Stories in this issue:
- Emma in the Shade (artist Juan Solé)
- Oh, Tinker! (artist Trini Tinturé)
- Angie’s Angel (artist Carlos Freixas)
- S.O.S.! – Agony aunt Angela Barrie
- Gymnast Jinty (artist Jim Baikie)
- Bijli the Curious Mongoose (text story)
- Nature’s Wonderful Ways (feature)
- Bessie Bunter
- More Winning Pictures By Our Readers
- Sindy and her Friends in “Carefree’s Champion”
- The Champions – Lillian Board (sports personality feature)
- Lucky’s Living Doll (artist Robert MacGillivray)
- Strange Story: “Phantoms of the Old Chateau” (artist Phil Townsend)
- My Brother’s a Nut! – sparkling new family story begins today
- Adam’s Got What he Wants – feature on Adam Faith
- Orphans Alone (artist Tom Kerr)
Another one of my slightly-randomly-acquired issues of June and School Friend. As I said in the comments on the last post, we will look to cover more titles beyond Jinty on this blog in the future.
“Emma In The Shade” is a nicely-drawn tale of parental angst. As with the other stories in June & SF, it feels very short at only 2 pages long per episode but other than that it could certainly fit in the pages of Jinty. Emma is the only child of brilliant parents, who expect her to excel likewise. But she doesn’t feel that she has any talents, and her mother in particular is very hard on her as a result. Of course when there is an accident that deprives her of one parent, it is the unsympathetic one that she is left with…
Little fairy Tinker is trying to help a young boy who is having no luck fishing – through a series of happy accidents she ends up dragging the whole jetty he is standing on off to the deep sea, which at least means that he ends up with an impressive catch!
Angie West is in trouble. While trying to find out what happened to a china angel belonging to her old friend, she has got mixed up in something which results in her being accused of robbery. She is cleared by the end of the episode because luckily she sketched a man that she saw in pirate costume in the location of the robbery – and that turned out to be the perpetrator, so all was well.
Gymnast Jinty is faced with a dilemma – the school she works at is due to be merged with another, and she and the games teacher at the other school must compete for their jobs. I’m not that interested in the story resolution but Jim Baikie does such lovely art even in the background details – Jinty invents a game to get the school girls practicing hard, by hitting tennis balls against ‘space monsters’ she has set up dangling from the ceiling of the gym. They are lovely little details. I include it here for others to enjoy.
The text story is a three-pager, as with the earlier issue I posted about. This is not so much a serial as a series of linked stories about the same protagonists, seemingly the little curious mongoose in particular. There is also a one-page “Nature’s Wonderful Ways” illustrated feature on interesting animals and their play-time habits.
Bessie Bunter is up to her usual tricks, but so is her brother, who is her rival in the quest to obtain a feast from a school hamper! But the two chumps, sorry chums, end up pinching a basket of cacti for the flower show instead, alas for them.
Sindy’s pal Tim dashes into a stable when a fire breaks out, and they discover a tale of drugged and sabotaged horses. Very Dick Francis.
The feature about a sports personality is on Lillian Board, a very fast runner I’d never heard of. She sadly died of cervical cancer at the very early age of 22: the feature just refers to ‘her killer disease’ without going into any further details and I needed to look her up to find out anything more.
Robert MacGillivray delivers his usual fun as Lucky and her living doll try to enjoy the sunshine without too many slapstick sillies.
The Strange Story is drawn by Phil Townsend, meaning we really have a good lot of Jinty stalwarts featured in this issue. It is about a girl in the French Resistance, who is guided to find an important package which has landed in the middle of a maze. Her guides are the ghosts of previous inhabitants who followed the path to escape from revolutionaries long ago.
“My Brother’s A Nut” is rather sloppily drawn I would say. Jilly Carter’s family is all very normal and ordinary, apart from her brother, who often takes it into to try out new ideas. This week he’s trying to get Jilly to form a band with him and some friends, as the drummer – but of course she has never done any drumming before.
The artist on “Orphans Alone” is familiar but I don’t know his/her name [edited to add – Catawiki tells me this is Tom Kerr]. Beth and Tim are orphans who have run away from the workhouse and are struggling to make a living. When Tim buys her a bottle at a fair, they seem to be dogged by bad luck afterwards, but it turns out to be all because of a scam that a nasty trickster is trying to play on the two. I assume there are further episodic tales of these two orphans to come, until eventually they find their last home or long-lost parents or similar.
A Resource on Jinty: Artists, Writers, Stories 
The artist for “Emma in the Shade” is Juan Solé.
Thanks for the info, added.
I always thought that the 2000AD series ‘Skizz’ which Jim Baikie drew in 1983 was the closest Alan Moore ever came to writing a traditional British girls’ strip. The years Baikie had spent working anonymously on comics like June & School Friend made him the perfect choice as artist.
It’s a beautiful cover.
Tom Kerr is the artist for “Orphans Alone” as you say, and the story first appeared in “Always together “School Friend and Girls’ Crystal” in 1963 – not sure of dates