The Mandy formula | KINDLE BLOG

British Comics blog today distils part of the D.C. Thomson formula at Mandy, once an enormously popular pre-80s weekly comic, read by nearly all British girls in middle-childhood and produced by a firm that knew exactly what their audiences wanted (rather than what it was politically correct to give them). This seems rather useful market knowledge for writers of books and comics, as such basic psychology don’t change much at its core and this audience is today a prime demographic. Especially so as in the UK we have the ‘new baby boom’ moving into this demographic. I’ve taken the liberty of pasting the list at British Comics (consider it a quote) and then further grouped these into over-arching categories.

* Trapped by cruel or unheeding authority:

– cruel factories, shops, boarding schools or workhouses;
– girls slaving for cruel employers or criminals;
– orphans forced to live with cruel or uncaring relatives;

* Trapped by intentional spite (with a sub-text of ‘secrets’):

– girls enduring blackmail, hardship, or unpopularity to protect a secret (often on behalf of their family);
– spiteful girls [manipulating the rules to] cause trouble for an unsuspecting cousin, foster-sister or classmate;

* Mild superstition:

– girls becoming unpopular because events keep conspiring to make them appear jealous or selfish;
– girls who were put under a curse or came into possession of apparently supernatural objects [or pets, such as a black cat] which adversely affected their lives, but of which they were unable to rid themselves until they worked out how;

* Detective/avenger:

– heroines adopting masked identities to secretly help people;
– saving animals from cruelty;
– girls pretending to be disabled in order to take advantage of people [and the unmasking of their fraud];

* A Billy Bunter-ish comedy of errors:

– blundering girls getting into one scrape after another. [Often short-sighted or just naturally clumsy].