Phoenix wrote:Re: Unhappy Families
Tammyfan wrote:
Phoenix: thanks for that! Are you able to give us an idea of how it ended, please?
Unfortunately, not at this time. I'm currently very busy completing a project, which may overall take the best part of a couple of months. I also have a couple of visits to London scheduled. I doubt whether I will be posting much on any topic on comicsuk during that time. In any case, as you will recall, my girls' story papers are just not accessible enough.
The Double Life Of Sad Sarah is an interesting story that makes use of a not uncommon literary device, that of the story within a story, notably used by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the idea of a fictional character who can move from his or her fictional world into the real world, as in the film
Cool World where Brad Pitt's character does just that. There will be lots of other examples. The
Sad Sarah story starts out promisingly but immediately becomes episodic, with just enough carryover to allow us to call it a serial.
Briefly, the basic story concerns Debbie Walters' father, a struggling cartoonist, who gets a commission to draw a picture strip story for a girls' comic to run for several weeks. He calls it
Sad Sarah, and it recounts graphically the way Sarah is treated as a skivvy by the family she is staying with, a theme much used of course by actual writers of other stories in
Mandy, or any other girls' paper for that matter. The unusual development occurs first when Debbie's father notices that some panels of the opening episode that he has already completed are different from the way he drew them, and secondly Sad Sarah suddenly makes a personal appearance in Debbie's bedroom. She is very angry at the way she is being portrayed in the cartoon strip, and is determined to rebel in the real world, from which incidentally she can disappear whenever she feels like it.
The mayhem she causes has to be seen to be believed, but it invariably gets Debbie into trouble because she has to introduce Sarah to her friends, schoolmates, relatives, and local shopkeepers etc. as her friend. One way or another she manages to spend all Debbie's money, and eats anything she can get hold of, regardless of where it is or who it belongs to, because of course as she is starved in the
Sad Sarah strip, she is always ravenous. She succeeds by blackmailing Debbie, making clear to her that if she doesn't comply, she will magically alter the drawn cartoon strips to show her rebelling, which will lead to Debbie's father losing his commission.
Four episodes from the end of the serial Debbie's father gives Debbie the good news that the editor is so pleased with his strip that he wants him to extend the story, but for Debbie this is the worst news she could have had. However, there is a light on the horizon. Debbie's dad decides to draw the strip to a close by having Sarah's mother come out of hospital, now therefore able to take Sarah home. The reader sees two panels of Debbie's father's strip in which Auntie Vi is telling Sarah's mother how they've tried to make her happy there, and Sarah deciding not to tell her mother about how badly she was treated as she would only be upset.
In the real world Sad Sarah is not at all impressed by that ending, and threatens to change the ending significantly after the final episode has been put in the post. A Deus ex machina is in the wings though in the person of Mrs Arnott from the local Writers Circle. She is not at all impressed by the strip showing such a weak and spiritless creature, and states that her new book will feature a girl who is out for what she wants, and doesn't let anybody stand in her way. Sad Sarah tells Debbie that that woman is her kind of author, who will give her the opportunity to be the kind of character she has always dreamed of being, and says goodbye to Debbie.
Debbie's dad informs her that he is going to get married again so they will have to move house. Debbie is delighted because she will have a new Mum, and moving house will mean a change of school, and a chance to start afresh and make new friends. Above all, no more Sad Sarah and no more trouble.
I wonder if real life artists for girls' comics worked like Mr Walter? I know Veronica Weir was a work at home artist, so maybe she did work that way.