philcom55 wrote:I think Melchester was also a major town in Thomas Hardy's Wessex!
That's interesting, Phil. Which novel was it in?
philcom55 wrote:did you consider Thomson's late 1980s girls' comic Hi!?
No I didn't, Phil. In fact I've never even seen one although I have seen a number of adverts for it in other girls' papers. I'll Google the title later this evening. However, I'm not that keen on adding to my reading schedule, particularly a title that sounds as if it has more non-fiction than fiction, as I would classify that as a magazine.
Diana just escapes that categorisation because the transfer of emphasis from serials to features occurred very late in her run. There is, of course, another factor to be considered. There were 831 summaries of serials in
This Was The Wizard covering just over a hundred pages of three-line summaries.
Bunty alone ran for roughly the same number of years, and as the vast majority of her serials are shorter than the average serial in
The Wizard, I will inevitably need more pages, especially as I do also intend to present the heading block illustrations as I did in
This Was The Wizard. They are not absolutely essential but I feel that they do add an extra element of nostalgia for the reader. Where the number of serials in the other ten titles are concerned,
Judy and
Mandy will demand the most space so, given that there are eight other titles to include, I may be well advised to write all the summaries in just two lines. I'm still in guessing mode but I suspect that this book might well run to over 300 pages, especially as in the Introduction I will be looking at Bunty's precursors, which will not only include
Girls' Crystal,
School Friend and
Girl but also a multitude of novels written specifically for girls between
Little Women and titles written in 1957, in order to attempt to assess their influence on the writers of
Bunty et al. If my current thinking about the detailed presentation of the serials persists I could well be approaching the issue by using categories such as School, Adventure, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Animals, Historical, Futuristic, Ballet, WW2, Mystery, Wild West and suchlike. I'm well aware that it is a demanding plan but at least it gets me up in the morning feeling enthusiastic.