Terry Aspin

From Wrexham in Wales, Terry Aspin (1916-2006) is an excellent example of the problem of creator attribution in Jinty and other girls’ comics. He is known as an artist who worked over a number of decades for British comics titles and stories including Davy Crockett, but it took until this year for him to be also identified as the artist on some of Jinty‘s best stories. (His granddaughter posted some archive material on Facebook, including sketches and page roughs, from which the definite identification was made.)

Here is a complete story beautifully drawn by Terry Aspin, from the Gypsy Rose ‘spooky storyteller’ series; this episode from 30 April 1977. The layouts are dynamic and the evil cat is positively demonic!

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List of Jinty stories attributable to Terry Aspin:

• Alice In A Strange Land (1979)
• Almost Human (1979)
• Cathy’s Casebook (1978)
• Curtain of Silence (1977); summary page
• The Girl Who Never Was
• Gypsy Rose (various dates)
• Toni on Trial

In addition to these Jinty stories, he also drew for other girls’ comics, including stories such as “Wendy at War” in Debbie; “My Secret Family”, “Night and Day”, and” The Portrait of Pauline” in Mandy; and “Vote For Smith” in Tracy.

Positive identification of artists is not always straightforward, as styles will vary as part of natural change over time, or for specific stylistic reasons. Details of how features such as eyes, mouths, and hair are drawn are good indicators, though not of course infallibly accurate. In the case of the illustration below, from the Jinty Summer Special 1978, the face of some of the background characters are a closer match to some of the faces in “Almost Human”, for instance, than the main characters of the respective stories necessarily are at first glance.

Terry Aspin