When I was about nine or ten years old, I used to get Judy comic. This was a girls' comic, full of stories like "Wee Slavey", "The Girl with the Million Dollar Smile" and other regular tales. Some stories were stand-alone, others were serialised and would run for eight or so weeks.
There was one particularly memorable serial called, "Nothing Ever Goes Right". No-one ever believes me when I tell them about this, and Internet searches have proved fruitless. But if anyone worked for Judy comic in about 1990, please let me know that I'm not imagining it. It's a scary thing to imagine.
Week 1: We are introduced to the girl - whose name I forget. Let's call her Louise, like all of my fictional friends. Louise lives in a nice house with her mum and dad and sister. She has a pony. At the end of Week 1, Louise's dad loses his job.
Week 2: The pressures of not having a job weigh heavily on Louise's dad and his stay-at-home wife. The pony has to go.
Week 3: Louise's mum and dad lose the house and have to move to a smaller place. Unable to cope with the rubbish situation, the mum and dad divorce.
Week 4: Louise's mum and dad meet up to talk about their problems... and just as it looks like they might get back together, they die in an horrific car crash.
Week 5: Louise is about 16, and doesn't want her little sister to be taken into care, so she quits school and gets a job, doing sewing, to look after her.
Week 6: Because of the close work sewing, Louise's eyesight starts to fail. Though now completely blind, she carries on sewing to support her little sister. If it had been me, the sister would have starved. I hate sewing.
Week 7: I can't remember exactly what happens to Louise's little sister, but she gets written out in some sort of horrific way.
Week 8: Louise gets pneumonia and dies alone in a little attic flat. She is buried in an unmarked grave with a wooden cross.*
This was sold to ten year-olds in the late 80s / early 90s. "Nothing Ever Goes Right": join my campaign to see this made into a film, and see if we can scar a whole new generation.
* Maybe nothing went right for Louise, but at least this one didn't end up with a bloke with a small willy.
2 comments:
Oh my God, look what I've just found!
"Judy's 'Nothing Ever Goes Right!' epitomised the girls' comics' love of tragedy. After a series of disasters, the last episode saw heroine Heather ending up in an unnamed grave. "
From http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/comics/features/girls_comics.shtml
I knew I hadn't imagined it.
L x
I remember 'Nothing ever goes right' vividly (but think it was published in the early rather than late 1980s?)! My favourite serial tale in Judy was 'Sally of Super School', which was about a girl at a school where everything was perfect, and she finally found out that everyone there was being brainwashed in a terrifying electric chair-like contraption. It was an evil genius of a story, and predated the eerily similar 'The Demon Headmaster' on TV by several years.
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