Spider Woman (1980)

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Published: Tammy & Misty 19 January 1980 – 22 March 1980 

Episodes: 10

Artists: Jaume Rumeu 19 January to 1 March 1980; Mario Capaldi 8 March to 22 March 1980 

Writer: Bill Harrington

Translations/reprints: Misty Presents: The Jaume Rumeu Collection (2021)

In the last entry we briefly touched on the subject of Spider Woman. So here she is for the final entry in our Halloween lineup.

Plot

Mrs Webb, the villainess from Misty’s “The Black Widow”, returns. She has abandoned revenge for her husband’s death in favour of world domination, and has established a base on an island in Australasia that was once a leper colony. Her new weapon is a strain of man-eating spiders she has developed, and her plan is to use them to scare the whole world into submitting to her and her spiders. 

Accidentally stumbling into this are Paula Moore, on holiday in Australia, and her grandparents. Their boat got blown off course by a storm and they discover the ship that was the first test for Mrs Webb’s man-eating spiders. It’s a ghost ship, with crew stripped to the bones from the spiders, which are still on board. 

Sensing danger from the spiders, they quickly head back to their boat and radio mainland to report the incident, but Mrs Webb is watching them on her monitor. Posing as naval authority, she kidnaps them and strands them on her island base, with nothing but decrepit old leper huts for accommodation and tales of leper ghosts to frighten them. Gran is bitten by one of the spiders Mrs Webb left to guard their boat and falls gravely ill. In her delirium she raves about spiders and ghosts of lepers who don’t want them around. They are forced to take shelter in one of the leper huts. 

Paula goes in search of the woman who stranded them in the hope of treatment for gran. Mrs Webb has her servant, Gorza, who looks like some sort of weird, lumbering cross between a dumb waiter, Frankenstein and a ogre, capture Paula and bring her to her base. She introduces herself and her plans to Paula, and she wants Paula’s full cooperation if her family is to stay alive. She knows the Navy will soon discover the ghost ship, and she wants Paula and her family to tell them of her great power. Mrs Webb then releases Paula.

Paula finds her gran is now recovering from the bite. She tells her family who they are up against, but they discover their boat, previously guarded by the spiders, is now gone altogether. And in the bushes, something or someone is watching them. Later they find a chimpanzee in the bushes, which is not native to the island, and they conclude he must have escaped from Mrs Webb’s experiments. But gran is convinced someone else is around and raves about leper ghosts and the previous inhabitants being into voodoo and black magic. Back at the hut, they do find evidence someone else could be around, but it’s in the form of a delicious meal waiting for them. 

Back at the ghost ship, the Navy have found the horrors on board and guess who they are up against before Mrs Webb even sends her first message to them on her TV monitor. She informs them she has hostages. They are to return to the mainland and report what her spiders are capable of, and she is going to do the same to the whole world if there is no global submission to her. The Navy radio her message back to HQ and start a search of all the islands in a 30-mile radius for the hostages. However, Mrs Webb is using her helicopter to see whether they are obeying her orders or not, and when she sees they are not, she drops a case of her man-eating spiders on the ship, who are soon doing their deadly work. The Navy hose the spiders off the ship and their radar tracked her helicopter. They are now hot on her trail.

Paula and her family now discover who else is on the island: an ex-leper named Jarvis. He remained on the island after being cured of leprosy and wants to join the fight against Mrs Webb. He shows Paula and grandpa a secret entrance into her lair, and they take advantage of her absence to sneak in. But they discover the entrance is guarded by an enormous killer spider. Jarvis quickly dispatches the spider, and they enter Mrs Webb’s lair to use her equipment to call for help.

Unfortunately it’s at this point that Mrs Webb returns and catches them. Mrs Webb straps Jarvis to a table to be the first test of her latest serum – one that can turn a human being into a spider! She adds that she has not developed an antidote.

Then a bombardment from the Navy shakes the base, causing Mrs Webb to accidentally inject the serum into herself. And like she said, there is no antidote available. Gorza is knocked out by falling debris. Mrs Webb makes a run for her helicopter, but as she prepares to take off, the serum starts to take effect and one of her arms turns into a spider’s leg. 

Paula impulsively makes a rush for the helicopter but is captured by Mrs Webb. Mrs Webb uses her remaining arm to get the helicopter into the air and tries to use Paula as a hostage against the Navy. When Paula yells at them not to give in to the threat, Mrs Webb angrily throws her against the controls, causing the helicopter to pitch. Mrs Webb makes another lunge at Paula to kill her with spider venom, causing another pitch that makes her fall out of the helicopter and into the sea. The Navy fail to find her, dead or alive, or in what form. They pick up Paula and her grandparents, but Jarvis wants to stay on the island.

Thoughts

Mrs Webb was the only Misty villain to return for a sequel, and one of the few who could. Misty being Misty, she liked to send her villains to sticky ends (an end Mrs Webb finally meets in this story!). Not all Misty villains met this fate, and Mrs Webb’s first story hinted she escaped and might be back. It’s a bit odd this followup didn’t appear in Misty when there was still time for it to do so before the merger. At IPC, a sequel tended to appear within a year after the original, and the first Mrs Webb story appeared in 1978. Perhaps the sequel had not been written at that stage? Did they decide to save the sequel for the merger? Or did ye Editor trawl through old issues of Misty to see what could be brought into the merger and ordered the sequel?

When I first read this follow-up, I found Mrs Webb way too camp and over the top for my taste, an opinion that has not changed much. Also, she was more into demented grandstanding than menace, which made her even more annoying. In her first story her planning showed shrewdness and cunning despite her insanity, but now her plans don’t seem to be well thought out. She seriously believes she can scare the whole world into submission by threatening them with spiders, even if they are ones capable of eating people alive? All the Navy had to do to stop her man-eating spider attack was bring out the hoses, and the world has insecticides and fumigation as well. 

Also showing lack of proper planning is how Mrs Webb wants to make use of Paula. She captures Paula and demands her cooperation, but she does not enslave her or ever make any real use of her as she did with her two slaves Sadie and Freda in her first story. After making her demands she just lets Paula go. She does not even use an enslaving device on Paula, which she did with Sadie and Freda. Doing so would have added even more punch to the plot. Instead, one is left feeling Mrs Webb capturing Paula at all was rather pointless, and the only purpose it serves in the plot is to inform Paula what’s going on. Okay, when comparing Mrs Webb now to what she was like in her first story, it is obvious that her insanity has increased, very likely at the expense of clear thinking. So perhaps it is understandable.

Also coming across as a bit improbable is the amazing recovery gran makes after the spider bite. Her recovery, without any medication, is so miraculous it’s unbelievable. She actually leaves the island looking hale and hearty, as if she had never been bitten at all. Was she lucky and only received a sublethal bite, or did she have some kind of fluke resistance to the poison?

The story could have done with a fuller explanation of who Mrs Webb was for the benefit of readers who had not read her original story, particularly the Tammy readers. We’re given the impression she has struck before and the Navy captain says she’s “the fiend who terrorised England some years back”, but there are no details. Some flashback or explanation would have been welcome by readers who sensed another story here and wanted to know the gist at least, and it would have enhanced the story more.

On the plus side, the story sure is high on the gross-out factor, which is so rare and bold for girls’ comics. Panels showing people being eaten alive by spiders, one being driven mad with pain and throwing himself overboard, and corpses that have been eaten to the bones must have shocked Tammy readers and given them nightmares for days. It’s also high on creepiness and sinister atmosphere, and it’s not just those spiders that are genetically engineered to be dangerous weapons. It’s the setting on the leper island itself. Those sinister-looking, decaying huts that were once home to lepers and the island graveyard full of leper graves creep us out immediately. Mrs Webb and then gran’s delirium set everyone high on anxiety and terror that there could be ghosts lurking around that are every bit as evil and dangerous as Mrs Webb’s spiders. And in a place like that, we’re more than ready to believe there are ghosts or something even more diabolical. Winding us up even more is the buildup to something or someone else on the island who is watching the stranded family. It’s quite a twist to have it turn out to be benign and friendly instead of menacing.

The apex of the horror is definitely the experiment to turn a human being into a spider. A human actually turning into a spider of unknown hybrid? Cor blimey! Having Mrs Webb herself not knowing exactly what the end result will be really adds to it.

It is a great Misty-style comeuppance to have this backfire on Mrs Webb and set her on the path to turning into a spider herself. It is a pity we don’t see the final form of this transformation. It feels like another missed opportunity and we’re rather left dangling as to how it would have turned out. It would have really turned the story up a few notches to have our protagonists up against a totally transformed Mrs Webb. We can just see her as the biggest Black Widow spider you ever saw, but still with a human mind that is totally insane, rampaging like Godzilla, and maybe laying clutches of eggs that hatch into swarms of giant killer spiders. That would have turned it into a really exciting story that would have readers on the edge of their seats while giving them the stuff of nightmares. 

Come Into My Parlour (1977-78)

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Published: Jinty 19 November 1977 to 11 February 1978

Episodes: 13

Artist: Douglas Perry

Writer: Unknown

Translations/reprints: Kom maar in mijn web [Just Come into My Web] (in: Groot Tina Boek 1981-3)

There’s nothing like a story with a creepy cackling crone, a black cat, and a hubble-bubble cauldron for a Halloween lineup. So we bring you this one from Jinty 1977.

Plot

Jody Sinclair is starting a new job at the kennels with Mrs Denham when she begins to have strange visions of an old hag calling out to her to come to a creepy old house, one that is supposed to have been empty for years. In the house there is a portrait of the hag. The hag is a witch named Mother Heggerty, but she compares herself to a spider as well: “Come into my parlour!” and “Let me see what I have caught in my web this night!” 

Mother Heggerty places a cat’s paw necklace around Jody’s neck to enslave her. Under Mother Heggerty’s bidding, whenever Jody touches the necklace she does whatever Mother Heggerty says. To test her, Mother Heggerty has Jody deliberately takes a dog off its lead when she walks it. Afterwards Jody has no memory of it at all. Mother Heggerty says she is using Jody to destroy old enemies of hers. 

Jody is aggressively defensive when her younger sister Tess asks her about the cat’s paw necklace. This odd behaviour makes Tess suspicious. Then Tess sees Jody wandering off in the dead of night and decides to follow. However, the witch realises Jody is being followed and has Jody lock Tess in a shed. In the parlour, Mother Heggerty is no longer in the portrait; she’s lurking behind a secret panel as a full-fleshed person, complete with bubbling cauldron and a black cat named Satan. Mother Heggerty now reveals she wants revenge on the Saxton family for injuring her ancestral family, but they need a bit of finding first because “they hide like rats”.

On the way back, Jody, who has no memory of locking Tess in the shed, lets her out. Mother Heggerty forces Jody to lie about things to Tess. At this point, Jody realises how Mother Heggerty has enslaved her through the necklace, which she soon finds she can’t remove. She also senses she has developed a kind of split personality because of Mother Heggerty: one is her own side, the good side, the other the bad side wanting to do evil. And the two sides are locked in conflict. Oddly, Jody finds herself gaining new confidence with her growing evil side into the bargain and can stand up to people in a way she could not before. 

Jody’s search for the Saxtons begins. Nobody seems to know who or where they are, but eventually Jody stumbles across Saxton Cottage, which was once part of the Saxton estate. The big house they once lived in has burned to the ground and it’s only a ruin now. Jody reports to Mother Heggerty that it looks like there are no more Saxtons. Mother Heggerty says there are because she can feel their presence. She orders Jody back to the ruin to light a fire there as part of a spell to find what happened on the night of the fire. Through this, Jody learns the Heggertys put a curse on the Saxtons, which culminated with the fire that destroyed their home. To get away from the curse, the Saxtons changed their family name and sank from sight. 

Then Tess takes the cat’s paw necklace (looks Mother Heggerty goofed and failed to take precautions to ensure nobody else could remove the necklace!). But now Tess is wearing it and she’s the one now enslaved by Mother Heggerty. Not wanting this for her sister, Jody runs after her to get it back, but the bewitched Tess pushes her into the river. Jody manages to save herself and make it to Mother Heggerty’s. She agrees to be enslaved again to free Tess, who is made to forget what happened.

Two days later Mum gets a job working for Mrs King. Through this, Jody befriends their daughter Madge. Then Mother Heggerty summons Jody again, this time to a Saxton grave, and there are fresh flowers on it. Jody’s job is to find out who is visiting the grave, and she finds out it’s the Kings. Realising the Kings are the Saxton descendants, Jody tries to warn Madge, but the necklace makes her faint. To stop Jody’s good side interfering with her plans, Mother Heggerty puts Jody under a new spell to make her completely evil. Fortunately for Jody later, Madge comes on the scene at this point and sees Mother Heggerty with Jody. 

Jody now turns into an utter delinquent, cheating, bullying, shoplifting, even abusing the dogs at the kennel with a whip, and loving every minute of it. And then she starts playing nasty tricks on Madge that almost get her killed, and then in Mr King’s store once she gets a job there. Mr King gets suspicious of these incidents and has Jody watched by an assistant named Gina. Mother Heggerty detects this and orders Jody to remove Gina. This causes Jody’s good side to resurface, and the two sides are in conflict again. The evil side wins out and has Jody set fire to the store. However, she is caught doing so. She tries to tell Mr King about Mother Heggerty, but he doesn’t believe it, saying the Heggerty line has died out. He dismisses Jody.

Jody’s good side is so overwhelmed that she runs away in despair and almost drowns in a river. She is rescued, and while in bed Madge visits. She says she does believe Jody about Mother Heggerty, having glimpsed her earlier. 

Then Mother Heggerty calls out to Jody again, and everyone sees Jody wander off to the creepy house in a trance. However, the house is now on fire for reasons unknown. Everyone crowding around sees Mother Heggerty and Satan, and they are astonished to see someone residing in a supposedly empty house. The house collapses, destroying Mother Heggerty and the spell she put on Jody. Jody can now remove the cat’s paw necklace, and she tosses it into the flames.

Mr King now does believe it was Mother Heggerty and realises the Heggerty line was not as extinct as he thought. He explains that the Saxtons/Kings sent a Heggerty to the stake for witchcraft and the Heggertys had been out for revenge ever since. Now it really has died out with Mother Heggerty, the last of the Heggerty line, but Jody still gives the remains of her old house a wide berth. She and Madge are now best friends.

Thoughts

Malign influences that take over a girl in girls’ comics tend to go either one of two ways. The first is to simply act out of character, in alignment with the force that’s taking over, and get into terrible trouble because of it. Then it fades – until next time – and the girl is left bewildered as to what came over her. She doesn’t realise what’s going on, she is finding the power too strong to fight, or it has its perks that make it tempting to use again. Examples of this include “Weather-Girl Willa”, “Mary’s Moneybank” and “Head of Hate!” (Mandy), “Sit It Out, Sheri” (Tammy), and “The Power over Patti” (Debbie). 

In the second, the malign force has an agenda and the girl is the helpless slave forced to carry it out. Stories that follow this line include “The Revenge of Roxanne” and “The Curse of Carmina” (Suzy), and “The Hateful Hands of Heather Smith” (Tracy/Judy). Usually the motive is revenge, but sometimes other motives are used. For example, in “What’s Wrong with Rhona?” from Tammy, the force that overtakes Rhona believes its justification is the fight for survival. The malice that follows can be petty acts of spite against people, as in “The Hateful Hands of Heather Smith”, or, as in the case of Mother Heggerty, is more calculating and strategic. 

Mother Heggerty definitely falls into the second category, and is one of the most calculating and strategic. The reason is obvious – she can’t find the enemies she wants revenge on because they’re hiding under another name, so she needs to track them down first. For this she needs a human agent who can do the detective work for her, and then the dirty work. For this reason we don’t get much overt nastiness Jody is forced to do at first. It’s not until the Saxtons are found that it really gets nasty. 

And it’s far more nasty and disturbing than we expected. Normally when girls are forced to do evil things in girls’ comics, their true nature is protesting all the way, helpless against it but never giving up trying to find a way. But in this case, the evil influence has had a psychological effect of developing Jody’s dark side, so part of her is embracing it as well as hating it. The side effects of bringing new confidence in standing up to people are an added bonus hat makes it even more tempting to welcome. It gets even worse when Mother Heggerty, to turn her reluctant slave into a willing one, casts the spell to bring the dark side totally to the fore. After this, Jody is not being forced to do evil like other enslaved girls in “bad influence” stories – she’s now totally evil, an utter psycho who is growing increasingly comfortable with being capable of doing anything. Now that’s really frightening! We wonder how on earth she can be rid of the evil now her good side is no longer able to fight it. It’s a relief when Mother Heggerty gives orders that are too much even for the evil side, and the good side begins to resurface. 

There are also the added elements of mystery, and girls just love mystery. The first is the mystery of where the Saxtons are and what name they are under now. The second is just why Mother Heggerty wants revenge on the Saxtons. We get hints that it’s revenge for a family injury, but the full details are deftly kept secret until the last episode. 

One quibble is that it’s never explained how or why Mother Heggerty found Jody and called upon her to be her slave in the first place. Normally the protagonist falls under the influence because she unwittingly stumbled into the den (“The Revenge of Roxanne”), finds some object she should have left alone (“What’s Wrong with Rhona?”), or something was planted (“The Curse of Carmina”). When we see the connection between the girl and how she got ensnared, we also see how the evil force activates. So we accept it all as logical plotting and good story sense. But we don’t see that here. Mother Heggerty merely calls out of nowhere, lures Jody in, and once she looks Jody over she says, “Ah, yes, I think you will do very nicely.” Why wasn’t it anyone else before Jody? Did Mother Heggerty just pick Jody out of a crowd or something? Did she try with someone else but failed for some reason? Did she summon others but rejected them before settling on Jody? Or had she just set herself up in the neighbourhood? After all, everyone thinks the house has been empty for years.

A second quibble is that the fire that destroys Mother Heggerty’s house comes across as just too quick and convenient a way to end the story because the reason for the fire is not shown. It would have worked better if the story had established how the fire started e.g. the house got struck by lightning. 

Overall, this is a very effective “bad influence” story that is handled a bit differently to most in setting the protagonist on a path that could lead her to genuine evil instead of being merely forced to do it. This makes it more interesting to read than other bad influence stories, and the mystery elements to be unravelled add even further interest to keep readers hooked. The artwork of Douglas Perry brings it all off really well, from the craggy crone face of Mother Heggerty to the horrible looks on Jody’s face once she turns evil. And that cat’s paw necklace is a further element of creepiness, especially to the artwork. It’s repulsive to look at, and it somehow looks more like a spider than a cat’s paw. Mother Heggerty could just as well have been Spider Woman as a witch, in the way she sets herself up with “Come into my parlour.”

Tammy & June 19 October 1974

Artist: John Richardson

Becky Never Saw the Ball – artist John Armstrong, writer Joe Collins

Secret Ballet of the Steppes – artist Douglas Perry, writer Gerry Finley-Day?

Nell Nobody (first episode) – artist Miguel Quesada 

Wee Sue – artist John Richardson

Bessie Bunter

Unscheduled Stop (Strange Story) – artist John Armstrong

Jeannie and Her Uncle Meanie – artist Robert MacGillivray

No Tears for Molly – artist Tony Thewenetti, writer Maureen Spurgeon

Town Without Telly – artist José Casanovas

Autumn covers are also good to profile in Halloween month, and I just dug this one out from 1974.

The issue begins another Cinderella story, “Nell Nobody”. Nell must have been popular, as her run (18 episodes) was even longer than the first Bella Barlow story (12 episodes). Nell Ewart is badly treated by her aunt and uncle (confusingly, they are actually her step-parents), who only have eyes for her spoiled stepsister/cousin Rosie. They yank Nell out of school to slog at a hot dog stand to pay for Rosie’s acting fees, which dashes her hopes of pursuing drama and stagecraft at school when she’s just discovered her talent for it. At least she still has her puppet Willoughby, and we know things will somehow start from there. And could Nell’s uncle have unwittingly helped her by establishing the hot dog stand across from the TV studio and theatre?

Imagine putting Coppelia together in three days! That’s the task facing our slave dancers of the Steppes from the slave-driving Berova. Incredibly, they pull it off, but Judith collapses from the strain. Princess Petra allows them to take a sleigh ride over the Steppes for a break, but Judith smells something fishy about their drivers. 

Recepta, once a TV addict herself, is now trying to stop her father from turning the town of Boxless into a town full of TV addicts. It’s a battle of wills between them now, with Dad going as far as to bind and gag Recepta and force her to watch television. 

Miss Bigger feels confident she’s put Sue in her place this time after lumbering her with the awful task of pumping the organ for choir practice. Little does she know Sue’s had one of her brainwaves to get out of it. 

Bessie Bunter is off like a shot when Miss Stackpole says there’ll be refreshments at St. Prim’s School – without stopping to hear there’ll be a hockey match there first. And to her chagrin, she’s lumbered as goalie. She tries to wriggle out of it and to the grub, but it backfires so badly on her that she gets tangled in the goal net and unable to get to the refreshments before the others finish them. Poor Bessie.

In the Strange Story, “Unscheduled Stop”, Jenny Shaw is reaching breaking point because her parents are always arguing. Then the train they’re on makes an unscheduled stop – back in time – which shows Jenny the younger versions of her parents and what started the trouble between them. 

The Stanton Hall staff, egged on by the militant Miss Byrdy, have gone on strike to get rid of Pickering. But it’s gone too far and Miss Byrdy is arrested. The strike collapses without her, but Lord Stanton sees the point of it after catching Pickering taking a horrible revenge on the staff, and orders him to apologise. No dismissal for him though, or any real improvement in how he treats the staff. At least the staff get raises out of it, and Miss Byrdy is soon released, all charges dropped.

Uncle Meanie’s round-the-trip cruise lands the family in California and at the doorstep of another McScrimp relative, Tex McScrimp. And from the looks of the signs and barbed wire fences he has put up, he is every bit as mean, unwelcoming, and eccentric about it as Uncle Angus. The miser gene definitely runs right through the McScrimp family; Jeannie’s generation is the only one known to have skipped it. 

Becky Bates is making a comeback as a tennis player after losing her sight. But keeping her blindness a secret is causing problems. This time it’s having another accident and collapsing because of it, and her coach/Aunt Elspeth is accused of driving her too hard. 

Tammy & June 2 November 1974

Becky Never Saw the Ball – artist John Armstrong, writer Joe Collins

Nell Nobody – artist Miguel Quesada 

No Tears for Molly – artist Tony Thewenetti, writer Maureen Spurgeon

Dirty Trix – artist unknown

Bessie Bunter

Menace at the Movies (Strange Story) – artist Mario Capaldi

Wee Sue – artist John Richardson

Secret Ballet of the Steppes – artist Douglas Perry, writer Gerry Finley-Day?

Town Without Telly – artist José Casanovas

We continue our Halloween theme with the 1974 Tammy Halloween issue. This is the first time the Tammy Cover Girls appear in a Halloween cover, and it’s a very nice cover. However, it also shows the inconsistency in depicting the age of the younger Cover Girl during this period. On this cover she’s a kid sister, but on the next cover she’s definitely a young teen, about twelve or so. 

The Cover Girls are the only ones commemorating Halloween. There isn’t even so much as a Halloween craft feature inside. Bessie and Wee Sue could also have emphasised the theme further with a Halloween-themed story, which they both did in later years. Instead, it’s business as usual. In the former, Miss Stackpole follows a suggestion to make Bessie a prefect to improve her conduct. But Miss Stackpole soon finds out it was bad advice – and Bessie finds out that even she can gorge herself sick! In the latter, Miss Bigger goes to such extremes in sugar hoarding during a sugar shortage that her larder is almost busting from it. But, as usual, she has reckoned without Sue. The Storyteller could have also done something with Halloween, but instead he tells a comeuppance story about a girl who is always playing truant. 

John Armstrong is now drawing “Becky Never Saw the Ball”, a story Pat Mills considers “rather silly and far-fetched”. Still, a lot of other girls’ stories could be considered that, and I could name a few stories that were far more silly and far-fetched than this one. Maybe one of these days we will do an entry on this story and you can decide for yourselves. Becky Bates is making a comeback as a tennis player after losing her sight. Added to that, she’s made a bad enemy out of Brenda Morris, even more so after she trounces Brenda this week. 

“Nell Nobody” is one of Tammy’s longest-running Cinderella stories (18 episodes!). Nell Ewart is yanked out of school and forced to slog at her uncle’s hot dog stand to pay for his spoiled daughter Rosie’s acting lessons. Nell is secretly pursuing performing ambitions of her own with puppets and turning the hot dog stand itself into a puppet theatre. But now her rotten Uncle Vic has smashed her puppet and she has no money for repairs. Unless she can think of something, her show is busted.

Molly discovers she has a double, Lady Alice Dornby. Lady Alice and Molly agree to swap roles, and Lady Alice even goes to Stanton Hall in Molly’s place at Stanton Hall when Molly has an accident. Oh dear, Molly realises that even though Lady Alice has been warned about Pickering the bully butler, she is going to get one heck of a shock when she meets him! 

“Dirty Trix” Harris has turned to cheating at athletics after being cheated herself, and the results are proving profitable for her so far. But now the coach, Miss Wood, is getting suspicious – even without Trix deciding not to cheat this week. 

The ballet slave dancers of the Steppes find they have swapped one form of slavery for another when they get kidnapped by Russian revolutionaries. Then, oddly, they find dancing can bridge the gap between them and their captors. So they create a ballet inspired by Russian revolutionary ideals, which delights the revolutionaries. Then comes the threat of war, so now there’s a desperate plan to escape back to the imperial palace to find a way to stop it. 

Mr Jones is trying to turn the town of Boxless, which previously had no television because its location blocked reception, into a television-addicted town. But his daughter Recepta, once a TV addict herself, has other ideas, and is trying to cure Boxless of TV addiction. This week, Recepta’s friend Joy thinks she has the answer. 

Nightmare at Grimm Fen (also the Face of Fear) (1976-1977)

Sample Images (as The Face of Fear, published 29 November 1975)

Published: Tammy 27 November 1976 to 5 February 1977. Plus a Strange Story prologue, “The Face of Fear”, 29 November 1975.

Episodes: 11, plus Strange Story episode

Artist: Diane Gabbot(t)

Writer: Unknown

Translations/reprints: None known

It’s Halloween season, so it’s time to bring out the entries on supernatural stories and covers. Leading off the lineup is this Tammy offering from Diane Gabbot(t), not just because it is a spooky story but also because it has one of the oddest publication histories ever seen in girls comics. It is very odd indeed, because what should have been the first episode of this story was instead published as a Strange Story, “The Face of Fear” (above). “The Face of Fear” appeared in Tammy on 29 November 1975, exactly one year before the serial itself began. It’s not a self-contained story, which Strange Stories usually were. Nor is it a Strange Story mini-serial, which sometimes appeared in Tammy. Strange Stories hadn’t been used that way before in Tammy or since then. Whatever was behind this aberration remains a one-off mystery that’s even stranger than a Strange Story.

Plot

(As) The Face of Fear

Patty and Mark Stephens are enthusiastic brass rubbers. At Grimm Fen, Grimmford, they go to a 12th century church, St. Frideswide’s, in search of brass rubbings. Inside the church they make a rubbing of an ominous-looking brass of a Frenchman named Robert le Mal (Robert the Evil One). They find it odd that he’s depicted as a skeletal figure wrapped in a shroud. His inscription reads: “When I wake up once more – watch out.” As soon as they finish the rubbing of Robert le Mal it gets hit by lightning and an extremely terrible storm blows up from nowhere. As they struggle to make their way back home in the storm, they hear a strange flapping sound. Back home, Dad says he saw a huge flapping figure following them. 

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