Julie -- Schoolgirl on Wings (Princess Picture Library 101, September 20, 1965)
Toda's Forgotten Book takes you into the strange (to me at least) world of the British girl's comic books. The Princess Picture Library was one-such comic book. published by Fleetway from 1961 to 1966 for a total of 118 issues, after which if merged with June and School Friend to become the awkwardly titled June and School Friend and Princess Picture Library, which ran for more than 340 additional issues (exact numbers and dates are uncertain and I can't be bothered doing a major internet search to find them.)
The target audience was young girls and the stories mainly featured prepubescent girls doing adventurous things, some branching into mystery with a few others into science fiction. At the beginning, the Princess Picture Library featured two girls in separate, alternating full-length adventures: Sally Doyle and Sue Day. Sue was a perky little brunette and Sally was a blonde who loved to dance ballet. The titles of the first six issues might give you the flavor of the series: Sue Day -- Detective, Sally and the Stolen Ballet, Sue at Sandybeach, Sally in Italy, Sue and the Cake Mystery, and Sally on TV. As the series went on, more girls were featured; there were Wyn and Patsy and Tillie and Fleurette and Beth and Jill and others.
And then there's Julie Bradshaw, the vicar's daughter and the heroine of at least four issues, Julie's adventures all seem to start with her eccentric Uncle Lionel, "a most amazing inventor."
Julie returns to the rectory after spending a few days with her aunt, only to find that the most amazing building building has sprung up on the property. It's Uncle Lionel's new laboratory; the attic had been getting a little cramped. Lionel shows Julie his new invention -- a personal flying machine that looks like a pair of bat wings. Lionel shows Julie how it works by taking a test drive; after ten minutes he is about to return when a net drops down from a helicopter above and captures the elderly inventor. Lionel's flying machine has a return button that will take him back to his laboratory automatically; instead, it triggers his new lab to take to the air to follow him.
The helicopter carries Uncle Lionel to Merovia, somewhere in the Balkans. Lionel and his flying machine is freed from the net just as Princess Miranda approaches. She apologizes for the way Uncle Lionel was brought there but explained that she needed him. her younger brother had been kidnapped for ransom by the evil Baron Blitzstein and taken to his remote mountain castle. Miranda cannot afford the ransom and she has no army to storm the castle. Uncle Lionel agrees to help just as his lab, with a startled Julie, lands in the Princess's courtyard. (If the return button wouldn't bring Lionel to his lab, then it had to bring the lab to Lionel.)
As Lionel suits up in his bat wings, Julie finds a spare set and puts it on, wanting to go with Lionel to reconnoiter the castle. Lionel says no and tells Julie he may need her to push the return button in the lab. Julie accidently pushed the GO button on her wings and flies into the air. Lionel pushes his GO button and it doesn't work, so Julie sets out through the air for the cruel baron's stronghold.. Of course Julie is captured and is placed in the dungeon with Prince Erich, Miranda's little brother. Julie is brought before Baron Blitzstein and learns that there is spy in Miranda's court. As the baron threatens the young girl into telling him Uncle Lionel's plans, Lionel pushes the RETURN button and Julie flies off.
Rescuing the prince from a dungeon is a much harder task than rescuing him from a turret. Lionel spends the night creating a small army of seven robots, all to control by him from his lab. Things go wrong when Lionel is drugged by the spy and the robots are sent amok among Miranda's people. A disgraced Uncle Lionel and Julie are exiled from Merovia. But don't count Uncle Lionel out yet. His ne plan concerns a very unusual banquet where all the food is mixed with some of his more inventive creations.
All ends well, of course.
Julie and Uncle Lionel also appeared in Julie -- The Six-Inch Schoolgirl, Uncle Lionel's Flying House, and Julie's Pet Monster. I may or may not read these in the future.
I'm not sure why, but Julie reminds me of an over-simplified, estrogenized Dunny Dunn, the star of Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin's young adult series.
Well, Danny Dunn was not Too terribly complex a character, either! (I would turn to Keith Robertson's Midge Glass and Henry Reed novels for young reader's characterization.) This does sound more than a little charming, with some WIND AND THE WILLOWS/low-key Ruritania sort of whimsy to it...and I wonder what would've been comparably offered to girl readers in the States in those years...my perhaps incorrect impression is that the US romance comics tended to die quickly (perhaps I'm thinking mostly of '70s comics from the likes of DC, my most engaged period with "mainstream" comics), but certainly girls were part of the market for Wonder Woman, Lois Lane, and Archie Comics titles...and the kind of comics that would be included in HUMPTY DUMPTY and CHILDREN'S DIGEST in the '60s/'70s before less kind publishers took them over...
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