The Lackluster World of Barbie Comics

The earliest Barbie comic was a five-issue series called Barbie and Ken that was published by Dell from 1962-1963. There’s a distinct lack of imagination on display here: the covers feature photos of the dolls rather than drawings, and the stories revolve around a Barbie fan club made up of little girls who meet to discuss what it would be like to meet Barbie in various scenarios? For some reason? Complete with rigid gender roles, of course!

For example, in the first issue, one girl talks about going on a flight with Ken as a pilot and Barbie as a flight attendant, while another attends a ballet where Barbie and Ken are the principal dancers. I couldn’t help but notice that the comic version of Pilot Ken has two legs, unlike my own Pilot Ken after my neighbor’s little brother threw him down the stairs, highlighting this comic’s shocking lack of adherence to canon.

No, but seriously, all of the stories are extremely dull, and I sincerely hope the children of the ’60s were having more fun than this comic suggests. At least the little girl who visits Nurse (sigh) Barbie at the hospital gets to watch Doctor (SIGH) Ken remove another child’s appendix, which fits in with the sort of gruesome play most girls of my generation enacted with their Barbies.

A few decades later, the Barbie license passed to Marvel, who launched two ongoing series in 1991: Barbie, which ran for 63 issues, and Barbie: Fashion, which ran for 53 issues. Those are pretty impressive runs, especially for comics starring a female character, and with a far higher percentage of female creators on their rosters than is typical for Marvel. (According to the Grand Comics Database, no creators stuck around on these books for too long, but almost half were women.) In fact, I’m fairly certain that Barbie held down her runs for longer than any Marvel heroine besides Patsy Walker (124 issues) and Millie the Model (a glorious 207 issues). That’s…actually more of a damning indictment of Marvel than a coup for Barbie, but let’s move on.

Jokes about Barbie beating Thanos aside (she could, and easily), Marvel publishing so many Barbie comics at first seems incongruous. But again, Marvel’s longest-running comic starring a woman is Millie the Model, and that doesn’t include all her various spinoffs. They’d had similar multibook success with Patsy Walker, who is best known as the superheroine Hellcat these days, but started out as a teen comedy heroine in the vein of Archie — arguably a junior version of Millie’s hijinks. In fact, Marvel had a whole bunch of light comedy books for girls outside of their superhero universe that also included Kathy and Wendy Parker, although admittedly most of these characters faded away in the ’70s, if not earlier. (Or, in Patsy’s case, developed mystical psychic cat powers. Which I’m sure Barbie also has.)