So, on Sunday, I finally got my hands on Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s long-awaited League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, in which a government dossier is discovered detailing various adventures of the League past and present. And it is absolutely and utterly amazing. Not least because one of the central plots in the book is based on the literary universe with which my sisters and I were obsessed as kids: Frank Richards’ original Greyfriars stories. Oh, yes, leedy, when our heroes first open the dossier and see the “note” written on it to “H.W.” refering to his old “Greyfriars compadre R. C.” I got very, very excited. And just WAIT til you see what Moore has done with it…
( Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1984 )

Anyway, the whole thing is pretty insane and kind of aweome, and I’d love it even without the Greyfriars stuff. But that felt like a present – if you’d asked me what fictional universe I most wanted Moore to do properly, it would have been Greyfriars.

I'm all in favour of journalists at mainstream publications bringing comics and graphic novels to a wider audience (hell, I've done it myself, lots of times - I did a(n almost) full page interview with Adrian Tomine in the current issue of the none-more-mainstream magazine where I work). But Christ, is it too much to ask that they get the bloody terminology right? The Observer announced the winner of their graphic short story prize (I haven't seen the winner because the Observer was sold out of our local newsagents yesterday) with a piece entitled Manga comes of age. As most of you reading this will know, manga doesn't refer to graphic novels in general, but that's not the only annoying thing about this article.

asily the biggest development in contemporary fiction has been the Manga revolution, or the rise of the graphic novel, which, in Dave Eggers's words, has become literary fiction's 'mutant sister'. We at The Observer are rather proud of our coverage of this vivid, chatty and pictorial genre.

Ah, does anyone do smug and patronising like the Observer? First of all, no one calls the rise of the graphic novel "tha manga revolution" because the likes of the Hernandez Brothers, Alison Bechdel, Alan Moore, Daniel Clowes and the other writers who are increasingly receiving mainstream attention are not manga. And why on earth did they describe the genre as "chatty"? Because it's got voice bubbles? Because it's the same medium as the Beano and therefore must be lighthearted and jolly? Ugh. Idiots.

If you are female, British or Irish and were a child between 1945 and 1990, chances are you read Mandy, Judy, Bunty et al. Valda, Miss Angel, the Honourable S.J. and their chums are burned into my memory forever, but, presumably because these comics were aimed at girls, very little has been written about them in comparison to boys' comics (or comics that were read by boys and girls, like the Beano - of which I was also a fan at a very early age, and indeed a member of Dennis the Menace's Fan Club (and Gnasher's Fang Club). Unlike boys' comics, there's also very little online about girls' comics - I've looked a few times over the years, and a quick google reveals that the situation is still the same: a couple of entries about girls' comics in general British comic fan sites. In fact, I've been talking about doing a book about girls' comics myself for years - these comics are a huge part of 20th century girls' culture in this part of the world, one that has been largely ignored.

So I was delighted to hear an item about girls' comics on Woman's Hour the other day, which sent me into paroxyms of nostalgia - I'd forgotten all about "The Cat", but as soon as they started talking about it I instantly visualised the art work, it all came back in an instant. Valda, of course, also got a mention, but I was slightly disappointed that no one mentioned the gloriously masochistic Miss Angel (rich girl who discovers she is dying of unspecified consumption-esque ailment and, to spare her parents the pain of watching her die, goes off to set up a sort of refuge for even more pitiful orphans in a stable house. Supporting characters included Annie, the hunchbacked orphan who was a musical genius. Miss Angel also regularly visited the orphans under the railway arches whom she was "unable to house", wishing that "the stable house was as big as my heart", though as my sister Busta J and I would regularly point out, the stable house always had room for the picturesque "orphan of the week" who arrived with an interesting backstory).

Other favourite stories in the C**** household back in the '80s included Workhouse Wendy (rich child goes undercover in workhouse to investigate its cruelty, but then her parents are killed in a shipwreck and she's trapped there!), Little Stranger (brilliantly scary story about a girl - who is an only child - who wakes up one day and discovers that as far as everyone else is concerned, she's always had a little sister. Who is, of course, really an alien who has brainwashed everyone) and, most of all, The Honourable S.J., in which the evil Sarah-Jane Cheetwell (oh, yes!) blackmailed the daughter of her housekeeper, who was unlucky enough to repeatedly end up at the same boarding school as S.J. We could never understand how, after being unmasked as evil and expelled time and time again, S.J. managed to get accepted at her next school, apparently without a stain on her character, and get made a prefect or headgirl straight away. But there you go. Perhaps her evil powers had a magical quality.

So what were your favourites?

The happiest of happy birthdays to jane_the_23rd! Tonight we shall feast in celebration.

Also happy birthday to agentz! Have a Gnome-tastic day.

Also, I came home yesterday to find my copy of cleanskies's Tiny Tea comic. So cool and funny and beautiful! And of course I agree with the tea-lovin' sentiments.