Tammy 4 August 1973

Jumble Sale Jilly (artist Juliana Buch)

Aunt Aggie (artist J. Badesa, writer Pat Mills, creator Gerry Finley-Day)

The Cat’s Eye on Katy (artist Douglas Perry) – final episode

The Making of Mary (“Wild Horse Summer” artist from Jinty)

The Sea Spirit (artist Juan Escandell Torres)

A Special Tammy Portrait – Rod Stewart

Simple Simona (artist Julio Bosch?)

Tammy Competition

The Secret of the Stables (artist Reginald B. Davis)

No Love for Liza (artist Jaume Rumeu)

No Tears for Molly (artist Tony Thewenetti, writer Maureen Spurgeon) – new story

We now turn to 1973 in our Tammy August month round, and the letters from readers in the issue are insightful reading. Two letters indicate Tammy could have been overusing the misery-laden formulas she had been renowned for since her first issue and she still had to strike a better balance with complementary material:

“Nearly all your stories are sad, they’re about orphans and blackmail, cripples and cruel parents, beatings and imprisonments…I get enough horror at school. Can’t you help make the world a happier place by printing more stories like Aunt Aggie…”

“It seems you think all you require to hold us readers spellbound are heroines with not-so-well-off and exceedingly nasty parents and grandparents or guardians…I think you should take all these horrible people out of your comic, or send them to Stanton Hall and Mr. Pickering – for some of their own medicine!”

Eventually the horrible people and sad stories did fade from Tammy, but for now, they continue. Among them is Juliana Buch’s first story for Tammy, “Jumble Sale Jilly”. Jilly Burridge is struggling to be an artist in the face of a family who scorn such things and don’t treat her so well either. This week, it looks like the fairy godmother figure to help Jilly has arrived in her life. In “No Love for Liza”, Liza Bruce also battles to be an artist against the odds piled on by a nasty stepfamily. And we have yet another nasty family in “The Making of Mary”. Mary Regan is forced to live with her horrible Uncle Ernie, who wants to take over her grandfather’s business. To add insult to injury, Uncle Ernie has also framed her grandfather and now he’s in prison. Imagine having to live with the very man who set up your grandfather!

On the same page, there is more on the long-standing Molly Mills debate that made her the most polarising character in Tammy. Some readers liked her:

“I disagree…that Molly Mills is rubbish. She’s great. My Mum and I both read it every week and if you take her out we won’t buy Tammy anymore!”

And others didn’t:

“Is [Molly Mills] going to be in the paper forever? She drives me mad. Please do something about her!”

Meanwhile, the nasty Kitty and Betty have already done something about Molly in her new story this week – they’ve pulled a spiteful trick on her, and now poor Molly faces the sack! But such things are hardly new in Molly. She’s bound to bounce back in the end, and then there’ll be the next time.

Tammy started off lacking humour to help balance her dark material. Two years on, she is building up a stronger presence of humour with strips like “Aunt Aggie”, a rotten schemer acting as a sweet figure on TV who gets her comeuppance every week, and “Simple Simona”, a clueless girl who is always the victim of her scheming cousins without even realising it, but she always triumphs over them in the end – again without even realising it. 

Elsewhere, it’s the final episode of “The Cat’s Eye on Katy”, and the letters page indicates it was a popular, gripping story. The witch doctor’s curse is broken by the good ol’ amor vincit omnia (love conquers all), when Katy saves the life of the cat he bewitched into doing evil against her in revenge for his imprisonment. Though he’s thousands of miles away, he knows what’s happened, and he’s still stuck in prison, doing cursing of a different sort: “Cursed white magic has won! My power over cat beast is gone!”. “The Sea Spirit”, which started in the same issue as “The Cat’s Eye on Katy”, is now on its penultimate episode.

Girls love a good mystery story, and there’s a mystery about Silver Star, the horse at Penny Lane’s stable, which she is salvaging from neglect. The mystery deepens when Silver Star responds to a strange whistle, and in the middle of the night, Penny spots him galloping off. Is it that whistle again?

Tammy & June 29 June 1974

Cover artist: John Richardson

Bella at the Bar (artist John Armstrong, writer Jenny McDade)

Wee Sue (artist Mario Capaldi)

Sadie in the Sticks (artist Juliana Buch)

The Haunted Headline (artist Juan Escandell Torres) – Strange Story

It’s Great Here – Competition

Bessie Bunter

Swimmer Slave of Mrs. Squall (artist Douglas Perry, writer Gerry Finley-Day?)

Jeannie and Her Uncle Meanie (artist Robert MacGillivray)

No Tears for Molly (artist Tony Thewenetti, writer Maureen Spurgeon)

Eva’s Evil Eye (artist Charles Morgan, writer John Wagner)

For the 1974 instalment of our Tammy June month round, we profile Tammy 29 June 1974, two weeks into the Tammy & June merger. Appropriately enough, June was the month June merged with Tammy in 1974, and it was one of the most beneficial mergers Tammy went through. She gained a more varied mix of serials, regulars, and now the weekly complete story.

The stage was now set for the regulars Tammy was to have for the next six years: Bella Barlow, Wee Sue, Bessie Bunter, the Storyteller, Molly Mills and the Cover Girls. After a steady, long-standing build towards regular strips in her lineup, Tammy finally had a strong core of regulars to keep her going. It took a few mergers to do it, though. Bessie Bunter and the Storyteller came over from June and Uncle Meanie and Wee Sue from Sandie. Wee Sue proved to have the strongest staying power of the two Sandie strips. Bella Barlow was not yet a regular in Tammy. At this stage she was a serial strip, but she became so popular that she turned into one of Tammy’s longest-running regular strips. 

The Storyteller was now providing readers with a regular weekly dose of the supernatural story. In so doing he enabled Tammy to explore all sorts of settings, from Roman times to the future, and more fantasy and science fiction. His other benefit was bringing “complete stories” to Tammy on a regular basis. Before then, complete stories had only appeared sporadically in Tammy.

The drawback to having more regular strips was less room for serials. Nevertheless, the dark, cruelty-laden Cinderella serials and slave story serials of Tammy’s earlier years were still appearing. In the first weeks of the merger they took the form of “Swimmer Slave of Mrs. Squall”, “Sadie in the Sticks” and Bella herself. Bella proved so popular that she ensured the Cinderella story would be a mainstay of Tammy forever. “Eva’s Evil Eye” seemed to indicate the bullying serial was appearing a bit more in Tammy, and the new Molly Mills story was taking a novel approach in doing the “schemer” story, a formula seen more often in the DCT titles. 

Tammy 2 June 1973

The Cat’s Eye on Katy (artist Douglas Perry) – first episode

School for Snobs (artist J. Badesa, writers Pat Mills/John Wagner)

Trina Drop-Out (artist Ana Rodriguez) – final episode

The Sea Spirit – (artist Juan Escandell Torres) – first episode

The Stranger in My Shoes (artist Miguel Quesada)

The Lonely Dancer (artist Candido Ruiz Pueyo)

Simple Simona

Get Shirty! (Competition)

The Girl in the Window (artist John Armstrong)

Dara into Danger (artist Juan Garcia Quiros)

No Tears for Molly (artist Tony Thewenetti, writer Maureen Spurgeon)

For the 1973 instalment of our Tammy June month round, we look at an issue that starts some new stories. They both have supernatural themes, one malicious and the other beneficial. In the former, an evil witch doctor bewitches a cat to get revenge on the policeman who imprisoned him. But his curse is not striking at the policeman directly – it’s striking at his daughter Katy miles away in England, with the cat doing the old “evil influence” gig on her. One has to wonder why the silly old witch doctor doesn’t use his powers to break out of prison instead – he’s got the superstitious prison guards scared enough of him for that, surely. But no, he’s just going to sit in prison and let the cat do its thing. In the latter, Sheena Barrett is a brilliant swimmer, but her fear of diving is a handicap. Then she meets Marina, a sea spirit who gives her the confidence to dive. 

There is also a third supernatural story, “The Girl in the Window”, where Dale befriends a shop dummy that can come to life. This is making for a lot of interesting moments, some awkward, some surprising, and some hilarious. Hilarity is also running high in a “School for Snobs” sequel and “Simple Simona”. 

Ballet stories have been the staple in Tammy from the first issue and cropped up frequently in her earlier years. This time it’s “The Lonely Dancer”, about a promising ballerina who is trying to find her missing mother.

As we now have a higher proportion of humour and the supernatural in Tammy, plus the ballet staple, there is less room for the dark tales laden with cruelty, misery and tortured heroines that the early Tammy was noted for. They are still going, but they are now balanced with more lightweight fare, which makes for a more varied mix in the comic. One, “Trina Drop-Out”, finishes this week, and the other is “Dara into Danger”, where a whole ski team is kidnapped and taken to the Antarctic. All except our protagonist Dara have been brainwashed by the mysterious Madame Jensen, but for what exactly hasn’t been established yet. And of course we still have Molly Mills to carry on the Tammy streak of cruelly used heroines.

Meanwhile, “The Stranger in My Shoes” features a heroine who is being tortured another way – her identity is forcibly switched with a delinquent and she is sent to borstal in the delinquent’s place. Is the story going to go with her suffering miseries at the borstal à la “Merry at Misery House” or go another route as she battles to prove her identity?

Aside from Molly Mills, Tammy was still not into “regular” strips to serve as her core. However, the return of “School for Snobs” and, pretty soon, “Aunt Aggie”, showed that semi-regulars were developing. 

Tammy 18 September 1978

Cover artist: John Richardson

• Bella (John Armstrong)
• Maggie’s Menagerie (Tony Coleman)
• Crawl, Carrie, Crawl (artist Juan Escandell Tores)
• Edie the Ed’s Niece (artist Joe Collins)
• Double – Or Nothing! (artist Diane Gabbot)
• Tuck-in with Tammy
• Bessie Bunter
• Molly Mills and the Maid of Mystery (artist Douglas Perry)
• The Telly Fan – the Strange Story
• Wee Sue (artist Barrie Mitchell?)
• A Bus in the Family (artist Giorgio Giorgetti)

 

September 18, 1978 has been chosen for 1978 in the Tammy round robin. The cover has the Cover Girls doing what the letter column sometimes commented on what readers do with their old Tammys – build up a pile of them and put them in storage. One reader actually said she discovered someone else’s pile of old Tammys while helping her father do renovations. Even today there must be old piles waiting to be cleared out or rediscovered, and be put up on eBay for eager collectors.

Bella has to do well in a gymnastics competition in Sydney in order to keep her job as a gymnastics coach in Port Tago. Sometimes we wonder why she even bothered with that job, much less keep it, as it has been fraught with difficulties from the start that still resonate. Her employer, Mr Cox, made the job offer without thinking and realised he didn’t actually want it in the first place, but couldn’t back out. Mrs Cox tried to drive Bella off because she is a disgraced gymnast. Mrs Cox and Bella have made peace, but Mrs Cox is not the coach who can bring out the best in Bella because she is a real stick in the mud who does not realise how gymnastics have advanced since her day. So Bella is already handicapped before she even starts at the contest, and there would have to be ominous signs of trouble from an old rival as well.

“Maggie’s Menagerie” is a story about a girl (Maggie Crown) who is hiding secret pets. Her problem is not just that her gran does not like animals. It’s also because she has to hide her menagerie on gran’s barge! Maggie’s managed to get them all safely hidden on board. But how long can she keep them hidden from gran? It sounds like even she realises she can’t keep it up indefinitely.

Carrie Smith is despised as a crawler at school because of the tactics she uses, including sucking up to the new strict teacher, to keep out of detention. But the reason is she can’t afford detention – she has to run swimming lessons before and after school to keep her parents afloat while Dad is jobless. On top of that she has a sprained back but is not seeking treatment because she doesn’t want to worry her parents. Dad’s just sent off a job application and Carrie hopes to God he gets it so she can stop all this crawling.

Kate Winter is a tennis player who can’t keep a tennis partner because of her foul temper. She finally finds one in Pam Doggett, the granddaughter of the tennis club’s charlady. However, a row with her parents has Kate realise she is beginning to care for Pam. She chooses pairing with her in a tournament over a cruise, much to her snooty parents’ consternation. Dad brings Mum along to the tournament to show her what a “little grub” Pam is. But something else upsets Mum and she leaves in an awful hurry. Hmm, do we have a little mystery here?

Speaking of mystery, Molly has one in the “maid of mystery”, though this week the mystery unravels. A Mrs Bowden has framed Molly for ransacking because she has mistaken her for the new maid, Victoria. This week Victoria explains why: to get her inheritance she has to prove herself in “gainful employment”, and Mrs Bowden will get the inheritance if she fails. Lord Stanton has sent Molly away from the hall for her own protection, but not even that is stopping Mrs Bowden, who still thinks she is Victoria. At least the mistaken identity will keep the real Victoria safe, and Molly is far more capable of handling Mrs Bowden than Victoria is.

There is a definite mystery about “A Bus in the Family” as well, but nobody is investigating it. “Dodger” Wilkins, the man who sold Dad the bus he is using to take his daughter Rosie’s class on a school trip on the Continent, is so desperate to get it back that he is chasing them all the way across the Continent! Dad and Rosie didn’t know that before, but now they do because Dodger and his crony Harry seized and searched Dad. They also suspect those creeps of sabotaging the bus. Pity Rosie and her father weren’t there for the glorious scene where the crooks meet their match (below) in Rosie’s form teacher! Despite this, the chase is going on to Gibraltar next week, with nobody looking into why Dodger is going to such extremes. But from the sound of things, it’s because something is hidden on the bus – or maybe Dodger just thinks there is, as he didn’t find it.

Crooks get clobbered. From “A Bus in the Family”, Tammy 18 September 1978. Art by Giorgio Georgetti.

Continuing the clobbering of the crooks in “A Bus in the Family”, Tammy 18 September 1978. Art by Giorgio Georgetti.

Bessie is seeking homemade beauty treatments, but of course her food inclinations and tendency for naughtiness take over. She ends up with 1000 lines. Meanwhile, Sue is trying to find a way to stop her father’s home movie parties because the catering is too much work for her and her mother. She knows Dad’s mates don’t really enjoy his movies either; they’re mediocre at best. The solution: make her own movie of Dad’s outtakes when he is shooting his lousy movies and show it to his long-suffering audience!

This week’s Strange Stories, one of my particular favourites, is a moral about the dangers of TV addiction. Norma gets so engrossed in television she neglects her studies. Her parents’ efforts to sort her out meet with little success. Then Norma finds herself in the television drama she was watching and becomes the heroine who saves the day. In the process she scrapes her leg and a bandage is put on. Norma wakes up and thinks it must have been all a dream – but then she finds her bandaged leg. Dad is very surprised when Norma suddenly seems to be less keen on television and starting on homework.

Sandie 28 July 1973

• Slaves of the Eye (artist Joan Boix)
• Cinderella – Superstar (artist Joan Boix?)
• Wyn and the Witch (artist A. E. Allen)
• Connie Courageous (artist “B. Jackson”) – last episode
• Sink or Swim, Sara! (artist Eduardo Feito)
• The Captives of Terror Island (artist Juan Escandell Torres, writer Terence Magee) – last episode
• Dancing to Danger (artist Tom Kerr)
• Bridie at the Fair (artist Leslie Otway)
• All Against Alice (artist Miguel Quesada?)
• Sisters in Sorrow (artist Desmond Walduck?)

“Slaves of the Eye” features another sinister teacher (Miss Krell) who exerts a strange, sinister influence over pupils, and it’s up to our protagonists (Kate Saunders and her friend Heather) to unravel how and why. Plus what lies under that veil Miss Krell always wears and what lurks in her laboratory. Kate has now discovered Miss Krell used a transmitter inside a netball to make the girls foul her during the match. Once she gets hold of the transmitter, it leads her and Heather to prison cells that were empty earlier but are now full of…whom?

 

“Cinderella Superstar” is an aspiring ballerina, Ellie Villiers whose road to her dreams is being blocked by uncooperative relatives who treat her like dirt. Now they’ve taken her gramophone to stop her dancing to her ballet music and given it away. But the blurb for next week says Ellie’s about to get some help.

 

Wyn is an ill-treated drudge at Pinchbeck Hall, but has a good friend in the form of the witch Grizelda “Grizzy” in the attic, whose magic helps Wyn get comeuppance on her horrible employers. This week Lord Pinchbeck is challenged to a duel but there’s a problem – Grizzy has turned him into a pig, so how the heck is he going to duel?

 

It’s the final episode of “Connie Courageous”. Connie Cartwright has jealous rivals in addition to learning to jump while being blind. And she needs the prize money to restore her sight, but her enemies have blocked the path to her getting to the event. Can she and her horse find a way to get there in time?

 

“The Captives of Terror Island” also ends this week. Madame Soong of Terror Island has kidnapped an entire hockey team in order to claim the National Hockey Championships for her country, and her training methods are “barbaric”. It looks like she has finally got what she wants and is a national heroine, until our heroine finally manages to expose her in front of the spectators. Madame Soong quite literally destroys herself – and Terror Island – with the very bomb she had set for her enemies.

 

In “Sink or Swim, Sara”, the two snobby headmistresses of St Agatha’s should have thought twice before making Sara Dale’s life so miserable. This caused her to change schools when they badly needed her to win an inter-school swimming gala. Now the same thing has resulted in two of Sara’s friends being expelled. Now they’ve transferred to Sara’s school and are happier – then Sara informs them that the expulsion is all part of some dirty trick the headmistresses are playing, which won’t be revealed until the final episode next week.

 

“Sisters in Sorrow” is also on its penultimate episode. Layla and her friend Pat have been forced to become thieves, but the story takes the unusual step of having an aristocrat, Lady Maggins, as the Fagin. They have been forced to impersonate two others in order to infiltrate a household so they can rob it. Layla manages to rescue the real McCoys, but they get cornered by Lady Maggins. Meanwhile, Pat has been exposed as an imposter, so they’re both in a corner now.

 

“Dancing to Danger” and “Bridie at the Fair” look like they have been reprinted from elsewhere, perhaps School Friend or June. In the former, Pat White uses ballet as her cover for undercover work against the Nazis in World War II. She manages to worm her way into Gestapo HQ to find information on a prisoner, Professor Duval, under pretext of her ballet troupe staging a performance there. However, her Nazi nemesis, Herr Staub, gets suspicious and is going to arrange a special watch on them. In the latter, Bridie Donovan has joined a fair in the hope of regaining her memory. But the fortune-teller Madame Rosa tells Bridie she can do anything she wants with her.

 

“All Against Alice” has been fostered out to a former Wimbledon champion who is coaching her in her beloved tennis, but shows her no affection. Then a Mr and Mrs Tyler claim to be Alice’s parents but lose the custody battle in the interim. Just as well, because they are clearly out to make money out of her, which they finally succeed in doing by destroying Alice’s amateur status through a dirty trick, and with it, her career.

Sandie: 12 February 1972 – 20 October 1973

Following the interview of John Wagner which ran on this blog a few days ago, I thought I would dig out my few issues of Sandie (only four, acquired somewhat at random). Because I have so few issues, and none of them are significant ones such as the first or last ones published, it didn’t seem worth reviewing them individually. Here therefore is something of an overview of this short-lived title – limited in scope by having so few originals to draw on directly, but I have tried to also bring together other relevant comments on this site and elsewhere, to give a wider context.

Let’s start with the contents of the four issues I do have:

Sandie 17 March 1973: Angela Angel-Face (artist Rodrigo Comos), Connie Courageous (unknown artist ‘Merry’), The Captives of Terror Island (artist Juan Escandell Torres, writer Terence Magee), Supergirl Sally (artist A. E. Allen), Isla and the Ice Maiden, Anna and the Circus, Brenda’s Brownies (artist and writer Mike Brown), Dawn at Dead-End Street (artist Bill Baker), Pop portrait: Paul Newman, Lindy and the last Lilliputians, The Nine Lives of Nat the Cat (artist José Casanovas), Quiz Kid Queenie (artist Luis Bermejo)

 

Sandie 28 July 1973: Slaves of the Eye (artist Joan Boix), Cinderella Superstar (artist ?Joan Boix), Wyn and the Witch (artist A. E. Allen), Connie Courageous (unknown artist ‘Merry’) – last episode, Sink or Swim, Sara! (artist Eduardo Feito), The Captives of Terror Island (artist Juan Escandell Torres, writer Terence Magee) – last episode, Dancing to Danger (artist Tom Kerr), Bridie at the Fair (artist Leslie Otway), All Against Alice, Sisters in Sorrow (artist Roy Newby)

Sandie 11 August 1973: The House of Toys (artist Douglas Perry), Noelle’s Ark (unknown artist ‘Merry’) – first episode, Wyn and the Witch (artist A. E. Allen), The Golden Shark (artist Santiago Hernandez), Cherry in Chains (artist Joan Boix), Slaves of the Eye (artist Joan Boix), Dancing to Danger, Bridie at the Fair (artist Leslie Otway), All Against Alice , Cinderella Superstar (artist ?Joan Boix)

 

Sandie 29 September 1973: Angela Angel-Face (artist Rodrigo Comos), The House of Toys (artist Douglas Perry), Jeannie and her Uncle Meanie (artist Robert MacGillivray, writer John Wagner), Noelle’s Ark (unknown artist ‘Merry’), Cherry in Chains (artist Joan Boix), The Golden Shark (artist Santiago Hernandez), Dancing to Danger – last episode, Bridie at the Fair (artist Leslie Otway), Sister to a Star, Cinderella Superstar (artist ?Joan Boix)

 

 

There’s lots of good stuff in these issues, though I did find the covers rather old-fashioned, with mostly very blocky designs. Some of the inside content is rather old-fashioned too, and/or show possible signs of being reprinted from elsewhere. “The Golden Shark” is hand-lettered, and “Dancing to Danger” and “Bridie At The Fair” are lettered using a different font or technique to the other strips. The latter two are also only two pages long per episode, and have a painted aspect to the title element – I take these to have been reprinted from much earlier titles where there may have been an option to use more sophisticated colour printing.

Some of my interest in this title is in how it might have influenced, or been influenced by, work that is more directly related to Jinty. For instance, “Isla and the Ice Maiden” has an orphaned girl learning how to ice skate as she is taught by a mysterious woman: both the basic plot set-up and the visual design of the mystery woman is quite reminiscent of the Jinty story “Spirit of the Lake”. Likewise, “Lindy and the Last Lilliputians” has some wee travellers from Lilliput travel to stay with Lindy, a descendant of Lemuel Gulliver – who they claim must look after them. It sounds like the story has quite a lot of differences from Jinty‘s “A Girl Called Gulliver”, but there are certainly some big overlaps too.

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In terms of the artists included, there is a fair amount of overlap with the slightly later titles I am more familiar with – with representation from José Casanovas, Rodrigo Comos, Douglas Perry, Santiago Hernandez, and the unknown artist who drew “Merry at Misery House” and so many other stories. Obviously there are many artists unknown to me, also: the very striking Joan Boix, who drew “The Slaves of the Eye”, is very well represented inside these pages. There are a couple of stories where it’s hard to decide if the art is by Joan Boix’s, or by Cándido Ruiz Pueyo’s. These are “Cinderella Superstar” and “All Against Alice”. I would be inclined to think these both contained Boix’s art if not for the fact that this would imply that there might be as many as four stories by the same artist in one issue! I suppose this is not impossible but still. On balance, I think that “Cinderella Superstar” is likely to be Boix’s work (though it is not signed in any of the issues I have, unlike “Cherry in Chains” and “Slaves of the Eye”). “All Against Alice” is not close enough for me to assign to Boix – it looks more like Pueyo’s work, though again not really definitively enough for me to say so for sure.

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On the post with the interview with John Wagner, I asked for people’s impressions of the title compared to others from that era. Mistyfan commented to say that “Sandie had more regulars than Tammy, particularly “Wee Sue”. She also had a lot of circus themed stories such as “Sister to a Star”, “Cherry in Chains” and “Slave of the Trapeze”. Far more than either Tammy or Jinty. She followed the in vein of Tammy in having Cinderella and slave stories.” I haven’t got enough issues to have much representation of regular strips – there’s the start of “Jeannie and her Uncle Meanie”; “Nat the Cat” was so long-running as to perhaps count; and I do have two separate Angela Angel-Face stories in this short sample.

The circus theme is absolutely inescapable even in just these few issues, though! “Anna and the Circus” is in the March issue above, and the August and September issues include “Cherry in Chains” and “Sister to a Star”. There are very few circus-themed stories in Jinty, and not many in Tammy either, so this feels like a real unique selling point for this title. Of course there are also plenty of cinderella stories, ballet stories, and the like – a lot of what’s in the pages wouldn’t look out of place in Jinty or Tammy (and indeed some was reprinted in annuals and summer specials).

Mistyfan also previously posted on this site about the launch of Sandie and about issue 7 of the title – representing the earlier issues of the title. But after the title came to an end it still continued to make something of an impact as stories had a life after death. Quite a few of the stories were translated into the Dutch market: for instance “Sandra Must Dance”,  “The Return of Rena”, “Lorna’s Lonely Days”, “Anna’s Forbidden Friend”, and “Peggy in the Middle”. Of course “Wee Sue” and “Jeannie and her Uncle Meanie” had an ongoing life in the pages of other comics titles thereafter, as did others (more briefly). “Angela Angel-Face” was reprinted in Jinty but generally reckoned to be a very weak offering in that title, and “School of No Escape” was reprinted in the Misty 1980 annual.

So Sandie feels a little old-fashioned to me, and a little quirky with its love of circus stories (quite why so many of them were used, I’m not sure – they make for a good story backdrop but aren’t quite as flexible a story theme as the sports or SF themes that Jinty readers liked, or of course the spooky tales of Misty). It has quite a bit of overlap of stories or of artists with the titles I am more familiar with, and some cracking content – I’d like to read more of the exciting “Noelle’s Ark” which I give below (and which again has some overlap with a classic Jinty story – “Fran of the Floods”). At this point it feels to me a bit like a fore-runner of the more fully-developed, stronger Jinty/Tammy/Misty stable – but at the same time, I know readers who have only found this title recently and have become real converts. I will seek out more…

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