John Richardson: Comics Bibliography

Goof from the Comics UK Forum has kindly supplied a list of the comics work done by John Richardson over the years.

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Misty
Serials:
End Of The Line… 12/08/78 – 18/11/78

Short Stories:
Red Knee – White Terror! (Beasts Story) 4/2/1978
Green Grow The Riches – O! 18/2/1978
The Dummy (Nightmare Story) 25/2/1978
The Secret Of Lan-Shi… (Beasts Story) 11/3/1978
The Haunting (Nightmare Story) 18/3/1978
Napoleon Comes Home… (Beasts Story) 25/2/1978
Miranda 22/4/1978
Stone Cold Revenge 6/5/1978
Sticks And Stones 20/5/1978
A Spell Of Trouble (Nightmare Story) 15/7/1978
Titch’s Tale… (Beasts Story) 29/7/1978
Dance Of Death 5/8/1978
Yet Another Teacher For Molly! (Nightmare Story) 16/12/1978
Examination Nerves 23/12/1978
A Girl’s Best Friend 30/12/1978
The Sad Eyes Of Sorrow 13/1/1979
Happy Birthday, Spooky Sue! 20/1/1979
Pot Luck 10/3/1979
The Curse Of The Wolf 31/3/1979
The Choice Of Silence 14/4/1978
The Uglies 14/4/1978
One Hour In Time 12/5/1979
The Disembodied 26/5/1979
A Stain On Her Character 23/6/1979
Framed 14/7/1979
The Writing On The Wall 21/7/1979
Time To Spare 18/8/1979
Inside Story 25/8/1979
Mrs Grundy’s Guest House 29/9/1979
The Pig People 1/12/1979
Smile 5/1/1980
Black Sunday Summer Special 1978
Old Ethna’s House Holiday Special 1979
The Pipe Dream of Marty Scuttle Holiday Special 1979
The Swarm Annual 1979

Tammy
Serials:
The Duchess of Dead-End Drive 2/03/74 – 16/03/74

Short Stories:
Moonlight Prowler 17/7/1982
Shock Treatment 20/11/1982
Carla’s Best Friend 15/1/1983
(Reprint from Misty “A Girl’s Best Friend”)
The Turning Point 12/3/1983
Donkey’s Years 17/9/1983
Fair Shares 24/12/1983?

Strange Stories:
This is Your Life 14/6/1980
The Beauty Contest 6/3/1981
Monster Movie 28/3/1981
Lost for Words 11/4/1981
The House of Leopards 9/5/1981
Water Under the Bridge 13/6/1981
The Carrier Bag 22/8/1981
Quicksilver 16/9/1981
Down to Earth 10/10/1981
Safe as Houses 17/10/1981
Unmasked 20/12/1981
Star Born 26/12/1981
The Burry Man 20/3/1982
All the Fright of the Fair ?
(?) The Pharaoh’s Daughter’s Stand-In (?) ?

Monster Tales:
The Gargoyle 16/1/1982
The Guardian 27/2/1982
Old Bug’s Last Trip 15/5/1982

Series: Wee Sue:
Weekly episodes 14/09/74? – 1982?
(Main artist from September 1974 to March 1977?)
1 story Annual 1977
1 story Annual 1979
3 stories Annual 1982
1 story Annual 1984
1 story Summer Special 1975
1 story Summer Special 1976
3 stories Holiday Special 1982
1 story Holiday Special 1983

Text Stories:
…Through Rose-Coloured Glasses Annual 1982
Star of Wonder Annual 1982

Comic Covers:
The Cover Girls 20/08/1973 – 04/10/1980
Annuals 1979 – 1982, 1984
Holiday Specials 1979 & 1980

Filler Artist:
Eva’s Evil Eye 31/8/74(?) – 07/09/74

Jinty
Series: Could It Be You? (or Is This Your Story?)
(Reprints from the June series) 1976 – 1977

Gypsy Rose Stories:
The White Blackbird (reprinted Strange Story) Holiday Special 1980
The Yellow Dress (reprinted Strange Story) Holiday Special 1980

Bunty
Serials:
Phantom of the Fells 348 (12/09/64) – 358 (21/11/64)

Judy
Picture Story Libraries:
Green for Danger No 237 (January 1983)
Dora’s Dragon No 254 (June 1984)

Mandy
Serials:
The Girl with the Black Umbrella 300 (14/10/72) – 313 (13/01/73)

Other:
Stella Starr – Policewoman from Space Annual 1974
Stella Starr – Policewoman from Space Annual 1975

June
Series: Could It Be You?
Some of the weekly episodes Early 1970’s?
1 story June Book 1973

Series: Lucky’s Living Doll
Filler artist for the weekly series 30/09/1972 – March(?) 1973
2 stories (reprints) June Book 1982

Strange Stories

When the Clock Stopped (1/1/1972)

The Haunted Room (18/3/1972)

Princess Tina
Filler Artist:
Clueless – The Blunderdog 22/4/72, 29/4/72, 27/5/72, 15/7/72

School Friend
Short Stories:
The Misfit (possibly reprint from longer story) Annual 1973
Elfrida of the Forest Annual 1975

Scream!
Serials:
Terror of the Cats 24/03/1984 – 28/04/1984
The Nightcomers 05/05/1984 – 30/06/1984

Short Stories:
A Ghastly Tale! – Green Fingers 7/4/1984

Pink
Short Stories:
Miss Get-What-She-Wants Annual 1975

Mirabelle
Serials:
A Song for Andrella ? 1977 – ? 1977
Later episodes, following Horacio Lalia (serial started 19/02/77)

Buster
Filler Artist:
The Leopard from Lime Street ? – ?

Guest post: John Richardson

Comics UK Forum poster Goof has kindly contributed the following appreciation of artist John Richardson, along with a detailed comics bibliography. Many thanks indeed, Goof!

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John Richardson, who died earlier this year, was not a Jinty artist. He drew no serial stories for Jinty – in fact, he did few full serials of any kind – and is represented only by a few reprints. Yet for other girls’ comics, especially Tammy and Misty, he produced a body of brilliant and original work across a wide range of stories from the darkest horror to the craziest knockabout comedy.

Like nearly all artists who worked for girls’ comics, he was largely anonymous to his many readers, and information about his life isn’t easy to find. Born in 1943 in the North Yorkshire mining town of Eston, he started working as a commercial artist after studying at Art College. Before this, he once assured an interviewer, he had tried his hand at farm work and professional wrestling.

His earliest work includes what seems to have been his first foray into girls’ comics, the 1964 Bunty serial “Phantom of the Fells”. During the 1970’s, he worked on several IPC girls’ comics such as June and Princess Tina, and did a serial and some smaller items for D C Thomson’s Mandy. He also did a couple of series for Cheeky Weekly comic, and the cartoon strip “Amanda” for the Sun newspaper.

Around this time he also began his long run of work for Tammy, which over the years made a significant contribution to the character of the comic, especially his series of “Cover Girl” covers which did so much to define to look of the comic between 1973 and 1980, and his period as the main artist for the “Wee Sue” series. He continued to produce stories and covers for Tammy until the end of 1983.

He contributed short complete stories to Misty throughout its two year run, as well as the serial “End of the Line“, and took full advantage of the extra space which Misty offered to artists to create some of his most spectacular work.

During the 1980’s, he drew for 2000AD, especially “The Mean Arena”, a science fiction serial that he also wrote, and contributed to the serials “Ro-Jaws’ Robo Tales” and “The V.C.s”. He also drew two serials and a short story for Scream! He drew and wrote the cartoon strip “Flatmates” for the Sunday People newspaper, and strips for specialist car and bike magazines. Most memorably perhaps out of his cartoon work, he created the Goonish comedy science fiction strip “Jetman” for a computer magazine called Crash.

Unlike a number of artists who worked on IPC’s girls’ comics, it seems that he didn’t move over to D C Thomson after the last IPC picture story girls’ comics ceased publication in the mid-1980s, although he did produce two Judy Picture Story Libraries in 1983 and 1984. I have not been able to find any further girls’ comic work after the demise of Tammy, and it looks as if he may have stopped working for comics altogether around this time. The latest comics work that I have been able to trace was in two issues of the Enid Blyton’s Adventure Magazine, published in July and December 1986.

It’s not clear why he did comparatively few full serials during his 20 years drawing for comics. I have seen it suggested that he had no great liking for drawing stories written by other people, and this may have discouraged him from working on long serials, where the artist would normally work more or less under instructions from the writer. It may be no accident that some of his best and most inventive comedy is in the Tammy series of Cover Girl covers, where he was free to interpret the joke in his own way because the jokes were purely visual. Many brilliant examples of this series are illustrated in Mistyfan’s History of Tammy Covers on this website.

He had the kind of style which once seen, was instantly recognisable, and yet this didn’t seem to limit his ability to adapt to almost any kind of story. He once said in interview that his work as a last-minute substitute for other artists had helped him to “learn from other people and gradually evolve something unique”. It’s an interesting thought that imitating the styles of other people can help you develop an original style of your own, but certainly his frequent work as a filler artist didn’t stop him developing a highly individual and spontaneous style, with a good feel for human anatomy and convincingly realistic facial expression.

Although he could turn his hand to almost any type of story, his best work in girls’ comic stories was in horror and farcical comedy. He had a tremendous flair for the grotesque, and he was able to turn this to account equally in horror and comedy. There’s nothing unusual about extravagantly hideous creatures in horror tales, but John Richardson’s had an exuberance which was all his own, like this example from “The Uglies” (Misty 14 April 1978):

He could handle bizarre comedy with the same panache, even when the subject was something as humdrum as a parking meter (“Stella Starr – Policewoman from Outer Space” from Mandy Annual 1975):

But the impact of his work didn’t depend solely on his command of the grotesque and fantastic. He could convey the same chill in a horror story by the power of suggestion, through his flair for facial expression, and ability to compose a powerful page layout. From “Black Sunday” (Misty Summer Special 1978) and “Old Ethna’s House” (Misty Holiday Special 1979):

Black Sunday

Old Ethna

He was also able to draw on his cartooning experience to enliven slapstick comedy stories, as in the Judy Picture Story Library “Dora’s Dragon”, where a dragon costume brought to life by a witch becomes a boisterous mini-Godzilla enthusiastically devouring anything that moves:

Dora’s Dragon

Although his style was so distinctive, he was well able to adapt it when taking over an established series from another artist. The Tammy series “Wee Sue” is an interesting example of this. He succeeded to the original Tammy series artist Mario Capaldi in the issue of 14 September 1974, but unusually, he did so in mid-episode. Here are the first two pages of the episode:

Page one is clearly in Capaldi’s style, and I would say that the end of page two is clearly by
Richardson, although he has toned down the normal character of his work to harmonise with Capaldi’s. But at what point did he take over? I personally think that Capaldi drew the first three panels of the second page, and Richardson did the rest. The point is debatable, but it certainly shows how well Richardson was able to adapt his style to conform to the very different style of another artist. By way of contrast, here’s a later episode where he has remodelled Sue’s enemy Miss Bigger from the severe and tight-lipped martinet created by Capaldi into a crazed hobgoblin in his own distinctive style (issue of 26 February 1977):

I strongly feel that this art should be known and celebrated far more than it is, but as so often with girls’ comics, the first stumbling-block to recognition is simply a lack of reliable information about what work the artist did. Contributors to the Comics UK Forum have compiled a list of the work he is known to have done for girls’ comics, and this will be posted next. Inevitably, it’s not complete, and we would be grateful to hear from anybody who can offer further additions, or spot any mistakes. If you can give us any help with this, please let us know.

Comics Jam: Preserving British Comics

Yes, good pun, I didn’t notice it myself until the suggestion that the next follow up should be a Dundee-based one called Comics Marmalade. (Note to the unknowing – Dundee is famous for both marmalade and comics.)

On Saturday I went to the Cartoon Museum in London, to a small but perfectly formed event (follow link to Down The Tubes for fuller description). I feel very lucky to have gone: the numbers were limited due to the venue size, and I believe also the key person behind the gathering was keen to keep it sharp and focused. Many thanks indeed, therefore, to David Roach for suggesting me as an attendee and to Peter Hansen for finding a slot for me to join in. The event was called “Comics Jam” and the aim of it was to discuss ways to preserve UK Comics History (though the subtitle actually used was just the straightforward descriptive phrase, “British Comics History”).

The event started at the beginning of the afternoon: 2 pm, to allow everyone  time to get there from far-flung locations (Dundee, Bournemouth, Wales, and indeed Peter Hansen himself is primarily based in Vancouver, Canada). Peter gave a short introduction of how he came to become a collector (recounted in more detail in a video included in the Down The Tubes link above) and we also saw an amazing short video walking us through his collection. The collection consists of a very large number of old comics of course (Peter shudders at the number of rusty staples he has pulled out of comics over the years, to prevent them from deteriorating further). Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, it also includes a large amount of original art work – but I think no one would expect the sheer number of pages of physical artwork that he has collected, which certainly numbers in the tens of thousands, stored in folders and on pallets.

Amazingly though, the collection also includes even rarer material. Tin plate adverts hung up outside newsagents, and a very few surviving paper adverts; leaflets and other promotional items including free gifts; dummies of comics never launched: all of great interest in giving a context to the business of publishing comics, of course. Best of all, the real holy grail for those of us who want to credit the creators behind it all: editorial correspondence, editorial bound copies of comics with annotations, and even pay books with information about who created what, and how much they were paid.

I hope the video, or a similar one, can be released at some time for wider appreciation. There is nothing quite like the impact it makes on the viewer as we watch Peter walking us through a simple door into a Tardis of comics ephemera: down corridors, along shelves, across pallets, peering into and out of art folders and banana boxes, and thence around many corners, up various stairs, and finally into a calm area where he catalogues his material. I was relieved to know that there is an electronic catalogue of the archive in spreadsheet format and that it’s not purely hard-copy, but it surely can’t be a complete work at this point as it consists of just Peter’s own labours rather than a joint effort or one done by someone brought in to complete this mammoth task. (Given that the event was co-organized by a number of academic bodies, perhaps this will change and a PhD student might end up with this task, or some part of it? Or Peter, please do correct me if I am wrong in my assumption about the completeness of it!)

Once we’d recovered from gawping at the Aladdin’s cave on the video, we had two discussion panels: the first was the one I was on (“The Story of British Comics: a round table discussion on the history of British comics, featuring Julia Round, Chris Murray, Jenni Scott, John Freeman, and David Roach, chaired by Phillip Vaughan“) and the second ranged from further historical discussions to information about what Rebellion and others are doing right now that will help to preserve this important part of cultural history. (“Celebrating and Preserving British Comics: a round table discussion on comics archives and preserving collections for the nation – featuring Peter Hansen, David Huxley, Rob Power, and Hannah Berry, chaired by Steve Holland”). Finally, we had a short trio of celebrities talking about their youthful memories of comics: Dave Gibbons and his youth as a comics reader and of course comics creator, Posy Simmonds on her early years reading both British and American comics (courtesy of a nearby USAF base) and Jonathan Ross talking eloquently on the rich texture of cultural history that a collection like Peter’s can hold for ordinary punters and for the research community alike (drawing on his experience as a governor for the BFI there).

Without going into detail of who said what and when (I didn’t take any notes for myself), I remember the discussion covering the below areas and more.

• None of us present needed convincing of this ourselves, but as we stated and re-stated, these are important cultural and artistic artifacts for a number of reasons. They are elements of a shared history that has shaped the readership and affected the nation, while they also reflect back to us the concerns and interests of the nation at that time; but they are also amazing creations of a high artistic standard, denigrated and overlooked at the time and since then. This is evidenced by the lack of printed credits throughout most of the time that British comics were published, but also by people’s attitudes to it and the lack of attention paid to the area since the comics stopped being published. The publishers were hugely cavalier about the original artwork (though to be fair, it constitutes a real physical challenge for archiving and storage if you are going to do it properly!), and the creators themselves downplayed what they put out, typically not thinking of it as art.
• As a result, the history and the artifacts from that time weren’t carefully preserved, and the knowledge of what it was made up of was being lost even when the main movers were still alive, let alone now, when more and more of those primary sources have died. We have lost and are losing memories  and information as well as artifacts – who did what, but also how they did it, what it meant to the readers, what unrecorded processes might have happened as a part of the overall business of publishing. (That’s some of the meat and drink of the interviews on this blog of course: hearing that in-house people wrote stories as well as freelance writers, that in-house art editors shaped a lot of the look and feel of the resulting page.)
• The knowledge or the information that is out there is very scattered and certainly isn’t brought together in any central way: the indexes and the archives that do exist need to be searchable, discoverable, queryable in ways that allow us to ask questions and perhaps get unexpected answers about the kinds of stories included in girls comics, or the numbers of women involved in girls comics as compared to boys comics, or any other similar question of interest that could be posed. At the most basic level, never mind those research questions: how about being able to refer to a complete bibliography of a high-quality but over-looked comics artist, or to be able to produce a complete list of all the stories written in a certain title?
• The range of things we need to do is of course overwhelming, and one question I asked was about what will we do, how can anyone choose a priority to stick to (or does each person choose their own priority, maybe). Some voices were asking about digital formats and the archiving of that material – a physical lump of Bristol board is quite hard-wearing and withstands quite a lot of mistreatment, and concept sketches also can last well, whereas current creators probably don’t even keep their ‘draft’ digital files that show the processes they used in order to get to the final output. (And even if they did, would the storage media and the machines to run them on exist a few years later?)
• We can’t do it all, though clearly different people will have different interests and aims – so what might or will we actually do, and what might happen first?
  • Rebellion are slowly going through their acquired archives to make use of it, seeing it as the valuable resource that it is; but the size of the challenge in front of them means they can only go relatively slowly if they are to do it right. Currently they are recruiting an archivist and sorting out things so that it will become somewhere that researchers and others can visit, but it isn’t at that stage yet. Peter Hansen also confirmed that there are discussions around Rebellion acquiring whatever IPC original artwork that he currently holds, because of course that would considerably reduce the work to be done by the Rebellion reprographics department, but that is still to come.
  • There is a consortium of interested parties working together to acquire Peter’s collection for the nation, but it would need substantial funding not only to acquire the material itself but also to make good use of it (storing it, recording it in some way, and making it available to the wider public and to researchers). Having said that, it’s not that this is all cost and no benefit – the recent Seven Stories touring comics exhibition, “Comics! Explore and Create Comic Art“, featuring art from Peter’s collection, has helped generate some £60,000 in income so far and over three years is expected to comfortably exceed that figure.
  • There were some digital archivists in the room so there is some interest in building up expertise in that area, but it is at a very early stage as yet.

Even what feels in comparison to be much smaller efforts, such as this blog, are part of the collective gathering of information and valuing of what was created – we are helping to show creators and readers from the time that it is worth bringing together, that it is worth preserving what we can of this. Not just the visible product of the weekly comic itself, but the invisible processes that went into it; the thoughts, the memories of how it was made, and how it was received by the readers themselves. After all, the Girls Comics of Yesterday blog made a great joint leap of attribution only the other day, bringing in not only the name of a really prolific writer – Marion Turner, writing under the pen name Fiona Turner – but also a long-sought-after name of an artist, Don Walker, given by Marion Turner’s son Philip. (Though I say ‘long-sought-after’ – seemingly the information must have been held at DC Thomsons all along as they are attributed with supplying the information to Philip in the first place.) So please, please keep writing in, anyone with any connection to the British comics publishing world!

 

Journey stories: how do they work?

I would not normally write at such length about a story theme, but there was an academic conference held the week before last, for which I submitted a paper. The subject was Travel and Comics, and I chose to look at Jinty‘s journey stories in some detail, meaning that I now have quite a lot to say on it… Last week’s earlier post about the Journey theme formed the first half of the paper, showing how the theme was prevalent and popular, particularly at certain points during Jinty‘s run. (I wonder exactly why this happened, but I suspect the answer is just ‘why not’!) Today’s post will look at some specific example stories in Jinty in more detail, asking the following questions:

• How does the journey start – what is the triggering thing that means the main character heads off on a journey in the first place?
• What keeps them going – why don’t they just stop and do something else? What is it that happens that means they can stop travelling at the end of the story?

(These points tell us quite a lot about what makes the story into a ‘journey’ story specifically: it is the distinction between a story that has some bits where some travelling happens, and a story that is more clearly about the journey.)

• While they are travelling, do we see the characters shown on the page as actively travelling, or do we see them ‘having travelled’, perhaps at the end of the day?

I think that looking at this sort of question about how a story works, in more detail, will help uncover some things about the journey theme beyond the obvious fact that it involves a journey.

How does the journey start?

If you look at some example journey stories, one thing that leaps out fairly soon is that it’s not a free choice on the part of the protagonist to go on a journey. Fran sets out  into a flooded Britain once her town has been overwhelmed by the rising waters and she is separated from her parents. Thumper suffers an accident at the precise moment which means he is unable to travel with Julie at the point she is moving house. Solveig and Per are looking forward to going home to Norway in the official convoy, but they have to go on the run when they see that Grendelsen has come to collect them as part of that official convoy: they know he is their deadly enemy. And even happy-go-lucky Katie McNab only sets off from London to Yuckiemuckle in order to fulfil the terms of Great-Uncle Ebeneezer’s will: because her family is poor, the chance to win a fortune is a strong incentive.

This  constraint or forced situation underlying the journey might be because the reader is expected to be a youngish girl (perhaps somewhere between 8 and 12 years old), not herself at an independent stage in life. Would it feel unrealistic if the protagonist was able to set off on a journey of her own choice, in the way that that a reader would be unable to do? Maybe, but I think that perhaps looking at Bella Barlow’s wanderings might shed a different light on it. Bella travels to many countries – Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, and Russia among others. She doesn’t go on a journey, with a beginning and an end: she goes travelling, with no particular reason to come to a stop. (All right, if she made it to the Olympics she would be able to stop, but she’s Bella Barlow – part of the point of her story is exactly that she will never get a truly happy ending!)

In mainstream publishing likewise there are plenty of examples where the main character sets off of their own accord. Laurie Lee famously wrote “As I Set Off One Midsummer’s Morning” – he goes to seek his fortune wherever he might find himself. There is no clear driver right from the start that means he needs to go in a certain direction or to do a certain thing. The power of his story isn’t about the drama of leaving home and what made him go, nor about whether he will get to his destination safely. Reading his story we are interested in the landscapes he walks through, the people he meets, the food he eats, the foreign languages he shows us.

So I think that part of the point of a journey story, certainly in girls comics, is precisely that the protagonist is made to set out on her journey, by forces that are somewhat out of her control. (Lack of control or choice is quite common in girls comics in general, of course.)

What keeps the journey going? What happens that means that the protagonist can finally stop?

For it to be a real journey story, the travelling needs to be a significant part of it, and so it has to keep going for a while. If you look at the examples in Jinty, there are temptations along the way for the main character to stop: Fran Scott finds some occasional comfortable places to stay for a while on her tortuous journey up to Scotland, and Thumper could have made a new home with various of the friendly humans he met along his travels westward. These possibilities are properly tempting in their own right, because there are significant dangers on the way too: with a serial story comes a lot of cliff-hangers, and quite a few of those relate to physical dangers such as illnesses (fevers in “For Peter’s Sake!” and “Song of the Fir Tree”, plague in “Fran of the Floods”), or murderous humans (marauding bands in some particularly spectacular episodes of “Fran of the Floods”).

So, keeping going on the journey is typically dangerous (though in humour story “Race for a Fortune” any sense of physical danger is only minimally present). The reason to keep going in the face of this needs to be pretty strong in itself, otherwise why wouldn’t the protagonist just stop, and bring the story to an end (or turn it into a different sort of story). The reason to keep going is indeed a strong one – it is typically related to love, family, or some sort of stronger loyalty than self-preservation.

• Fran keeps going in order to find her sister – the urge to find someone from her family, so that she doesn’t feel all alone in the world, is what drives her on, even though she doesn’t know for sure if her sister is alive in Scotland. When she is faced with a substitute possible family, it is not sufficient and she moves on regardless.
• Thumper keeps going, despite increasingly sore feet and failing eyesight, in order to be reunited with his beloved owner, Julie. Other substitute possible owners, even though it is clear to him that they are loving and kind, are not enough for him to stay and he finds a way to move on regardless.
• Corrie keeps pushing her pram southwards to London “For Peter’s Sake” as the story title has it – she is convinced that the pram is the only way that her ailing baby brother will be cured.
• Although Katie McNab’s motive to keep going is less of a life-and-death situation than in the other stories, it is still an important one: a sense of family, in that she constantly muses on how the money she might inherit from great-uncle Ebeneezer would transform their impoverished lives.

The story does come to an end eventually, of course; generally with the protagonist reaching the end of their journey. The main character doesn’t just decide to stop travelling, though, as we saw above. The story end is tied up with the beginning of the story and the reason why she set off in the first place. Thumper finds Julie; Fran finds her sister; Corrie reaches London and her pram helps to cure Peter; Solveig and Per reach their home village in Norway and Grendelsen is defeated once and for all so he is no longer a threat. Some stories in Jinty have surprising endings that defy their beginnings; not so the journey story, which ends in a way consistent with the constant motivation.

How does this help us to understand what a journey story is or might be?

It seems to me that the above give us some important characteristics about what a journey story is and how it works, at least in British girls comics. The main character is forced by some sort of external circumstance to embark on the journey; she does not choose freely to set out. She keeps going on the journey for a serious reason, not lightly undertaken (and this is true even for humorous takes on the theme). She doesn’t just stop travelling because she feels like it, she has to complete the journey in a way consistent with the circumstance that forced her to set out in the first place.

You can easily enough imagine different versions of the stories, where one or more of these elements have been disregarded. Would they still count as journey stories, just ones that didn’t happen to have been written?

• What sort of story might there be, if the protagonist had set out on a long journey of her own free choice?
  • You can certainly imagine a travel diary or a tourism story, perhaps like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books. It would probably focus on something different rather than being a quest: perhaps it would be a didactic story, teaching the reader how to set up camp and survive under tough conditions, or perhaps it would be about the people and landscapes she found on her travels.
  • I can imagine a girls comic covering this as a historical story, say retelling the life of a great explorer such as Lady Hester Stanhope, or perhaps framing it as a moral tale of a missionary.
• What if the main character could stop any time she felt like it?
  • Perhaps this might work if she had set out of her own choice in the first place as above. It does however feels to me as if this would take away from the journey aspect of the story: I am not sure if such a story would count as a journey story.
  • Can anyone think of a journey story where this happens?
• What if the main character never stopped, or never found what she was looking for?
  • There are stories that work in something like this way, as far as I understand: Valda travels the world competing with athletes and always beating them (would she stop if she found someone who could beat her, is that stated in the story?). Boys’ comics character Wilson similarly travels around, though as I understand it, he trains other athletes rather than focusing on beating them.
  • To readers of these stories – do they feel like journey stories to you?

And Finally

For the conference, I also briefly looked at a question which I think would repay more attention than I was able to spend on it at the time. This was about the depiction of the process of journeying itself. While the characters in the story are travelling, do we see the characters shown on the page as actively travelling, or do we see them ‘having travelled’, perhaps at the end of the day? How much of the process of travelling is shown on the page?

It seemed to me that the stories I looked at often didn’t show that much travelling on the page itself, though it did vary as some stories did more than others.

• Thumper and Beaky are typically shown arriving somewhere new at the very beginning of the episode, and leaving again in the last panel or two. The bulk of the episode is spent with them overcoming the challenge posed that week: chasing off robbers, avoiding deadly rats and packs of dogs, avoiding being penned in by would-be owners. This only really changes in the second to last episode (see sample images on the story post) where we see a lot more active travelling depicted on the page itself. Other than that, it is the narration that does a lot of the work: we are told that they have travelled for days, that he is footsore, that he has little strength left.
• Although as with “The Darkening Journey”, many episodes are focused on the challenge of the week, in “Fran of the Floods” Fran is shown on the page travelling by row-boat, on foot, by raft, and even by cruise ship. Not every panel shows her travelling onwards, but it is quite a feature of the story.
• Corrie Lomax pushes her gran’s pram over a considerable distance and it is again quite a feature of the comics art itself: in the sample images on the story post she is shown doing so in many of the week’s story panels.
• “Race for a Fortune” works similarly to “The Darkening Journey”, with Katie shown arriving and leaving again on her trusty roller skates, but otherwise mostly dealing with the week’s challenges as the key focus of each episode.

You would think there might be more use made visually of the fact of travelling, but as I mentioned above, it seems that the narration plays more of a role in telling the reader about the journey than the art does. We don’t see lots of use of maps, for instance – showing how far the protagonist has travelled or still has to travel. We don’t typically see a lot of ‘local colour’ either, which is also a bit surprising – when Katie is in the Scottish Highlands she sees some people wearing tam o shanters and pretending there is a local lake monster as in Loch Ness, but this sort of ‘tourism touch’ is not done as often as I might have expected. (Would a Welsh reader feel a surge of local pride, say, if something was set in Snowdonia, or would that mostly tend to put off the larger group of readers who wouldn’t immediately identify with the local touch in question?)

As I said above, I think this could repay more attention across a wider range of comics. Do most other journey stories stick to the episodic ‘challenge of the week’ format with minimal travelling shown? Do artists who I haven’t looked at use more, or less, in the way of visual shortcuts to indicate the character’s travelling, or is it generally down to the writer to tell us readers about the journey? I hope you may have comments and thoughts on this, and the rest of my long post: so please share!

Story Theme: Journey Story or Quest

The Journey Story or Quest was a popular story theme at certain points in Jinty and in other titles. Indeed, at some points in 1976, it would have been possible to be reading an issue of Jinty which included three or even arguably four journey stories in the same week’s comic (see 24 April 1976 for an example). It’s a story framework which allows the creators to vary the setting and characters as much as they like, and to experiment with a range of local touches if desired (Scottish kilts, Welsh mountains, or European stereotypes could be brought in depending on the story). Within a Quest theme the dramatic tension is kept up, too – the protagonist is always thinking of the thing that keeps them on the journey – the danger they are avoiding or the goal they are trying to reach.

The journey story is of course focused around a lengthy journey, but it is also something of a quest, as the protagonist has someone she needs to find or something she needs to do before she can stop journeying. She does not just head out for the fun of it or to see the sights; there is some motivating reason for her to keep moving. Apart from the journey element, the other themes of the story can be fairly varied: there are journey stories in Jinty which are rooted in science fiction, humour, love of aninals, and more.

Core examples

“Song of the Fir Tree” (1975-76). This story has siblings Solveig and Per traveling across Europe after they are released from the concentration camp they were held in during WWII. They travel from Germany to Norway under their own steam, constantly having to keep one step ahead of their enemy Grendelsen (though at the same time, unknown to them, their father is chasing after them also).

This was the first journey story printed in Jinty. Clear precursors outside of British girls comics are “I Am David” and “The Silver Sword”, both of which feature long journeys and have child protagonists dealing with the aftermath of WWII.

“Fran of the Floods” (1976). After her home town is overwhelmed in flooding, Fran Scott travels the length of an apocalyptic Britain to see if her sister is alive and well in Scotland. This popular and well-remembered journey story is one of survival against the odds and courage in the face of barbaric behaviour on the part of other survivors.

“Bound for Botany Bay” (1976). Betsy Tanner is transported to Australia; in addition to the lengthy sea journey, once she gets to Botany Bay she runs off and travels across dangerous countryside, eventually finding her father who was sentenced to transportation earlier on.

“For Peter’s Sake!” (1976). Set in the 1930s, Carrie Lomax has a brother who is seriously ill. Her grandmother’s pram has rocked many babies back to good health in a seemingly miraculous way and she hopes that it will do the same for little Peter. However, Carrie and the pram are in Scotland and the rest of her family is in London, and she needs to push the pram all the way back to him on foot.

“The Darkening Journey” (1977). Thumper has been separated from his owner Julie, who is moving house with her family, across Britain to the west country. To add to the pathos, both of them are going slowly blind: Julie because she needs an operation to cure her, and Thumper because of an accident at the time they were separated. Together with his friend Beaky, a clever talking rook, he travels towards the setting sun to see if he can be reunited with his beloved owner.

“Race For A Fortune” (1977-78). This is a humourous take on the journey story: Katie McNabb must race her snobby cousins in a journey to inherit her skinflint great-uncle Ebeneezer’s money. The one who reaches Ebeneezer’s home village of Yuckiemuckle first, starting out from the south of England with no money to help them, will win the race and the terms of the will. Katie and her cousins battle it out, each overtaking the other at various points on their travels.

“Somewhere Over The Rainbow” (1978-79). This is the longest, most epic of all the journey stories in Jinty (indeed so long is it, at 36 episodes, that to date I have quailed before the mighty task of writing a story post for it!). Dorothy and Max are an orphaned brother-sister pair who run away from the state care they are put into when their mother is killed. Inspired by the Wizard of Oz song, they travel from the south of England all the way to Scotland, hoping to find happiness at a care home called Rainbow’s End.

Updated to add: a post on this story has now been added.

Edge cases and uncertainties

The core stories listed above all feature epic, dangerous, and long journeys as a central aspect of the story. There are other stories in Jinty which feature travelling on the part of the protagonists, but without it being such a central part of the plot.

“Then There Were 3…” (1976). This is more of a mystery story: ten girls hire a narrowboat and travel on the water for some time, but the plot primarily focuses on the mystery of what is behind the occurrences that spook the girls. Is it something supernatural in origin, or is it down to a purely human villainy?

“The Big Cat” (1976-77) When her grandmother dies and she is evicted from the gypsy camp she lives in, Ruth travels with the big cat Ayesha that the story is named after. We do not currently have a story post about this to confirm if this is more of a journey story, or a fugitive story where the protagonist runs away and spends time in hiding rather than in travelling towards a clear goal.

Not to be confused with…

There are plenty of stories that include an element of journeying or travelling, such as those ones where the main character runs away: for instance Jinty‘s first issue includes the story “A Dream for Yvonne“, where Yvonne runs away from the circus to become a ballerina. She does not travel throughout the story unceasingly until she reaches her goal, though: she runs away multiple times, loses her memory, is threatened by jealous rivals, and is eventually accepted by both her family and the ballet school. The journeying is not the main point of the story, but rather her challenge lies in how to be accepted by family and friends.

Likewise in many stories there is a dramatic finale where the protagonist runs away either to elicit sympathy or to enact some specific deed: Gail in “Gail’s Indian Necklace” and Lee in “Daddy’s Darling” are two such examples from Jinty‘s early days. I am not counting these either, as the main focus of the story is again not on the journey itself, which is pretty limited in the span of story time that it takes up.

Fugitive stories may overlap considerably with the journey story, but again the key question in my mind is whether the fugitive keeps running, or mostly hides away somewhere. “Always Together…” (1974-75) has an orphaned family (well, almost – read the story summary for more detail) who run away from the welfare state mechanisms which are threatening to split them up. They do not keep running continuously, but instead camp out in a few locations and fend for themselves throughout the bulk of the story.

There are a few stories with castaways (“Desert Island Daisy“, “Girl The World Forgot“): if you are going to be cast away on a desert island you can hardly avoid having travelled, somewhere along the lines! But the focus is then on the predicament of the main character, not on a prolonged journey. The same goes for “Alice In A Strange Land” which has a transatlantic plane journey at beginning and end of the story, and a dramatic crash landing in an early episode, but which does not focus on those elements in the core plot.

Elsewhere…

Journey-themed stories were of course not confined to the pages of Jinty, though the April 1976 spike in popularity of these stories is perhaps only seen in this title. The following stories are not meant to be a complete list of journey stories, but just to give a flavour of the prevalence and the variety of them across both IPC and DC Thomson. (Many thanks to Mistyfan for providing scans of the below and other stories, and also to Lorrbot and the Girls Comics of Yesterday site, which I checked for mention of journey stories.)

• Glen, A Dog on a Lonely Quest (Tammy, 1971)
• Janet and her Travellin’ Javelin (Debbie, 1974)
• Towne in the Country (Tammy, 1976-77)
• The Ride-Away Randalls (Debbie, 1978)
• The Wandering Starrs (Bunty, 1978-79)
• One Girl and Her Dog (Tammy, 1978-79)
• Jumbo and Jet (Tracy, 1981)
• Jet’s Incredible Journey (Suzy, 1986)

Other thoughts

This post is already rather long, but I have more thoughts about the theme. Another post will follow, discussing aspects of how journey stories actually worked in more detail, looking at some of the stories mentioned above.

The Darkening Journey

Sample images

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Publication: 26 March 1977 – 6 August 1977 (20 episodes)

Reprint/translation: Translated into Dutch and published in Tina as “Samen door het duister” (1981)

Artist: José Casanovas

Writer: Unknown

Summary

Julie Burton’s eyesight is growing dimmer and dimmer, and her main support is her golden Labrador, Thumper, who almost acts as a guide dog. There are some bright spots in her future: her father has got a new job over in the west by the sea, and there is hope that an upcoming operation might give her good sight again. However, on the cusp of leaving to travel miles away to their new home, Julie and Thumper are separated and the dog suffers a blow to the head that leaves his own eyesight blurry. A friendly talking rook, Beaky, befriends Thumper and together they make their long difficult way west towards where Thumper remembers Julie’s new house to be located.

Their way is fraught with difficulties: it’s mostly humans who get in their way, either for positive or negative motives. First the talking rook is nearly recaptured by his former owners, only to be rescued by Thumper; then they both need to run away from a selfish rich lady who only wants to keep them while she’s able to show them both off to her snooty friends. (The rather more sympathetic chauffeur and secretary help them to escape in the end.) Sometimes Thumper and Beaky save the humans (foiling some lorry hijackers), sometimes they save each other (Beaky brings human help to save a trapped or injured Thumper more than once, though Thumper returns the favour when they are both trapped by floodwaters).

In the meantime, Julie is pining away thinking about Thumper, and he likewise seems to have an almost telepathic bond with her – her image is shown hovering over the setting sun more than once, as a beacon calling him to her, and she likewise often seems to be able to sense his misery. Increasing his woes, Thumper is suffering from more and more blind spells too. But there are many times when temporary blindness and separation anxiety are not the biggest evils they face – a few of the humans they meet have plans to put Thumper down; he is bullied by a pack of stronger dogs; and another time he is nearly eaten by rats.

Though by the end, Thumper in particular is moving more and more slowly, they eventually reach the westernmost limit of their travels: the final moorland, and the sea. The dramatic tension tightens right at the end as the dog, careless with happiness, hurts his foot badly and is trapped by the rising tide: but Beaky comes through again and brings Julie’s dad to the final rescue. All is well, once the two beloved friends each have operations to restore their eyesight.

Themes and commentary

It is an intrinsically pretty sentimental story, with the dog protagonist gifted with an implausibly good skill in navigating his way cross-country in the absence of a definite location to head for. (Not to mention the almost telepathic nature of the mental connection that he and Julie seem to share.) It must have been a popular story, at 20 episodes long and featuring on the cover twice, though at the same time not rivalling the most classic Jinty stories that were also running at this point. (Though they were shorter stories, both “Creepy Crawley” and “The Spell of the Spinning Wheel” featured on the cover four times in the same time period.) Journey stories in general seem to have been very popular at this time, and the addition of sympathetic animal characters will have given it a different angle from other journey stories.

José Casanovas is also always a talent to enjoy reading. His art style is much busier and ‘fuller’ than that of many other Jinty artists, who often like to include a lot more white space in their finished pages, but it makes a nice change of pace and feels very solid. This is a story that, while far from the first rank of stories running in this title at this time, is enjoyable on its own merits and will have a number of fans.

Jinty 30 April 1977

• Creepy Crawley (artist Trini Tinturé)
• Sue’s Fantastic Fun-Bag! (artist Hugh Thornton-Jones)
• Cassie and the Cat – Gypsy Rose story (artist Terry Aspin)
• Mark of the Witch! — final episode (Phil Townsend)
• Alley Cat
• The Darkening Journey (artist José Casanovas)
• The Robot Who Cried (artist Rodrigo Comos, writer Malcolm Shaw)
• Kerry in the Clouds (artist Cándido Ruiz Pueyo, writer Alan Davidson)
• Spell of the Spinning Wheel (artist Jim Baikie, writer Alison Christie)
• Don’t Forget to Remember! (craft feature)

This issue is from a great period of Jinty’s run. It includes a number of real classic stories that have stood the test of time and memory (“Creepy Crawley”, “Spell of the Spinning Wheel”, and “The Robot Who Cried” being the obvious stand-outs) and all in all is a really solid read.

“Creepy Crawley” shows the how mean the main character Jean Crawley can be: she goes to see her rival Mandy who is recovering from the bee stings that the scarab brooch caused to happen. But even when not under the control of the scarab badge Jean allows her jealousy to control her, enough so that she voluntarily goes back to wearing the scarab and letting it give her ideas on how to get the better of Mandy. And it’s not just limited to ideas – the scarab’s control over insects means that Mandy’s beautiful wooden sculpture is eaten by termites before it can beat Jean’s pretty painting in the school art competition.

In the Gypsy Rose story “Cassie and the Cat”,  Cassie rescues a cat from some bullies, but the cat is far from what it seems. Enjoy the creepy story, atmospherically drawn by Terry Aspin, at the end of the post.

It is the final episode of “Mark of the Witch!”, and outcast Emma Fielding redeems herself by saving rich girl Alice Durant, the girl who she’s persecuted in revenge for the persecution that Emma herself has suffered at the hands of the local villagers. As they keep each other afloat in the raging river, Emma takes a moment to think “It’s funny.. I could die, but I feel sort of happy! Happy to be fighting and struggling with Alice instead of against her!”

“The Robot Who Cried” is an invention of the bushily-moustached Professor Targett – codenamed KT5, she escapes from the laboratory and discovers that she can pass for a real girl – assuming she can sort out how human emotions like friendliness or loneliness work in real life, of course.

In “Kerry In The Clouds”, Kerry Langland is taken under the wing of famous actress Gail Terson, but Ms Terson clearly has an agenda of her own. There are echoes of the story “Jackie’s Two Lives”, also written by Alan Davidson – both feature a poor girl with ambitions beyond her station, manipulated in sinister ways by an older woman. Spanish artist Cándido Ruiz Pueyo provides some very stylish hairstyles and clothing.

“Spell of the Spinning Wheel” is a rare foray of Alison Christie’s into a spooky mystery story – I wish she had done more of it, it was very memorable. Rowan Lindsay is sporadically struck down by a mystery tiredness – she’s worked out that it is related to hearing humming sounds but she hasn’t persuaded anyone other than her dad to believe her yet, and the doctors have now forbidden her from running again.

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Jinty 26 September 1981

Cover artist: Mario Capaldi

• Freda’s Fortune – first episode (artist Trini Tinturé)
• All over a farthing… – text story (artist Mario Capaldi)
• Child’s Play – Gypsy Rose story (artist Phil Townsend)
• Gaye’s Gloomy Ghost (artist Hugh Thornton-Jones)
• Holiday Hideaway (artist Phil Gascoine)
• Tansy of Jubilee Street (artist Ken Houghton)
• Winning Ways – sports tips
• The Sweet and Sour Rivals – last episode (artist Carlos Cruz)
• Worlds Apart (artist Guy Peeters)
• Snoopa (artist Joe Collins)

This is one of the last few issues of Jinty before the merger with Tammy. As a result it is full of penultimate episodes (Holiday Hideaway, Worlds Apart), a final episode (The Sweet and Sour Rivals) and complete or nearly complete stories (the Gypsy Rose story, and the first half of the two-parter Freda’s Fortune).

Freda wins a pony in a raffle – a stroke of luck for her, as she has longed for one since she was a toddler, but also some bad luck because not only does she have to find somewhere to keep it and food to feed it, she also earns the envy of snobbish Susan who will stop at little to throw a spoke in her wheel.

The text story “All over a farthing” has a struggling girl give away a lucky farthing to the school charity appeal, only to find that it brings luck back to her and her unemployed father in an unexpected way.

The Gypsy Rose story, “Child’s Play”, is a new one this week, drawn by Phil Townsend (though the subsequent week’s issue will have a reprint of a story by Trini Tinturé from 1977). I reprint it below.

“Holiday Hideaway” is coming to an end – the family in hiding prepare to ‘return from holiday’ which will mean they have to continue to lie to their friends by pretending they have been away on a cruise ship holiday all along. But the episode ends by a reveal that they can’t possibly have been on the ship – the liner never left England in the first place! How will Hattie Jones and her family keep their heads up now?

This is the last episode of “The Sweet and Sour Rivals”: at the school fair Mandy and her friend Suzie Choo face off against Abigail Beaton whose family run the town’s snootiest restaurant. As often happens with schoolgirl rivalries, the envious antagonist overreaches herself and the good girl(s) have to save the day, including the antagonist herself. This time the jealous rival entices a horde of hungry dogs to all the food stalls, risking her own parents’ food stall as well as the Choo’s one; and Suzie saves the day by building a wall of plates to keep the dogs away. Yes, it’s a Great Wall of China (groan).

In “Worlds Apart” the six schoolgirls are transported from brainy Clare’s world into scaredy-cat Jilly’s world – one inhabited by horror monsters. Read all about it in the summary of that story, linked to above.

Page 1, “Child’s Play” – Gypsy Rose story

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Jinty 15 October 1977

• Destiny Brown (artist Rodrigo Comos)
• Sue’s Fantastic Fun-Bag! (artist Hugh Thornton-Jones)
• Guardian of White Horse Hill (artist Julian Vivas)
• Alley Cat
• The Goose Girl (artist Keith Robson; writer Alison Christie)
• So What’s New with David Essex? (feature)
• Rinty ‘n’ Jinty
• Stage Fright! (artist Phil Townsend)
• Lilies for the Bride – Gypsy Rose story (artist Christine Ellingham)
• Fran’ll Fix It! (artist Jim Baikie)
• Cursed to be a Coward! (artist Mario Capaldi; writer Alison Christie)
• Autumn Treasures! (craft feature)

If you’ve read Mistyfan’s superb, thorough rundown of the cover styles that Jinty had over the years, you may remember this issue being noted as the last one which had a separate blue background behind the logo. (Following issues had the logo incorporated into the body of the cover design itself.) However, we had not yet posted about the issue itself, which I am remedying here.

Destiny Brown is trapped in a number of ways – having run away to find her father, her purse was stolen and she had to sleep rough. Not surprisingly she was quickly set up to be exploited by some rough types, especially once they realize they may have struck gold, if she really can predict the future with her second sight. Poor old Destiny – dragged away by these dodgy geezers, just as she has bumped into her father, who is likewise being dragged away by – who is *he* trapped by? It looks like the police, but is it really so? The art, by Rodrigo Comos, is clear and classy, if perhaps slightly old-fashioned looking for the time.

The letters page includes a list of the winners of a recent competition: the first ten correct entries won a KODAK Instamatic camera, while the 60 runners up won a giant full-colour poster of Starsky and Hutch. Looking at the names of the winners carefully, most of them are, unsurprisingly, traditional English, Irish, or Scottish girls names; but there are one or two less usual entrants hidden in the mix, indicating some small diversity of the readership. Pushpa Hallan is one of the ten winners of the main prize, and C. Thiyagalingam is one of the 60 winners of the runner-up prize. Perhaps even less expectedly, there is also one boy’s name included: Adrian King.

Orphan Janey is adapting to being fostered by the Carters – but when she sees a beautiful white horse, they think she is making up stories to impress them. What Janey doesn’t yet realize is that no-one else can see the horse apart from her – and nor will any photos of the horse show it, either! It’s all tied up with the local beauty spot, White Horse Hill, which is threatened by the destructive plans to build a motorway.

Brenda Noble is a bird-lover who is campaigning against the local sport of goose shooting in the village she lives in with her mother. Her mother hates birds as she blames them for her husband’s death – and soon she enacts her plans to take the two of them to Edinburgh away from the wee ‘backwater’ village.

“Stage Fright” is an odd mystery story: stylishly drawn by Phil Townsend, the protagonist Linda is being made by Lord Banbury to train as an actor in order to win an acting trophy that has been in his family for generations. But who is locking her into places, stealing her costume, and watching her from afar?

The Gypsy Rose story this week is drawn by Christine Ellingham, who until recently we were only able to list as the ‘unknown artist of Concrete Surfer’. What a pleasure to be able to correctly credit this lovely art! Delphine is a lively girl who works in a florist’s shop. She has an irrational fear of lilies, but the rich customer who falls for her wants a centrepiece of those same flowers, to be put together with her very own hands. Not only that – once he proposes to her, Delphine finds out that his mother’s name is Lily, and she is due to sleep in the lily room. All omens that tell her that soon she will meet the spirit of the lily – in death.

The evil fortune teller who is the villain of “Cursed To Be A Coward!” manages to get Marnie Miles thrown into a rickety old boat in the middle of a pond – luckily she gets fished out but the fortune teller’s determination to make sure that blue water will get her yet is pretty sinister.

The craft suggested for this week is to collect up ‘autumn treasures’ such as the heads of cow parsley, twigs with berries, or pretty leaves, and to make dried arrangements of them in vases, or pictures, or perhaps even jewellery of the tougher seedpods of ash keys or beech nut cases. The pictures accompanying the feature make it all look rather pretty, but I would assume that beech nut cases in particular would be rather scratchy to turn into jewellery!

Jinty & Lindy 3 January 1976

• Slaves of the Candle (artist Roy Newby)
• The Jinx from St Jonah’s (artist Mario Capaldi)
• Friends of the Forest (unknown artist – Merry – “B Jackson”)
• Golden Dolly, Death Dust! (artist Phil Gascoine)
• Ping-Pong Paula (artist Jim Baikie)
• Too Old to Cry! (artist Trini Tinturé unknown)
• Wanda Whiter than White (artist Ana Rodriguez)
• The Haunting of Hazel (artist Santiago Hernandez unknown)
• Song of the Fir Tree (artist Phil Townsend)
• Do-It-Yourself Dot

This post is inspired by a number of creator attribution discussions from recent months, not all of which have made it onto the blog yet (and some of which are hot off the press!). Yesterday I had a lovely, fun meetup with the daughter of Trini Tinturé, who is very delightfully based in the same city as me for at least some of her working time. I dug out some old issues to show Maris Tinturé some of her mother’s Jinty stories in situ, and this was the first one where I spotted a story attributed to Trini.

Maris leafed through it once, twice, and couldn’t find any art of her mother’s. Was it just too much of a skim-read to spot it after all this time? No – I pointed out the specific story I had in mind, “Too Old to Cry!”, and the immediate reaction was, ‘but that’s not hers!’ – and a quick cameraphone piccy and email confirmed it. This story looks enough like Trini’s art for me to never have questioned the attribution that came handed down to me, probably from David Roach originally, but to the most familiar of eyes it is as unlike her art as one face is like another. Below is the episode of the story from this issue – compare it to a piece of definite Trini artwork like the sample pages of Creepy Crawley. (But I think that you will be likely to have to look very closely to be sure, unless you are very familiar with her artwork.) [Edited to add – Trini now says that this story is hers after all! This is upon reflection and, especially, her review of the second and third pages of the story. Here are her own words about it (translated by her daughter Maris): “I would much rather say that this bad work is not mine, and it would be easier for me to do so. But, unfortunately, I have to admit it is. Shame, shame! It looks like the main character had to have a ‘special’ feel, and special indeed I made her! She looks horribly tuberculose. I don’t remember the story or the characters at all. (And at the bottom of the last page the texts points to the continuation in the following week, meaning it’s a serial: no clue at all.) But there are traits in the other characters that give me away mercilessly. Nobody can copy certain kinds of folding and line… The way of drawing stones, the backgrounds… the older people… (Or maybe it was a cooperation between me and Dracula, who knows!)

But the date 1976 certainly does not fit. It is quite possible that they originally put aside the story and only published it years later, who knows why. There was a lot of entanglement [with] publishers. These bad pages smack of my earliest works for Scotland’s schoolgirl series, for example. Fortunately my style changed very soon.

There’s nothing more I can add. It is bad work, but it is mine.”]

 

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This issue also includes an episode of “The Haunting of Hazel” which we have likewise previously attributed to Santiago Hernandez. However, on looking at the 2017 post on “Santiago Hernandez or José Ariza” Trini has this to say: “Barracuda Bay” is definitely Hernandez. “Golden Shark” possibly, but much earlier work perhaps. “The Haunting of Hazel” is unlikely to be Hernandez.” So I have likewise changed the attribution of that story on this post, in order not to confidently show it as being by Santiago Hernandez.

Finally, one other story in this issue is from an artist that we have long referred to as unknown – the unknown artist who drew “Merry at Misery House”. A sighting by “Goof” on the UK Comics Forum gave us a valuable reference to the name “B Jackson” as the artist credit accompanying the illustration for a text story in the ‘Daily Mirror Book for Girls” 1971. Further detective work by David Slinn (a contact of David Roach’s) and by David Roach has given a long list of stories and titles that “B Jackson” seems to have worked on. This will follow as a blog post on this site, with apologies for the delay in getting to this denouement.

But will the attribution of B Jackson prove long lasting, or could it be falsified or proved inaccurate in some way? All that I’ve seen on the blog so far goes to show that there is no 100% guarantee of anything – the word of an expert is very valuable but there’s nothing to compare with a direct line from the creator themselves, if at all possible.