Let's start off with a gentle Gothic Halloween adventure...
...featuring the adventures of the world's most famous fashion doll!
Writer Trina Robbins and penciler Mary Wilshire certainly deliver "girl power" in this short, but sweet, All Hallows Eve tale in Marvel's Barbie Halloween Special #1a (1993) giveaway issued to comics stores for promotional purposes at Halloween.
NOTE: The giveaway "book" was just the 8-page story reprinted from Marvel's Barbie #11 (1991).
The other Halloween-themed story from that issue was re-purposed into Halloween Special #1b and also given out in 1993.
Barbie, and its' sister title Barbie Fashion, were two secret success stories for Marvel in the 1990s.
Because they weren't superhero titles, hardcore, mostly male, fans never even noticed them, but the two books ran an impressive 63 and 53 issues respectively at a time when many titles lasted 12 issues or less!
Barbara Slate, who wrote 65 issues of the two series, told the tale...
In the 90s, Tom DeFalco, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, started a
girls’ line.
It was a courageous move because ‘girls don’t buy comics’
was the catch phrase whenever the subject was brought up.
But Tom boldly
went where no man had gone before and got licenses for Barbie (Mattel)
and then a few years later, Belle (Disney’s Beauty and the Beast) and
Ariel (Disney’s Little Mermaid).
I wrote 65 Barbie comics. Every month Barbie would have a different
profession.
She was an astronaut, a teacher, and a designer, to name a
few of her seemingly endless career paths.
Barbie could do anything and live anywhere.
We won the Parents Choice
Award two years in a row.
Even Ms. Magazine loved Barbie comics!
Her
breasts were normal size.
Why?
Because under the keen eye of the
marvelous Marvel editor, Hildy Mesnik, a team of women wrote, drew and
adored Barbie.
We were all conscious of the fact that young girls would
be reading our work and we wanted them to grow up to be strong,
independent and successful women.
Of course our sales couldn’t compete with Spider-Man and other male
dominated superheroes.
Comic book readers were, after all, 95% boys.
But
every month our numbers increased.
To make a very sad story short, just
as the girls’ line was getting traction, some a-hole who knew nothing
about comics bought Marvel, looked at our monthly sales numbers, and
eliminated the entire girls’ line while sending Marvel into bankruptcy.
(Don’t get me started.)
From "Let the Girls Take the Lead", available
HERE.
Next week...
You'll Cry Your Eyes Out if You Miss It!
(Oh, you've heard that, eh?)
