Fran of the Floods

Fran of the Floods was a serialised comic strip drama which ran in the Jinty comic for girls in the 1970s and is collected here into one volume. The story is pretty dark and involves runaway climate change causing devastating floods which nearly completely overwhelm the UK, causing a huge loss of life and the complete collapse of society. 

Our heroine is schoolgirl Fran, who is caught up in the devastating disaster and tries to find her sister, who had already gone to Scotland (and assumed safety).

With her parents missing, presumed drowned, Fran is all alone until she meets up with her best friend Jill and they have a long series of adventures in this new dangerous and very wet world. Not only are the endless rains and floods a problem, we also have various gangs of evil adults set to exploit the survivors (though as this was a comic aimed at children, the teenage girls are exploited for slave labour not anything else of course). That is bad enough though as plenty of whips seem to have survived the flooding if little else.

Fran and Jill have a mixture of very bad luck (in getting into an endless series of bad situations) and good luck (in how they always manage to get out of them!) The story is very enjoyable though obviously intended to be read in short chunks weekly. Reading the story collected into a single volume can get a bit repetitive at times. Overall though this a taut and frequently intense tale, well written by Alan Davison and with classic British style comic artwork by Phil Gascoine.