A while back I binged on English Schoolgirl books so The Silent Three are old friends. I like them though I confess this isn't much of a story. To fit the eight pages the writer tips us off immediately who's the bad guy and who's the good girl. After that it's just waiting for the inevitable. The girls' main shtick, their secret identities, isn't really necessary to the story, and giving Cherry a robe doesn't make sense to me.
Still, I like Silent Three stories because the stakes are so low. The adventures are pleasant, the setting is pleasant, the characters are pleasant (except the supercilious bad guys), and the art is pleasant. In a world increasingly obsessed with violence, in a country where we're awaiting the ascendance of a fascist president, it's a relief to escape to a land in which the ultimate problem is finding a missing will.
It's interesting how most of these schoolgirl comics are sealed off from time. The schools are far off in an idyllic countryside. One hardly ever sees an automobile or an airplane (forgive me, aeroplane). There are no telephones, radios or, God forbid, televisions. Many stories might as easily have taken place in 1925 as in 1955. I wonder if the editors decided to keep the stories "girlish" by not getting involved in the complexities of the outside world. Perhaps it was a more pragmatic decision: with timeless stories and artwork, the strips could be reprinted endlessly without seeming dated.
Speaking of the artwork, the drawings by Evelyn Flinders or whomever are quite nice. The artist gives equal attention to characters and backgrounds, resulting in a strong sense of place. It must have been a pain drawing all those vertical stripes on the girls' school uniforms.
The business of compressing the story by inserting blocks of text is kind of clunky. I'm not going to be too hard on the idea because I'm currently working on a book that does precisely the same thing. Some of these captions, though, explain the obvious or recap the action. They'd work better in a longer story or a serial, where you have time to forget what went before.
One other thing struck me as odd: the way the writer harps on Cherry's hair color. "[Their] thoughts flew to dark-haired Cherry..." Peggy of the Silent Three has dark hair but no one makes a big deal of that. Is Cherry's dark hair supposed to identify her as a member of a group? Dark-haired servants? Maybe she's a gypsy. But then she wouldn't be described as pale-faced, would she?
Anyway, Happy Christmas, Silent Three. Jolly glad it turned out well. By the way, do any Englishmen (or Englishwomen for that matter) still say, "jolly"?
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Topic: Week 149 - A Christmas Mystery For the Silent Three (Read 2535 times)
