It's nearly the witching hour, and the mist is rising, so time for another strip from greatest ever girls' comic, Misty. The Sentinels is the one about a scary tower block that's actually a gateway to a parallel Earth. As homeless heroine Jan and her family have to fend for themselves on the streets, and are forced to squat in the scary Sentinel high rise, we're in absolute working-class British comic book heaven.
Written by Scottish writer Malcolm Shaw, plucky Jan and her parents are seen as unfortunate victims of circumstance, and not as the benefit scroungers they undoubtedly would be these days.
Plus tower blocks, far from being seen as the positive wave of the future that various governments painted them as were, even back in the '70's, often seen as areas of depivation and disillusionment. Except the one Mary, Mungo and Midge lived in, obviously.
That's all background of course, as this is ostensibly a story about weird happenings, strange occurrences and Nazi's. Lots and lots of Nazi's.
But like the best kid's comic strips, there's a heavily political edge here, and you can easily see The Sentinels being adapted by those maniacs at HTV for a thursday teatime, and we'd all be reminiscing now how scared we all were of those creepy tower blocks. Some of us still are.
