About Misty

Misty

Misty was a weekly British comic for girls, published in London by IPC Magazines through Fleetway from 4 February 1978 to 12 January 1980. It ran for just 101 issues, yet it became one of the most famous and fondly remembered British comics of its period: a horror and mystery anthology for girls, hosted by a mysterious fictional editor, Misty herself, and remembered for genuinely frightening its young readers. Its creator Pat Mills designed it as a female counterpart to 2000 AD, with the emphasis on magic and horror rather than science fiction.

Misty merged into Tammy in January 1980, but its influence long outlasted its run. Annuals continued until 1986, and from 2016 Rebellion, owner of the Fleetway archive, has issued a continuing series of Misty reprints, specials and revivals, including a 2023 hardback collection marking forty-five years since its launch.

Origins: a horror comic for girls

Misty was devised by Pat Mills, the creator of 2000 AD, which IPC had launched the previous year. Mills's plan was to apply his 2000 AD approach to a girls' comic: bigger visuals and longer, more sophisticated stories, with the emphasis on the supernatural and horror, taking as models the films Carrie and Audrey Rose, suitably modified for a younger audience. His starting idea was a girls' horror comic built partly as a vehicle for his serial Moonchild, a story of a girl with telekinetic powers.

Mills turned down the editorial role, and the comic was passed to Wilf Prigmore, group editor for IPC's girls' comics and the driving force behind Misty's creation, to develop. In other hands the comic became different from Mills's original design: the horror was toned down, the title was branded a mystery story paper, and Misty emerged as a blend of supernatural mystery, horrifying cautionary tales and comedy, shaped also by the need to compete with DC Thomson's Spellbound, the mystery paper that had run from 1976 to 1978.

The editorial team and production

The majority of Misty's run was headed by a consistent editorial team: editor Malcolm Shaw, sub-editor Bill Harrington, art editor Jack Cunningham and art assistant Ted Andrews. Mills remained involved at the inception as consulting editor and scripted a few early stories. The contents were provided by a range of freelance and in-house writers, including Shaw and Harrington themselves, with art supplied mainly by British freelancers and by the Spanish studio artists who produced much of British comics art in the period.

The comic sold strongly from its launch: the Albion British Comics Database records that when Misty launched it sold 170,000 copies a week. For a brand-new girls' title in 1978, in a market long past its peak, that was a striking figure, and it confirmed that the experiment of a horror comic for girls had found its audience.

Inside an issue of Misty

Each issue of Misty ran to 32 pages. A typical number contained a selection of one-shot stories, generally four pages long, and serials that stretched over ten or so issues in four-page instalments. The issue opened with an inside-cover welcome from Misty herself, the fictional editor and host, who appeared in a delicate full-page line drawing, designed by the artist Shirley Bellwood, and invited readers into her realm. The title character's name also carried an echo of the film Play Misty for Me, which had influenced the comic's naming.

The rest of the issue mixed comics with other material: one or two prose stories, supposed true ghost stories sent in by readers, a Write to Misty letters page, a horoscope section called Star Days, and a regular comedy strip, Miss T, about a hapless witch, written and drawn by Joe Collins. A handful of half-page advertisements completed the number. The mixture — terror framed by a letters page, horoscopes and a comedy witch — was Misty's distinctive balance of the frightening and the friendly.

Stories not to be read at night

Misty was marketed with the promise of stories not to be read at night, and its one-shot tales are what readers remembered. They were cautionary stories with a Gothic twist, most frequently built on a transgression — a cursed object acquired, a delinquent act committed — that brought a bad end to the protagonist. The punishments were frequently out of all proportion to the fault, and that disproportion is the source of the comic's reputation: the academic Julia Round's work describes Misty one-shots in which a tiny moral slip could damn a heroine, and one critic quoted in her research called the comic a potential life-ruiner.

The BBC writer Jac Rayner, summarising Misty's moral universe, catalogued its lessons in punishment-fitting-the-crime style: vanity, troublemaking, cruelty and greed each met a grotesque supernatural retribution. What distinguished Misty from adult horror anthologies was its psychological emphasis; rather than twist endings alone, its stories dwelt on dread, guilt and consequence, in settings its readers recognised — schools, homes, holidays and shops.

Serials: Moonchild and The Four Faces of Eve

Misty's two most famous serials appeared in its first year and were chosen, nearly forty years later, to open Rebellion's reprint programme. Moonchild, by Pat Mills and artist John Armstrong, told of a girl with telekinetic powers, in the line of the Carrie story that had inspired Mills's conception of the comic. The Four Faces of Eve, by Malcolm Shaw and Brian Delaney, was the editor's own contribution to the opening line-up. Both serials were originally published across issues 1 to 13 and 20 to 31 of the weekly.

Another frequently cited serial, The Sentinels, linked the years 1978 and 1940 through two empty tower blocks, using time displacement for a story of haunting and history. Serials of this kind, running for ten or more weeks, gave Misty a depth its one-shot stories could not: characters could be developed, mysteries prolonged, and the supernatural woven into continuing lives rather than single shocks.

Misty as host and brand

Misty herself was one of the comic's most effective creations: a beautiful, mysterious young woman who dwelt, in the comic's mythology, in a cavern of dreams beside a strange pool, and who welcomed readers to each issue and presided over its letters page. Shirley Bellwood's cover art for many issues established the character's image. The fictional editor was a device borrowed from horror anthologies for adults, adapted for girls, and it gave the comic a personality independent of any single story.

When Misty merged into Tammy in 1980, the character came with it: Misty herself joined Tammy's Storyteller as a presenter of strange stories, and the Misty name appeared prominently on Tammy's cover for 34 issues and less prominently for another 51 before disappearing. The brand also survived in annuals, which continued to appear from 1979 to 1986 — six years after the weekly comic had ended.

The end of the weekly run

Misty's weekly run ended with its 101st issue, dated 12 January 1980, and the comic merged with Tammy from the issue dated 19 January 1980. Alongside the weekly there had been a summer special in 1978 and holiday specials in 1979 and 1980, and a monthly Best of Misty series ran for eight issues in 1986. The brevity of the original run — under two years — contrasted then, and contrasts still, with the size of the comic's reputation.

The merger followed the standard Fleetway pattern, by which the girls' comics group concentrated its titles over time: Tammy had absorbed Misty and would absorb Jinty the following year. Misty's darker, horror tone fed into the merged comic, which gained Miss T and Misty herself from the union.

Scholarship and the Gothic tradition

Misty has attracted more academic attention than any other British girls' comic. Julia Round's research, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications and in book form on Gothic in British girls' comics, examined Misty alongside DC Thomson's Spellbound as examples of a lost Gothic tradition in girls' publishing. Round annotated the complete run of 101 issues held at the British Library and studied the comic's letters pages as evidence of its readers' community.

That scholarship places Misty in a broader history: a girls' comic drawing on Gothic fiction, Hammer-style horror imagery and the cautionary tale, published by a mainstream London house for a mass audience of schoolgirls. Misty's blend of the supernatural, the historical and the everyday — and the seriousness with which its young readers responded, in letters that Round has analysed in detail — is now the principal case study for the argument that British girls' comics were more sophisticated than their later reputation suggested.

Reprints and revival

Rebellion acquired the rights to Misty with the Fleetway archive in 2016 and immediately began reprinting it. The first collection, published in September 2016, gathered Moonchild and The Four Faces of Eve, with Mills describing the chosen stories as the very best of Misty and expressing the hope that they would lead a long-overdue girls' comics revival. Further collections followed, and Rebellion has published Misty specials in the years since, culminating in the Misty: 45 Years of Fear hardback in 2023.

In 2024 the revival extended to new material: the American writer Gail Simone was announced as reviving Misty in a new special, with a cover by Tula Lotay and art including Aly Fell's — the first full-scale revival of the brand since Rebellion acquired it, and evidence that a comic cancelled in 1980 could still anchor new publishing more than four decades later.

Legacy

Misty's legacy is the reverse of its publication history: the shortest-lived of the Fleetway girls' trio became the most celebrated. Its 101 issues demonstrated that horror and the supernatural, treated with visual sophistication and moral intensity, could succeed in a girls' weekly; its host character gave it a brand that survived in annuals, in Tammy, and in modern reprints; and its stories remain the standard example in discussions of Gothic comics for young readers.

For the directory of British magazines, Misty is a London weekly of 1978–1980 that burned, in its publisher's later phrase, terribly bright. It is studied in universities, collected by Rebellion, revived by new writers and remembered — sometimes nervously — by the generation of girls who were told, on its covers and by its host, that its stories were not to be read at night.