Nerding Day: Misty – Horror Comics for Girls

Misty: Horror Comics for Girls was exactly what it sounds like, but not the way you think. They were not “for girls” in the sense that their stories were built to appeal to young women, but rather that girls needed these stories so they could learn how to quit being so awful all the time. Misty thinks literally anything a girl might do is just terrible. If you learn every single moral their short twisty horror stories have to teach, you will sit patiently in a corner until something fucks you and then you will have the decency to die in childbirth. Quietly.

Misty writers only ever had time to think of one twist, zero good characters, and seventeen reasons to insult young women. The writing is breakneck, with every villain promptly explaining their evil plot in one speech bubble on the first page. This dude got a hold of magic pencils, which you might recognize as too dumb for a Twilight Zone episode and almost dumb enough for an Outer Limits episode. What does he do with magic reality-altering pencils? Does he draw himself with a bitchin’ jetski? Does he draw his enemies with floppy dick arms? Does he draw himself on a bitchin’ jetski mowing down the dickarms while pulling a sick Christ Air, like any reasonable person would? No, he uses them to draw rich girls, then explains to his victims exactly how his powers work and can be thwarted, and hopes it’s less effort to pay him than to punch him in the face and break his pencils. 

Please notice: 

I have condensed the entire ten page story into five panels and you have lost nothing.

By exorcising everything unnecessary, the hero of this story, a young girl, does not appear. This is considered ideal in proper English society.

The girl ganks a man by ripping his head completely off via magical paper assault and it’s still not enough to earn her panel time.

The story acts like the moral is that you should be wary of vanity, lest it consume you. But the girl didn’t commission the portrait. Her family did. So really, she had the audacity to stand in a spot when told, and for that she was rightfully punished. 

According to Misty, the ideal British girl lives in a closet where she practices not minding things and poops twice a year into a decorative scarf that she washes in a river on the solstice. No other activity is permitted, or safe. 

Let Not Evil Flourish is about the great bell-ringing fad that apparently swept through the 1979 Brit Tween Scene like Les McKeown’s fingers through plaid knickers. That joke was just for you, British girls of the 1970s. It might be the only thing you have.

Please notice:

You can really feel how much the artist doesn’t respect Carol. She doesn’t need to say a thing and yet you instantly understand she has the vacant, uncomprehending worldview of a carnival prize goldfish in a milky plastic bag.

The British call counter-clockwise ‘widdershins’ because they have adorably quaint nicknames for everything. They call garbage cans ‘wheelie bins,’ they say ‘it’s monkeys outside’ when it’s cold, and they call a hearse full of disobedient girls ‘a bloody good start.’

No, I’m sorry, that joke was in poor taste. They call it ‘a tin of clammies.’

Carol and her friends carefully scouted the most remote location they could find so they wouldn’t bother anybody with their fuckin’ raging bell party. (It’s the only instrument a young woman was allowed since Harlots and Harlotry declared the accordion ‘the devil’s bellows.’) These girls risked catching greenlung in a dank ruin for the sake of courtesy, and still these dizzy idiots — I’m sorry, I believe the British term is ‘bumspinny botchers’ — will burn for their love of bells.

It doesn’t matter how innocuous a hobby sounds. Like ringing a small handbell? Have fun in hell. With all of your friends (also in hell). Enjoy standing in one spot for a length of time so a person can look at you? Standing is Satan’s posture, you visible slut. You should be trapped in a portrait and attacked by a magical art pervert. Like catching butterflies?

Now, it’s true that butterfly collecting is a pretty fucked up hobby. Why kill a beautiful helpless thing for no reason when there are so many beautiful things with fight in them, and so many reasons? But “don’t be cruel” is not the lesson here. The lesson is: Don’t look at things with your silly girl eyeballs. Seeing things is what gets you collected by purple giants out to invent a new fetish. 

With all this in mind, can you imagine the pure venom Misty has in store for girls who question other people’s decisions? The worst crime! This is always punishable by death or, if the judge has just had his tea, mere disfigurement.

In this one, a young girl has the audacity to question why a man bought a rusting shell of a car he is not qualified to fix, and then named it ‘Satan’s Wheels.’ On the one hand these are extremely questionable decisions. On the other hand, it was a girl that questioned them. She is to be sprayed in the face like a disobedient kitten, but with acid. 

It’s a Dog’s Life is a special episode of Misty Beasts — which is both my new Arthurian bulgecore porn handle and a recurring Misty feature where the girls are mauled by beasts. In it, a dangerously willful girlchild questions her older aunt’s dangerous obsession with her little dog.

Give this to Misty Comics: No panel is wasted. You know that dog is evil right from the jump by the way it’s drawn, somewhere between a kitty-flipping gremlin and Chewbacca cumming. And that’s before you realize its most precious toy is a hideous clown. 

Please notice:

Jane doesn’t even hate the dog. She only points out that maybe it’s a little crazy to buy the dog steak when you can’t afford it. And it’s maybe a lot crazy to prepare gourmet meals for your dog when you don’t have the energy to eat, yourself. 

On the spectrum of rave goblin to orgasm wookie, Ling is skewing strongly Sweatpants Boner Chewbacca here.

Dogs speak English and understand estate law.

You see the mistake already: Jane repeatedly inquires about the welfare of an elderly person. Let’s see how that goes for her.

This is the only way it could end, from the very first panel: You never put a clown in a story unless it’s going to murder a child. It’s your classic Chekhov’s Clown principle.

It doesn’t matter how stupid or insane the decision might be, a young girl should never open her fucking mouth to say a word about it. I don’t care if your dad promised your whole family a record player then got blasted on butterbeer and blew his whole check on garden gnomes, you will shut up and take it or die ironically.

That was not a joke example.

He got his big yearly bonus today and immediately raced out to the gnomery – every village has one – to spend eight hundred dollars on tiny men that stand in the yard. Despite the ruinous lunacy of this decision, the mother still displays all the proper etiquette of a British lady, in that she has no dialogue. 

Lesley is upset by this, perhaps because her father didn’t even do it for the sheer mad love of gnomes, but because of implied peer pressure from the neighbors. He deprived his whole family of a pretty basic appliance just so the insane neighbors building a garden army wouldn’t look down on his ungnomed grass with scorn. Infuriated, Lesley does the ultimate sin: Something.

She’s going to die because she knocked over a lawn decoration. 

“That’s stupid!” Lesley thinks to herself, “just stupid!” 

And she’s right, of course, but she has to be punished anyway because that thought bubble should have been empty. 

Please notice:

That gnome did not break. It is pictured intact, post-kick. She didn’t destroy all of her father’s gnomes, she just moved them out of place. For that, she is to be murdered by a horde of tiny stone men, their little concrete fists small in size but great in number. Her tenderized corpse looking like she was thrown out of a plane in a hailstorm; like she was locked in a giant dryer full of golf balls; she has to die like an airsoft war crime because that’s what you get for being a girl and having an emotion.

It might have been okay to be British in the ‘70s, we don’t know. It’s probably even okay to be a young British woman today, who can say? But if you had the nerve to be a British Girl in the 1970s, it was really your own fault when the street signs came to life and bashed you into marmalade. You should have known better than to bother a man for directions. 

I hope you enjoyed those specially tailored comics, girls! You awful, awful girls!