[Laura Vivanco]

I came across some blog posts I thought might be interesting to discuss, but there doesn't seem to be a place to discuss more general topics, so "Articles" seems like the best fit.

We've had a little bit of discussion about cover art in romance and so, given IASPR's broader remit, when I came across the following I thought people here might be interested:

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First off, we start with some pages from a book about how to draw women and men in comics. There’s a lot of traditional sexism here. Check it out, just because some of it’s pretty facially ludicrous.

Then there’s the turn-around where an intelligent artist took the same images and showed how sexist they are by switching the sexes of the figures. It’s all pretty strange looking, since we don’t often see confidently over-muscled women, and arched-back pouting men. But it gets more remarkable toward the end, in the section on how to draw sexy poses. We’re so used to seeing women in those sexualized poses that they seem almost unremarkable and generic — but when we put a man in the same poses, it becomes really clear that no one ever really stands like that. (from Alas, a blog)

I'm sure there are comparisons to be made with the way models stand in a lot of clinch covers. I'm thinking in particular of the way the muscled Fabio (or other male model) stands, compared to the draping of the female model's body and the strange extended neck and/or raised leg poses.

What the comic-book examples show is that male characters are not expected to be objects of a sexual female gaze, and strangely enough that seems to be the case on a lot of covers marketed at female readers of erotica too. That's something that's been pointed out repeatedly at Erotica Cover Watch. Their initial post, discussing why they started their campaign, is here.

[BevBB]

Thank you for opening this thread. Those links are pretty fun reading. I think I've got some similar things saved somewhere. I'll have to dig around.

Also, I have a post that just went online this morning about the 1st Harlequin, which ties in here nicely because there are images of both the paperback and hardback covers in the post. And people think poser art is strange.

[veinglory]

While there is clearly sexism in comic art, most 'how to draw' books are really basically scams. I have yet to see one drawn or written by people who are active mainstream comic professionals. Most display as ideal types of art no editor worth their salt would accept.

When you look at comics, especially beyond Marvel/DC there certainly are hyper-muscled female characters (e.g. She Hulk) and lithe pouty men (e.g. yaoi). Like romance (in fact more so), comics and graphics are a broad genre--including some very radical and subversive work.

[Laura Vivanco]

veinglory, on 08 September 2009 - 03:31 PM, said:

When you look at comics, especially beyond Marvel/DC there certainly are hyper-muscled female characters (e.g. She Hulk) and lithe pouty men (e.g. yaoi). Like romance (in fact more so), comics and graphics are a broad genre--including some very radical and subversive work.

I'm sure you're right, but I suppose the mainstream view of comics, like the mainstream view of romances, doesn't take those subversive elements into account.

[Cora Buhlert]

I've been out of the comic scene for a few years now, but the height of the anatomically impossible and sexist superhero art was in the early to mid 1990s. And in many cases, the male characters were not much more anatomically plausible than the female ones. Though to be fair, I did like the work of artists such as Jim Lee or J. Scott Campbell and others who worked in that style quite a bit in the beginning. Because the comics still had stories I enjoyed, even if female members of the X-Men, WildCATS or Gen 13 kept ripping and losing their clothes. It was only when certain comics focussed more and more on the cheesecake and less on the actual stories that I got annoyed. There were certain artists and publishers associated with that sort of style. From the occasional glimpse into the window of a comic shop, it seems many of those comics and artists are still around.

But even in the American superhero comic field at the height of its cheesecake phase, there were artists who drew more realistic human figures. J.H. Williams III, Gary Frank and John Cassaday are all artists of whose work I have positive memories. And US independent comics feature all sorts of art.

And as veinglory pointed out, once you look beyond the US, it's a very different stories. Manga art is frequently sexualized, but it plays to very different beauty ideals and body images than Western comic art. And in Europe, you have the gamut from extremely sexualized art, e.g. Barbarella, Natasha and Franka (the latter two I loved as a teenaged girl) via more weird hybrids such as another old favourite of mine, Michel Weyland's warrior woman Aria who is sexualized, but the art is otherwise realistic, and non-sexualized realistic art (Roger Leloup's Yoko Tsuno, Jean Giraud's Lieutenant Blueberry) to comics which do not sexualize characters at all (Tintin, Suske & Wiske, De Geuzen, etc...) and almost entirely womenless series such as Blake & Mortimer. The British comics found in mags like 2000 AD, Warrior or Captain Britain were less sexualized than their US counterparts as well.

PS: She-Hulk, in spite of her muscles, was often drawn in a highly sexualized way, at least during the time I read her. Take this cover from the 1990s for example or this more recent cover.

[BevBB]

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I've been out of the comic scene for a few years now, but the height of the anatomically impossible and sexist superhero art was in the early to mid 1990s.

Really? I wouldn't have thought it would've fallen that late but then I've not truly compared decades in a while either. Then again, come to think about it I do remember hearing a lot of dissatified comments about the way Superman and company at DC was drawn in the late 1990s. Electric Blue Superman was not popular or a fan favorite. Shudder.

I'd have to look back though my DC encyclopedias to see when the worst female drawings were because it depends on what character you're talking about. Lois Lane has always been treated fairly well, but she isn't a superhero/superherione. She's a successful career woman and ace reporter. Wonder Woman on the other hand... has had her moments both good and bad. On the flip side, there's probably even a worse case than WW and that's probably Catwoman simply because she's always been seen as straddling that line between being good and bad as well as being intentionally sexually alluring on top of all that. There isn't any way she could escape being badly draw - in the context we're talking about here - most of the time. What would be interesting would be how often she was actually draw with some restraint.

What I've found interesting isn't the male and female quotient but the costume one. Part of the entire disquise working is the fact that the artists overdraw the muscles, and everything else, once they're in the costumes, don't you know?

[Cora Buhlert]

Skimpy and bizarre costumes, the tendency of female characters to lose clothes, etc... have been a part of comic books since the beginning and I recall seeing some Wonder Woman art from the 1940s that verged on BDSM.

However, before 1990 we never saw anything as bad as this or this or this or this or this (made particularly tasteless by the fact that the girl taking off her clothes is supposed to be a 17-year-old teenager - the accompanying comic was actually pretty good) or even this, which is from a comic I absolutely loved at the time.

[Cora Buhlert]

Come to think of it, I wonder whether the stereotypical urban fantasy cover look of a woman in skintight clothing with tattoos and weapons did not originate in American superhero comics as well. At any rate, I saw similar looks there long before they started showing up on book covers.

Catwoman, pretty much the original bad girl in leather, DC, 1990s

The ladies of DV8, Wildstorm, 1990s

Psylocke of the X-Men, Marvel, 1990s

Zealot of the WildCATS, Wildstorm, 1990s

Black Canary, DC, 1980s

Huntress, DC, pretty much unchanged since the 1980s

The Black Queen, X-Men villain, Marvel, 1980s

Emma Frost of the X-Men, Marvel, has been sporting the corset look since 1979

Storm of the X-Men, Marvel, has been dressing like this since 1975

Rachel Summers a.k.a. Phoenix of the X-Men, Marvel, 2000s

Jakita Wagner of Planetary, Wildstorm, 1999

Zatanna, DC Comics, 1990s

Elektra, Marvel Comics, has been dressing like this since the 1980s

Viper a.k.a. Madame Hydra, Marvel, has been dressing like this since the 1960s

Dizzy Cordova of 100 Bullets, Vertigo, 2000s

Promethea, ABC Comics, 2000s (This is one of my favourite comics of all time)

Midnight Nation, Top Cow, 2000 (This is pretty much proto urban fantasy)

Midnight Nation, Top Cow, 2000 (Very eerie, considering this image would be historical just a few months later)

Death from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Vertigo, 1990s (yet more proto urban fantasy)

John Constantine, Hellblazer, Vertigo, 2000s (the original proto urban fantasy)

[BevBB]

Not exactly directly related to "cover art and bodies" but simply because I didn't know where else to place this, I thought I'd mention it here. I just put a post up on my site about the new Scooby Doo live action movie that premiered last night on the Cartoon Network. After forty years, the Scooby gang is definitely a study in the ways both males and females are portrayed because they're were originally targeted at kids yet have found an audience that transceeds all age groups. In many different formats. In this new movie, they're restarting the story back in high school, all at about the 15-16 year old age, so it's interesting how they're approaching all their interactions. Very true to the characters if not all the canon points and I thought it was an extremely good effort. I loved it, actually.

I also ran across mention of a group of children's mystery books that might've been an influence on the development of the original characters and stories that I'd never even heard of - The Famous Five by Enid Blyton. I placed a link to a site about them in the post if anyone is curious. Anyone here heard of those books or know more about them?

[Cora Buhlert]

Scooby-Doo live action movie? Is that the pretty dreadful film that came out a few years ago and featured Buffy as Daphne and a CGI dog as Scooby Doo or something else altogether?

BevBB, on 15 September 2009 - 02:07 AM, said:

I also ran across mention of a group of children's mystery books that might've been an influence on the development of the original characters and stories that I'd never even heard of - The Famous Five by Enid Blyton. I placed a link to a site about them in the post if anyone is curious. Anyone here heard of those books or know more about them?

Heard about them? I devoured The Famous Five and Enid Blyton's other children's adventure series as a young girl. When I was a child, there was not a lot of translated children's and young adult literature. You were mostly stuck with whatever authors from your country were writing, hence there are a lot of extremely well known British and American children's books that I never read or only know, because I saw a cartoon adaption on TV once. However, Enid Blyton was one of the few authors whose works were translated and available (though edited in some respects) and I loved them. I wasn't the only one - a friend from university actually had Enid Blyton as an exam topic.

I've never really noticed a link between Scooby-Doo and Enid Blyton's Famous Five before, but come to think of it, whoever made that claim could have a point.

On the other hand, I have no idea what the other influences mentioned, I Love a Mystery and Dobby Gilles are. From the context, I assume they are early television shows which never made it to this side of the pond.

[BevBB]

Cora Buhlert, on 14 September 2009 - 09:34 PM, said:

Scooby-Doo live action movie? Is that the pretty dreadful film that came out a few years ago and featured Buffy as Daphne and a CGI dog as Scooby Doo or something else altogether?

Oh, no, no. The one you're thinking of, Cora, is the 2002 theatrical release that featured Sara Michelle Gellar (Buffy) and Freddy Prinze, Jr. in starring roles. It was okay had fairly good characterizations, but way heavy on the special effects. There was also a sequel with the same stars that I think came out direct to video. This one that they premiered yesterday was specifically for the Cartoon Network. Personally, I think it was a cut above the others due to the focus on the storyline and the way they developed the characters getting to know each other.

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Heard about them? I devoured The Famous Five and Enid Blyton's other children's adventure series as a young girl. When I was a child, there was not a lot of translated children's and young adult literature. You were mostly stuck with whatever authors from your country were writing, hence there are a lot of extremely well known British and American children's books that I never read or only know, because I saw a cartoon adaption on TV once. However, Enid Blyton was one of the few authors whose works were translated and available (though edited in some respects) and I loved them. I wasn't the only one - a friend from university actually had Enid Blyton as an exam topic.

I've never really noticed a link between Scooby-Doo and Enid Blyton's Famous Five before, but come to think of it, whoever made that claim could have a point.

That's fascinating because I'd honestly never heard of them before I ran across that reference today and they do sound exactly like what the Scooby Doo series was based on. Particularly when you factor in the knowledge that originally they started playing with younger characters that evolved towards teenagers who had a van and could therefore travel around more independently. I bet someone working on the series had definitely read those books as a kid.

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On the other hand, I have no idea what the other influences mentioned, I Love a Mystery and Dobby Gilles are. From the context, I assume they are early television shows which never made it to this side of the pond.

Well, the only thing I know about I Love a Mystery was what I was able to find on Wikipedia about it being a radio series from the early 1940s. While there's some similarilty to the cases Mystery Inc tackled, I'm not sure it would hold up to scrutiny, although it does mention supernatural horror.

Dobie Gilles was a fairly popular sit-com from the early 1960s. I remember seeing it in reruns a lot when I was younger but had honestly never thought that about how much the Scooby Doo characters had in common with them until I saw that quote. And they do.

[Laura Vivanco]

As Cora says, Enid Blyton was very, very famous in the UK. She still is:

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Enid Blyton is the UK's best-loved writer, according to a survey conducted for the Costa Book Awards. [in 2008]

The creator of the Famous Five series and the Noddy books topped the poll, followed by Roald Dahl and Harry Potter author JK Rowling.

Jane Austen, the author of Sense and Sensibility was fourth and William Shakespeare came fifth.

Charles Dickens came sixth in the survey of 2,000 adults. (BBC)

According to the UN's Index Translationum which "contains cumulative bibliographical information on books translated and published in about one hundred of the UNESCO Member States since 1979," she's the author with the fifth highest number of translated works (3544 of them).

She did write some books for younger children (such as the Noddy books) and others which were adventure stories for older children (such as the Secret Seven and Famous Five).

She was probably the equivalent of J. K. Rowling because of her fame, the fact that she wrote books for children, many were set in boarding schools (Malory Towers and St. Clare's) and the writing styles are not totally dissimilar. There's a comparison of the two here, by Kate Forsyth:

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To me, the Harry Potter books have all the verve and wit and excitement of the books I loved to read as a child. And though J.K. Rowling has rightly been compared with C. S. Lewis, Roald Dahl and E. Nesbit, the author she reminds me of most is the author I loved most passionately as an eight year old.
Enid Blyton

For quite a few years, nothing gave me such a thrill as being given a new Famous Five book. Since there were 21 in the Famous Five series, my family found choosing Christmas and birthday presents a breeze. I daydreamed about exploring secret passages, thwarting smugglers, discovering buried treasure and having a dog called Timmy. My sister and I used to fight over who would get to be George, the girl-who-was-as-good-as-a-boy.

I have to admit, though, that I haven't read many of them, because my mother thought they weren't good quality and discouraged me from reading them. We didn't have a TV, so I didn't see much Scooby-Doo, either.

[BevBB]

Wow. Okay, how did she get exported outside the US so successfully and not extolled here? Or maybe she has been and I've just never heard of her? She was a tad before my time in some ways. Okay, maybe not looking at that website about her books again. If the last one of the Famous Five was published in 1963, I would've been about six. Still trying to figure out how I missed them.

As to the similarities with Scooby-Doo, the original classic series - still the best - on CBS that set the template was Where Are You, Scooby-Doo about a gang of four friends who solved mysteries together while driving around in a blue van known as the Mystery Machine and calling themselves Mystery Inc, a "club" they created when they first met and realized they all loved mysteries. One the Wikipedia page on the series, right after the section that talked about the possible influence of Dobie Gillis and Enid Blyton, there were this descriptions that might help clarify things:

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The roles of each character are strongly defined in the series: Fred is the leader and the determined detective, Velma is the intelligent analyst, Daphne is danger-prone, and Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are cowardly types more motivated by hunger than any desire to solve mysteries. Later versions of the show would make slight changes to the characters' established roles, most notably in the character of Daphne, shown in 1990s and 2000s Scooby-Doo productions as knowing many forms of karate and being able to defend herself.The plot of each episode followed a formula that would serve as a template for many of the later incarnations of the series:

1: At the beginning of the episode, the Mystery, Inc. gang bump into some type of evil ghost or monster, which they learn has been terrorizing the local populace and is the local 'ghost story'.

2: The teens offer to help solve the mystery behind the creature, but while looking for clues and suspects, the gang splits up in two groups. In the first group are Fred, Daphne, and sometimes Velma. The second group is composed of Scooby, Shaggy and sometimes Velma.

3: Scooby and Shaggy find food and eat, but run into the monster, who gives chase. Scooby and Shaggy try to lose the monster.

4: Meanwhile, Fred, Velma and Daphne investigate some places by themselves and find clues, but also run into the monster. Daphne oftentimes ends up being captured by the monster. Sometimes Daphne is rescued by Scooby and Shaggy, but usually she is rescued by Fred and Velma. Velma often ends up dropping her glasses and being unable to see anything until she finds them again.

5: Scooby and Shaggy lose the monster and then are reunited with Fred, Velma and Daphne.

6: However, after analyzing the clues they have found, the gang determines that this monster is actually a person in disguise. They capture the monster, often with the use of a Rube Goldberb-type contraption built by Fred or accidental clumsiness from Shaggy and Scooby, and bring him to the police.

7: Upon learning the villain's true identity, either the only person they had met or someone they hadn't seen before, the fiendish plot is fully explained, and the apprehended criminal would utter the famous catchphrase, or a variation thereof: "And I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"

8: The gang finally gets to relax and have fun. Shaggy tries to eat something, but Scooby beats him to the punch.

Absolutely totally formulaic and yet completely entertaining at the same time. Sound familiar? Which is probably probably why it's been so wildly sucessful for so long.

One thing I might add for the uninformed is that Scooby-Doo is technically Shaggy's dog but the entire gang claims him. Would that make Shaggy into George?

[Cora Buhlert]

BevBB, on 15 September 2009 - 06:26 PM, said:

Wow. Okay, how did she get exported outside the US so successfully and not extolled here? Or maybe she has been and I've just never heard of her? She was a tad before my time in some ways. Okay, maybe not looking at that website about her books again. If the last one of the Famous Five was published in 1963, I would've been about six. Still trying to figure out how I missed them.

It seems to me that until very recently, i.e. the past fifteen years or so, children's literature was very much segregated by country and language, probably because it was assumed that children could not relate to cultural differences. Which could not be more wrong.

Hence, Enid Blyton whose works were very British in many respects either did not make it to the US at all or was overshadowed by local works such as Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys, neither of which I've ever read because they did not make it to Germany. In fact, I'm amazed that Enid Blyton was translated into German, though we still only got some of her works, mainly the adventure oriented series such as the Famous Five, Secret Six, XXX of Adventure. We did not get Noddy or her stories for younger children, though I still have four books of her stories for younger kids in English. I have used them in the classroom on occasion, because it's not easy to find suitably short and easy reading material for fifth and sixth graders. They still appeal, too, some forty to fifty years after they were written.

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The roles of each character are strongly defined in the series: Fred is the leader and the determined detective, Velma is the intelligent analyst, Daphne is danger-prone, and Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are cowardly types more motivated by hunger than any desire to solve mysteries. Later versions of the show would make slight changes to the characters' established roles, most notably in the character of Daphne, shown in 1990s and 2000s Scooby-Doo productions as knowing many forms of karate and being able to defend herself.

I haven't watched Scooby-Doo in ages and even as a child, I only watched it when I was abroad (which was often, since my Dad traveled a lot for his job), because German TV did not deem it wholesome enough for youngsters. The definition of Fred as the leader of the group is interesting, as he always struck me as the blandest character and the one whose name I have always problems recalling. Shaggy, Daphne, Velma and of course Scooby-Doo were so much more notable. I also recall watching a version of the show which added an Asian boy to the cast.

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One thing I might add for the uninformed is that Scooby-Doo is technically Shaggy's dog but the entire gang claims him. Would that make Shaggy into George?

Actually, Velma strikes me as more George-like than Shaggy. Daphne is obviously Anne. Scooby-Doo is Timmy. I'd peg Shaggy as Dick and Fred as a the other boy from the Famous Five whose name I can never recall either.

One thing that was notable about Hanna-Barbera's cartoon output of the 1960s and 1970s is that most of their cartoons were inspired by some other pop cultural phenomenon. The Flintstones was inspired by The Honeymooners, as was The Jetsons and the Flintstone-like show about ancient Romans. Scooby-Doo apparently was a blend of I love a Mystery, Dobby Gilles and The Famous Five with a bit of Halloween atmosphere added for good measure. There was one Hanna-Barbera cartoon which more or less took the Dead End Kids, who went from supporting characters in Warner Bros melodramas of the 1930s to the stars of comedy vehicles, added a gorilla and made them have adventures. I never knew about the parallels until I saw a Dead End Kids film and thought, "Wow, those actors remind me of that cartoon I watched ages ago."

The amazing Jonny Quest cartoon was inspired by James Bond, adventure comic strips of the 1930s such as Terry and the Pirates and perhaps also by Enid Blyton's XXX of Adventure books. Come to think of it, I find the parallels between Blyton's Adventure series and Jonny Quest more notable then between Scooby-Doo and the Famous Five. Race Bannon is basically Bill from the Adventure books, hotshot American spy and everything, though Jonny Quest turns the widowed mother of Philip and Dinah from the Adventure books (who ends up marrying the Bill character) into the widowed Doctor Benton Quest (whose relationship with Race has been the stuff of speculation for forty years). Jonny is apparently Philip and Hadji is Jack, the orphaned boy whom Bill and the mother character eventually adopt, though the Jack from the book reminds me more of Jonny than Hadji. Latter versions of Jonny Quest added Race Bannon's daughter Jessie, who would probably equal Lucy, Jack's twin sister from the Adventure books. The parrot from the Adventure books become Bandit the bulldog from Jonny Quest. Poor Dinah does not exist in Jonny Quest.

Total aside: I loved the Adventure books so much that I named two of my dolls Lucy and Dinah.

The great thing about the Hanna-Barbera cartoons is that you could still enjoy them even if you have never seen/read whatever inspired them. And then, as an adult, you can go back to them, spot the inspirations and be amazed.

[BevBB]

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Hence, Enid Blyton whose works were very British in many respects either did not make it to the US at all or was overshadowed by local works such as Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys, neither of which I've ever read because they did not make it to Germany. In fact, I'm amazed that Enid Blyton was translated into German, though we still only got some of her works, mainly the adventure oriented series such as the Famous Five, Secret Six, XXX of Adventure. We did not get Noddy or her stories for younger children, though I still have four books of her stories for younger kids in English. I have used them in the classroom on occasion, because it's not easy to find suitably short and easy reading material for fifth and sixth graders. They still appeal, too, some forty to fifty years after they were written.

I've been reading and talking about this all day today and only after reading this did it click in my head that Blyton was a British writer. Duh.

But the other thing that had been nagging at me was that I knew there was a similar type children's series that I used to read when I was younger but was drawing a blank on it. When you mentioned Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, Cora, it came back to me - The Trixie Belden books. Those were definitely in this type of template of a group of youngsters. This is from the description on Wikipedia:

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Trixie was a young teen living just outside the fictional town of Sleepyside-on-Hudson, in the Hudson River Valley area of New York. She lived at Crabapple Farm, which had been in her family for either three or six generations (this varies between books), with her parents and three brothers, Brian, Mart, and Bobby. The first book establishes her friendship with lonely, sheltered rich girl Honey Wheeler whose family has just moved into the Manor House next door and soon the girls are embroiled in their first case.

If I remember correctly there are a couple of other characters that get added to the mix fairly quickly due to the first couple of "cases" that they solve. We're talking about 39 books that went from 1948-1986 but by several different in-house writers using one pseudonym, Kathyrn Kenny. These are still popular books.

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I haven't watched Scooby-Doo in ages and even as a child, I only watched it when I was abroad (which was often, since my Dad traveled a lot for his job), because German TV did not deem it wholesome enough for youngsters. The definition of Fred as the leader of the group is interesting, as he always struck me as the blandest character and the one whose name I have always problems recalling. Shaggy, Daphne, Velma and of course Scooby-Doo were so much more notable. I also recall watching a version of the show which added an Asian boy to the cast.

I tend to think it depends on how one defines leader. If you're expecting someone who's flashy and out front, then no. (And they played off that concept in the theatrical movies, too.) But if you're talking about someone who serves as an anchor to hold them together and provide strength and occasional brawn, then yeah maybe. Particularly in those early episodes from the original Where Are You, Scooby-Doo series (1969–1972). In that, he is somewhat blander than the others but they all contribute something to the mix so it balances out. The thing I'm always amazed at in rewatching that original series is how equal the two girls are treated by the two guys. Sure, they all tease Daphne about being danger-prone but they all pull their own weight when it comes to solving the crimes and catching the bad guys and we're talking about the early 1970s here. They are a team. They always have been. I think that's part of why the series has made such a lasting impact.

The Asian boy you're thinking about was on The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo series from 1985-86, a very short-lived one with only 13 episodes. Not one of the better offerings and one that didn't feature the entire gang, only Shaggy, Daphne & Scooby.

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The great thing about the Hanna-Barbera cartoons is that you could still enjoy them even if you have never seen/read whatever inspired them. And then, as an adult, you can go back to them, spot the inspirations and be amazed.

Don't they all? I mean, they tend to get overshadowed by Disney, but both Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. have had quite a bit to do with animation history over the years. And they make it their business to go to great lengths to make sure that what they produce can be enjoyed by the entire family forever. Once they hook us they never want to loose us.

[Cora Buhlert]

BevBB, on 16 September 2009 - 05:38 AM, said:

I've been reading and talking about this all day today and only after reading this did it click in my head that Blyton was a British writer. Duh.

But the other thing that had been nagging at me was that I knew there was a similar type children's series that I used to read when I was younger but was drawing a blank on it. When you mentioned Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, Cora, it came back to me - The Trixie Belden books. Those were definitely in this type of template of a group of youngsters. This is from the description on Wikipedia:

If I remember correctly there are a couple of other characters that get added to the mix fairly quickly due to the first couple of "cases" that they solve. We're talking about 39 books that went from 1948-1986 but by several different in-house writers using one pseudonym, Kathyrn Kenny. These are still popular books.

I remember the Trixie Belden books being available in Germany, when I was a kid, but I never read them. For some reason, I mistook them for horse books and I would not read horse books.

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I tend to think it depends on how one defines leader. If you're expecting someone who's flashy and out front, then no. (And they played off that concept in the theatrical movies, too.) But if you're talking about someone who serves as an anchor to hold them together and provide strength and occasional brawn, then yeah maybe. Particularly in those early episodes from the original Where Are You, Scooby-Doo series (1969–1972). In that, he is somewhat blander than the others but they all contribute something to the mix so it balances out. The thing I'm always amazed at in rewatching that original series is how equal the two girls are treated by the two guys. Sure, they all tease Daphne about being danger-prone but they all pull their own weight when it comes to solving the crimes and catching the bad guys and we're talking about the early 1970s here. They are a team. They always have been. I think that's part of why the series has made such a lasting impact.

The Asian boy you're thinking about was on The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo series from 1985-86, a very short-lived one with only 13 episodes. Not one of the better offerings and one that didn't feature the entire gang, only Shaggy, Daphne & Scooby.

Either the broadcast packages from the distributors or the European TV stations had the tendency to throw together different versions of series featuring the same characters, hence you could easily get a Popeye or Tom and Jerry cartoon from 1940 followed by one from 1986. Sometimes, even completely inappropriate stuff such as WWII propaganda cartoons (which traumatized me as a child, because it's not fun to see on TV that even Donald Duck wants you dead because of your passport) would end up mixed in with harmless cartoons As a result, it can be difficult to figure out which version you actually watched.

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Don't they all? I mean, they tend to get overshadowed by Disney, but both Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. have had quite a bit to do with animation history over the years. And they make it their business to go to great lengths to make sure that what they produce can be enjoyed by the entire family forever. Once they hook us they never want to loose us.

Disney had the technical edge over both Warner and particularly Hanna-Barbera, whose stuff was very rough and basic (and still great). But both the old Warner Bros cartoons and the latter Hanna-Barbera cartoons were often funnier and more daring than much of Disney's output. Besides, my childhood self neither knew nor cared about different studios and production companies. For me, all cartoon characters hailed from some mystical place known as animation land. It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I realized that I had never actually seen Bugs Bunny interact with Mickey Mouse or Daffy Duck interact with Donald Duck or either of them with the Flintstones or Woody Woodpecker, because they were made by different companies. I think it was visiting a Warner Bros store in either London or New York in the mid 1990s, when the penny finally dropped.

[Laura Vivanco]

I've just seen that as part of the 60th anniversary celebrations, Harlequin are reprinting some of their vintage "Suspense and Adventure" novels, with the original covers. They have a lot of women on the verge of a wardrobe malfunction They're here at the eHarlequin website and here at Amazon. The titles are interesting, too: No Nice Girl; I'll Bury My Dead; Virgin with Butterflies; Kiss Your Elbow; Pardon My Body; and You Never Know With Women.

[Cora Buhlert]

Laura Vivanco, on 23 September 2009 - 09:04 PM, said:

I've just seen that as part of the 60th anniversary celebrations, Harlequin are reprinting some of their vintage "Suspense and Adventure" novels, with the original covers. They have a lot of women on the verge of a wardrobe malfunction

It may be politically incorrect to admit this, but I love the cover art of those vintage suspense/adventure/crime paperbacks, wardrobe malfunctions and all. These are comparatively tame. I've seen worse, particularly on the covers of so-called Men's Adventure Magazines of the 1950s and 1960s.

The cover of Virgin with Butterflies is particularly nice. And the "virgin" manages to remain dressed, too.

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They're here at the eHarlequin website and here at Amazon. The titles are interesting, too: No Nice Girl; I'll Bury My Dead; Virgin with Butterflies; Kiss Your Elbow; Pardon My Body; and You Never Know With Women.

James Hadley Chase, who wrote several of those novels, was quite a well known author of hardboiled crime fiction in the 1940s and 1950s. He almost always wrote about American settings even though he was British and had barely visited the US. Well, it worked for Karl May.

I have no idea who the other authors are. But whenever I've picked up a vintage paperback with dramatic cover art, I've rarely been disappointed by the writing inside.

[Sandra Schwab]

Cora Buhlert, on 16 September 2009 - 02:47 AM, said:

In fact, I'm amazed that Enid Blyton was translated into German, though we still only got some of her works, mainly the adventure oriented series such as the Famous Five, Secret Six, XXX of Adventure.

Nah, nah, nah. You're forgetting the Dolly (Malory Towers) and the Hanni & Nanni (St. Clare's) series. The names of the protagonists were mostly Germanised, and the books were heavily edited and revised. Both series proved to be so successful in Germany that several books were added to them. These additions were also published under Blyton's name, but most of them seem to have been written by Tina Caspari. She also wrote the Tina & Tini series, which were attributed to Blyton, too.

[Sandra Schwab]

Forgot to add: I totally agree with Kate Forsyth. For me, the first Harry Potter book read like an Enid Blyton novel with magic thrown in ...