. So you end up with intergenerational discussion focused on topics, using the comics as a kind of object

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to elicit a response. The other half of what I do is actually about looking at what happens in the comics much as I described. Most recently, I have gone back to Girl in the 1950s,

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and I've been looking at how cookery was depicted. And that's because at this point, we start to see all of the new mod cons. We get freezers, we get fridges, we get gas ovens, very exciting.

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And they're trying to sell the idea of becoming the modern housewife through including cookery elements. Some of this cookery element is about the sweet treat.

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How do you do royal icing for a birthday cake, for instance? A lot of it is very practical. And as the 1950s progresses, the strips move from something called mother tells you how--

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You can hear it's a very matriarchal voice. I know how to do this. You don't. I'll teach you-- through to what's

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cooking with Carole and Chris, who are two friends who share a flat and argue over who's used the last bit of pastry in the fridge. Very contemporary.

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Now that shift reflects a changing model of family and of community, and it moves towards peer influence, which of course, is seen as key in the late '50s and early '60s in terms of histories of popular culture.

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But it's there, too, in the cookery that is expressed in these particular comic strips within Girl.