Girls’ Comics: Dragged screaming from the K-Punk comments box, this link leads to an excellent essay by Miriam Hurst on the British girls’ comics of the 1970s. Hurst makes intelligent points though you can’t go far wrong in this territory just by describing the material, viz:
However, at least serial stories such as these usually ended happily. Shorter stories often didn’t. In one, a vain girl who has won many beauty contests stumbles across a secret contest. When she sneaks in, she discovers that it is an ugliness contest. She is detected by assorted monsters, who crowd around her and explain that being ugly is just as valid as being beautiful; in exchange, she announces that she now realises that people who are ugly on the outside can be beautiful on the inside.
The story could have ended there. Instead, one of the monsters speaks up. The girl is correct, it says, but not in this case. All of these monsters are just as ugly on the inside as they are on the outside; as her face changes in shock, they move in on her, mouths open.