Photostories

My favourite thing that people used to do with their dolls was "photostories" (occasionally called picfics I think). These are effectively comics told through the medium of doll photography. They were often pretty crass and silly. Most were short stories but some could stretch on for chapters, more like a webcomic. Here I am going to talk about my favourites.

A Blythe Opera

This is about a model named Claudette and is a soap opera (hence the name). There is murder and evil twin impersonation. I can't remember exactly what happened but I know it ends on a cliffhanger. I don’t think I ever fully recovered after reading it. You can still read the whole thing on Flickr and read an interview with the author here!

All my Pullips

This one is extremely insane. I literally cannot coherently explain the plot of this one. It was an attempt by the author to have a story that included every member of their Pullip collection. Also, probably to show off the huge dollhouse they’d built to house them.

All the characters have a memorable personality and appearance, which I think is the charm of the story. The main character is Ash, who is an amoral and cynical mad scientist. There is her weird daughter-thing Valentine, and Valentine’s evil doppelganger Nightshade who is hell-bent on world domination.

There are countless subplots, some involving time travel, robots, organ harvesting, the theft of the eiffel tower, genies, the FBI, fairies, assassins, pirates, literally a Pullip who is customised to look like Frank N Furtur from Rocky Horror... (I told you it was insane).

Sadly, it is unfinished and no longer online, but you can find almost every update up until its hiatus on the wayback machine, along with character bios.

Be My Valentine

The website for this is on the Wayback Machine, but sadly only some of the posts are archived, so it's not really readable anymore. Anyway, this was a romance story! It was surprisingly well written. I later learned this was because the creator was like, a real published author.

It had a plot typical of a teen movie, with a nerdy girl falling for a popular guy. She also ends up befriending the typical "mean girl" archetype against all odds. Obviously, this was groundbreaking storytelling to 12 year old me. There was a spinoff featuring this character that was unfinished.

Each panel was a picture taken of the author's dolls and then edited with an online comic creator. The idea of writing this huge thing, then taking all the photos, then editing them and uploading to Blogger... insane. There were crowd scenes in this. The effort that went into this still astounds me. Honestly it paid off, I came back to read it all the time.