Left-Out Linda [1974]

Sample Images

Published: 10 August 1974 – 9 November 1974

Episodes: 14

Artist: Jim Baikie

Writer: Unknown

Translations/reprints: Translated into Dutch as “Linda” in Tina 1975/76; Translated into Greek in Manina.

Plot

Linda Lake’s father had died when she could barely remember him. Consequently she and her mother have always been close. Unfortunately Mum also developed the tendency to spoil Linda too much, and as we shall see, this has bred selfishness in Linda (though not as badly as some Jinty heroines, such as Lisa Carstairs in “She Shall Have Music“).

Mum sends Linda to boarding school, but Linda can’t bear the separation because she and her mother have always been close. Moreover, she is not willing to adapt to school rules or respect that there are reasons for them, because she does not like being ordered around. As a result, she isn’t taking to the school, and it shows in difficult, selfish behaviour that does not endear her to her classmates. Only Linda’s roommate Joan shows her any friendliness and does her best to reach out to Linda.

As if difficulties in settling into the school weren’t bad enough, Linda is shocked to hear that her mother is now entering a second marriage with a Mr Grant! On top of that, Linda is not even invited to the wedding because they did not want to disrupt her schooling. Then one of the girls says that sending Linda to boarding school was probably to get her out of the way, as Mum must have been as fed up with her as they are.

That comment is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and Linda’s difficult behaviour is pushed over the edge altogether. She wants to go home, and starts trying to get herself expelled. However, the staff take the view that her difficult behaviour is due to her emotional problems and give her more lenient punishments than expulsion. Linda’s classmates are more outraged though, and turn even more against her.

To make things worse, Linda’s difficult behaviour unwittingly causes Joan to get injured twice, the second of which puts her in hospital altogether. At this, the other girls get so angry with Linda they throw her in the swimming pool. However, they did not think that Linda was wearing a heavy dressing gown at the time, which drags her down. So she almost drowns by the time the headmistress finds her. Not willing to sneak on the girls, Linda says she was trying to get herself expelled because she wants to go home. However, the headmistress guesses what really happened and has Mum remove Linda from the school.

Before Linda goes, she goes to hospital to apologise to Joan. Joan accepts her apology but says she’s been a “silly chump”. She did not give the school a chance or tried to be friends with anyone, and she does not understand that if she wants her mother’s love she has to earn it. However, Joan will keep the door open for Linda in case there is a second chance.

Linda is so happy to be coming home, but there is one thing she has not considered: it’s no longer just her and her mother. There’s now a stepfather and a stepsister, Lorette, and household arrangements have changed to accommodate them. Linda had been accustomed to having her own bedroom, but now she has to share it with Lorette. She did not like sharing her study with Joan because she was not used to such things, and she does not like sharing her bedroom now. She is not willing to call Mr Grant “Dad” (but we will for this discussion) and when she finds she is the only one in the household who does not have the surname “Grant”, she feels the odd one out. She does not even try to reach out to them although they try to reach out to her. She starts wallowing in self-pity that she is the unwanted one, just like she was at school.

Not once does she think that she is not even making herself wanted, or that her selfish attitudes are making things even worse for herself. She is not friendly to Lorette, although Lorette tries to reach out to Linda and is just as kind as Joan. Linda is annoyed that Lorette is willing to call her mother “Mum” and wants things to be the way they used to be – just her and Mum. But it’s no longer the same, what with Mum having to share in Dad’s business for one thing. Linda feels left out again.

Dad’s business is a boutique, which is named “Lorette” as well. We learn Lorette is following in Dad’s footsteps as a trainee dress designer and also helps out at the shop. Linda looks down on it, calling it a “rotten, poky little place”, so she is really put out to find it is hugely popular. Linda’s only friend now is a girl she meets in a coffee shop, an out-of-work fashion girl called Honey. Linda keeps Honey a secret from her family as she feels they would not approve (as it turns out, they would have good reason to if they had known).

Some things are not really Linda’s fault. On one occasion she is ordered to make tea for the family. She does try, but everything turns to custard. This reinforces Dad’s view that Linda has been spoiled and needs sorting out. And now Mum has seen the helpful, sensible Lorette, she agrees Linda is a bit selfish and thoughtless by comparison. So they look into sending her another boarding school. Naturally, Linda does not want another boarding school coming between her and her mother.

A turnaround comes in an odd way. Linda unwittingly burns an order Dad received while burning prospectuses that have arrived from boarding schools. To make up for her mistake (without owning up), she helps to make up the order. But she does not listen to Lorette’s advice on how to cut out the patterns, and as a result she messes things up. Lorette saves the situation, but instead of appreciating it, Linda is narked that Lorette ends up looking the clever one and she not. Meanwhile, Dad is still angry with Linda for the near-disaster.

More trouble arises when Linda shoots off her mouth about the boutique to Honey, and gets invited to a party. Lorette offers to help Linda with a dress from the boutique to wear, but Linda uses a dress that she has been explicitly told not to touch. She does not realise it is Lorette’s entry for a national dress competition. Nor does she realise a photographer taking a photo of her with pop star Gary Glance while wearing the dress at the party is for the newspaper. The party turns progressively sour for Linda when she realises Honey has just taking advantage of her and her connection with the boutique, and does not really care for her. To add to Linda’s miseries, she also put a tear in the dress, which she graciously mends when she gets home.

But when the family see the photo of Linda wearing Lorette’s entry in the newspaper, they are furious beyond words because Linda has gotten Lorette’s entry disqualified from the competition. To add to Dad’s rage, he has realised that Linda was responsible for the lost order along with the missing boarding school prospectuses, and thinks she did it out of spite. He is so angry with Linda that he slaps her and calls her spoilt, selfish, and hateful, and then walks right out of the house. Mum is in tears at her new husband walking out and her marriage on the verge of collapsing because of Linda, and agrees that Linda is spoiled and selfish. Linda is appalled to see how heartbroken Lorette is and crying her eyes out.

Linda is struck with guilt and shame and realising that she has indeed been spoiled and selfish. So she decides to run away and not trouble them anymore, and heads to the shop to take some money to fund herself for running away. Then she finds another of Lorette’s designs that has been overlooked. Linda decides to make up for things and have the family think better of her by making up the design for Lorette and enter it for her. Once the dress is done, she parcels it up to post for Lorette later on. But in what will have serious consequences for her, she also makes a teapot for a cuppa.

Ironically, Linda’s attempt to be unselfish only gets her into deeper trouble. When her family find her, they are furious at her for staying out so long and worrying the whole family, who’ve had the police out looking for her. To cap it all, it’s caused Lorette to have an asthma attack.

The family decide on a clean break with a holiday in Paris – minus Linda, who is to stay behind as a punishment. Dad has arranged for his mother to mind Linda, and warns her that Gran is a crabby woman who will make Linda toe the line. Sure enough, that is what Gran comes across as when Linda first meets her.

Gran tells Linda to go and open the shop. But Linda finds she has unwittingly flooded the place and ruined the clothes because she left a tap dripping and the tea leaves from the teapot clogged the sink. Linda is in hysterics because her family will think she did it on purpose and she will never convince them otherwise.

But Gran soon shows she has a heart of gold under that crabby exterior. She takes the situation firmly in hand and helps Linda to not only clean up the mess but redecorate the place as well. Finally, Linda has found a friend. And when Gran is confined to bed because of her exertion, Linda devotes time to taking care of her while running the shop by herself. Linda really enjoys running the shop herself and handling the accounting. In so doing she is gaining confidence and taking the lesson of responsibility seriously.

Then disaster strikes when Gran mistakenly puts Linda’s name on Lorette’s entry form for the competition. Linda is alarmed, because Lorette is surely going to think Linda stole her design. They need to head down to the organisers to sort it out. But first, they have to clear everything out of the shop by Saturday so they will be free to see the organisers on that day. Linda discovers whole new lessons in resourcefulness as she comes up with all sorts of advertising gimmicks to make sure everything gets sold out.

Of course everything gets sorted out with the organiser, a Lady Dunwoody. Lorette wins first prize too. Gran also sees Lady Dunwoody about something else, which she keeps secret from Linda.

When the family come back, they are in a changed mood. The break had been just what they needed. Now Dad’s anger has cooled, he has repented not letting Linda come on the trip. But they have brought back loads of presents for her. He also finds Linda is calling him “Father” now, and they are all set for a fresh start. They are really impressed with Linda’s handling of the shop. Lorette is surprised and thrilled to win first prize at the competition. Gran then unveils her special surprise for Linda: Lady Dunwoody has awarded her a special fashion prize for how well she handled the shop. It is a grant for studying fashion at college so Linda can open her own boutique when she is older.

Realising the O and A levels she will need for college, Linda is all of a sudden repenting her conduct at boarding school. However, the headmistress agrees to take Linda back. Joan is waiting for Linda with open arms and says how pleased she is to see what a changed person Linda is.

Thoughts

This story has the distinction of being the first story Jim Baikie drew for Jinty, and it was the beginning of a regular Jim Baikie run that lasted until 1980 with “White Water”. It was also the first Jinty story to use the fashion theme, which must have helped to make it popular. Girls’ stories with the theme of fashion/modelling are always sure-fire winners.

Although Linda is set up as a selfish, spoilt and thoughtless girl, she starts off more sympathetic than most of these types of girls usually do. We can understand her being so close to her mother that it is painful for her to be separated from Mum at boarding school and she would naturally have trouble adjusting to boarding school. Plus there is the brutal shock of Mum suddenly getting married again without Linda actually getting to know the new stepfamily first, or even being invited to the wedding. A girl who is so used to it just being her and her mother and then suddenly being flung into a situation of sharing Mum with a stepfather and stepsister who are virtual strangers would indeed be emotionally traumatised. Even if Linda is spoilt and selfish, when we consider the upheavals and traumas Linda is suddenly subjected to without warning, we can hardly blame her for being emotionally difficult.

Yet Linda is as much the architect of her own misfortunes as she is a victim of them. She imagines herself as being unwanted and left out, but she does not realise that she is not making herself wanted in the first place. She does not understand that Joan and then Lorette are trying to reach out to her because they care about her and they are not trying to make her feel unwanted. If she reciprocated their efforts and reached out to them, she would realise that she is wanted.

Her own thoughtlessness also adds to her woes, such as when she tries to get herself expelled from boarding school but almost gets Joan killed in the process. If she had tried to settle into the school and made friends, she would have avoided that. Likewise, if Linda had respected Lorette’s wishes about not using that particular dress, she would have avoided that terrible trouble with her family.

Linda is more prone to guilt than other selfish girls in Jinty when her actions lead to trouble that she did not intend. For example, her first impulse after that miserable party at Honey’s is to go home and own up to her parents. But she changes her mind when she hears Dad voicing his suspicions about her deliberately hiding the mail. Linda also thinks she did deserve the ducking in the swimming pool (though not the near-drowning, surely!) because her actions to get herself expelled almost got Joan killed. And when she finds Lorette’s overlooked dress design, she turns it into a conscientious effort to make things up to her stepsister. It is a cruel irony that this act of atonement has the family even more furious with her and thinking she is an even worse character than ever. And just when she was seriously trying to change and make up for things.

It is another irony that another act of Linda’s thoughtlessness (not turning the tap off properly) sets in motion a series of events that turn Linda into a more mature, confident, responsible and happier person, and she is rewarded accordingly. If she had turned the tap off, it is less likely she would have developed the warm relationship with Gran, who would have continued to come across as crabby. And it would have been less likely that the muddle over the entry form would have occurred, which had the bonus of Linda receiving her own prize that sets the stage for her future career.

Wenna the Witch (1974)

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Published:  10 August 1974 – 2 November 1974

Episodes: 13

Artist: Carlos Freixas

Writer: Unknown

Translations/reprints: Wenna de heks [Wenna the Witch] in Tina 1976, Tina Topstrip 34, 1981; Greek translation in Manina; Indonesian translation Wenna, Si Penyihir [Wenna, the Witch] Tina TopStrip 34.

Plot

Wenna Evans (formerly Lomax) is the foster-daughter of the Evanses, who live in the Welsh village of Llarygg. It is a village where the locals still believe in witches. Still, that has never been a problem for Wenna. She has always seen herself as a girl like any other, and so do the villagers.

But all that changes when a stranger named Mr Burr arrives. He declares in public, right in front of the villagers, that he is looking for Wenna Evans because his research has uncovered that women in her Lomax ancestry were burned at the stake for witchcraft. (More likely they were victims of ignorance, superstition and persecution, probably because they possessed psychic powers of some sort.) Mr Burr thinks Wenna may have inherited the powers and asks her, right in front of everyone, whether she has ever noticed anything unusual about herself, particularly any “dark stirrings” or even visions? Now either this man has absolutely no tact or common sense, or he’s as ignorant and superstitious as the villagers themselves. Of course Wenna is absolutely outraged and yells at him to go away and not come back. As Mr Burr leaves he has a bad accident, and the villagers think Wenna put a curse on him.

So now the villagers think Wenna is a witch and the persecution begins. Her worst enemy is Blodwen Hughes, an expelled schoolgirl who has always been jealous of her. Blodwen’s job in a village shop is the perfect vantage point for her to spread the gossip about Wenna and fan the flames as much as she can. They get inflamed even more when Blodwen is taken ill and says Wenna put the evil eye on her.

Bad things happen one way or other and they are blamed on Wenna. Unfortunately some of them look a bit uncanny, such as when Wenna is surrounded by an angry mob while at the water pump and wishes for them to be swept away – and then jets of water shoot out of the pump, which drives them off. They all blame Wenna’s witchcraft, notwithstanding that their stone-throwing ruptured the pump in the first place.

There are actions Wenna takes that do not help matters. She borrows a book on witches to help her better understand what she is faced with. But when word leaks out it fuels the rumours against her. Wenna goes to the Gallows Hill, which is shunned and feared because it is said to have druid powers. She calls upon the ancient druids to grant her wish to make the villagers stop persecuting her. Unfortunately the villagers see her and accuse her of casting a spell that causes an accident.

At times Wenna herself wonders if she has powers, and there is evidence of it too. Mr Evans tells her that her ancestors were a strange lot and her mother was said to have second sight. Just before the encounter with Mr Burr Wenna had a vision of herself looking absolutely terrified. During the night she had a vision of Mr Burr’s operation and wished for his recovery – and next day she hears he had a miraculous recovery at the time when she wished for it. There are moments of anger where she wishes the villagers would be swept away or suffer in some other way. Then either something happens or she has visions of something happening, and she’s full of doubt about herself and wondering if the villagers are right after all.

Wenna has some friends, in the form of Myfanwy “Fan”, her dog Taffy (thank goodness Taffy isn’t a cat, or the villagers would persecute him as much as Wenna!), her foster parents, and Dr Glynn the village doctor who sticks up for her and chastises the villagers for their stupidity. As the persecution intensifies Wenna gets banned from school because parents won’t allow their children to attend while she’s there, and she gets shunned in the street, with doors slamming on her everywhere. Angry villagers tell Wenna’s foster parents to throw her out or suffer themselves, which forces Wenna to run off at one point. It escalates into a stone-throwing mob trying to drive her out of the village.

Meanwhile, there has been heavy rain that is showing no sign of abating.

The violence drives Wenna back to Gallows Hill, where she thinks she will be safe because the villagers are too scared of the place. She falls asleep and has an ominous dream of villagers being drowned in floodwaters from the heavy rain. Next day Fan comes to warn her that the villagers have guessed where she is and are coming after her, despite their dread of Gallows Hill. Wenna escapes by taking a tumble down a ravine called Devil’s Gullet, where she stows away aboard a truck. The villagers are baffled by her disappearance (for the time being).

The truck is going to the dam, which is in danger of bursting. Wenna overhears the engineers saying that if the dam breaks the water will flood Devil’s Gullet. They think the dam is holding – just – but when Wenna tries to cross the dam to get away from her enemies she discovers it is beginning to burst. She has more visions of the village flooding and villagers drowning in the floodwaters.

Wenna informs the engineers that the dam is bursting, and she decides to put aside all the things the villagers have done to her in order to help them. They all head to the village to warn the villagers. They pass by the witch-hunting villagers at Gallows Hill, who have now realised Wenna went down into Devil’s Gullet. The mob goes down after her, too crazed with witch-hunting fervour to heed the engineers’ warnings that the ravine is going to flood. Wenna goes down after them and, pretending to be a witch, scares them into going back up the hill and away from the floodwaters. Unfortunately she does not make it herself and the floodwaters carry her away.

Back on the hillside, the engineers tell the mob Wenna actually saved their lives by scaring them out of Devil’s Gullet, and it was Wenna who raised the alarm about the damburst. The engineers then do what they can to mitigate the flood damage to the village.

The villagers change their minds about Wenna when they learn how she helped save the village. They are stricken with remorse and think they have driven her to her death when they find her washed up in front of the village cross. However, Wenna is still alive and Fan says it is a miracle. When Wenna recovers, the villagers greet her with apologies, smiles and flowers. Even arch-enemy Blodwen has come around and says Wenna has powers to work small miracles. Wenna comes to accept that she may have inherited genuine powers from her Lomax ancestors, but everyone knows she will use them for good.

Thoughts

Lingering witch-beliefs in some rural areas of Britain have formed the basis for a number of girls’ serials where the protagonists are persecuted by villagers who still believe in witches. The formula was not used much, but some stories that had it include Mandy’s “Bad Luck Barbara” and Bunty’s “Witch!” Jinty ran two serials with the formula, the first being Wenna and the second being “Mark of the Witch!”.

Wenna is in line with the typical formula of the villagers believing the protagonist is a witch because of her alleged ancestry. How it starts is so astonishing as to be unbelievable. Nobody ever thought Wenna was a witch until Mr Burr comes barging into the village, tells people he has discovered she is descended from these executed Lomax witches, and then starts questioning Wenna right in front of everyone about what powers she has. What the hell was this man thinking? At best he’s incredibly stupid and tactless, not to mention rude, and deserves to get his face slapped. At worst he too is a witch believer who deliberately stirred things up against the girl he believed to be a witch. Whatever his motivation, the damage was done.

It is a common thread in the formula for odd things to happen to the protagonist (nightmares, visions, voices in the head, shouting at persecutors and then things happen to them) that have her wondering if she does indeed have strange powers. However, in Wenna it is more overt, such as her visions of villagers drowning. In similar serials, such as “Witch!”, these weird occurrences are usually kept more ambiguous in order to leave scope for readers to make up their own minds. But of course none of these things happened before the persecution started. And presumably they abate after the persecution ends.

Wenna has more support than most of her counterparts do. Usually there is only one person who sticks by them, but they don’t always do so for the duration of the story as Fan does. Sometimes they abandon the protagonist and go over to the other side, as in the case of “Witch!”. However, in this case Fan not only sticks by Wenna but so do the foster parents, Taffy the dog, and the doctor.

The resolution of the story – the villagers change their minds about Wenna because of her heroism in the flood – ensures a happy ending, if not a realistic one. When witch-believers brand someone a witch the label sticks, if not extremely hard to remove, and casts a long shadow. For this reason the endings to “Bad Luck Barbara” and “Witch!”, are more realistic, where the protagonist leaves the village with the villagers still hating her.

Wenna is notable for two things. First, it was the first Jinty story drawn by Carlos Freixas. Two more Freixas stories followed: “Slave of the Mirror”, which replaced Wenna, and the best-remembered one, “The Valley of Shining Mist”. Second, it was the first Jinty story to have the protagonist narrate the story herself. The only other Jinty strip to do so was “Pam of Pond Hill”.

European Translations

In the couple of days since the interview with Alison Christie was published, we have had some particularly interesting information sent in. Candela, who writes about girls’ comics in Spain, tells us that Alison’s ‘story “Over the Rainbow” was very popular in Spain and reprinted in two different girl’s magazines, and of course all the stories under the Gypsy Rose head, which in Spain sometimes were reprinted under the Uncle Pete’s stories.’ Likewise, Peggy from Greece wrote in to say ‘I was really touched to discover after 40 years the writer of one of the stories (“My Name is Nobody”) that I loved in my early youth! It is such a lovely story about the power of friendship’. She was even able to send in some scans of the Greek translation of this story, shown here with many thanks to her (see below for the first and last episodes). She also says that ‘”My Name Is Nobody” was selected to be among the stories to be included in the first issues of the Greek magazine Manina (issue 9), something that shows the significance of the story itself! Just for your information, the other stories of the first issues were “The Cat Girl” (from Sally),  “Molly Mills” (from Tammy), “Lucky’s Living Doll” (from June &  Schoolfriend), “Jackie & the Wild Boys” (from Princess Tina)” and “Bessie Bunter” (from June & Schoolfriend).’

Greek translation of “Nobody Knows My Name” (originally published in June & Schoolfriend, 1971)

click thru for first episode

click thru for last episode

The work done by writers and artists in comics like Jinty was typically on a work-for-hire basis, with a flat fee being paid and no expectation of earning royalties on reprints or translations and so forth. The artwork was owned by the publishing company and not sent back to the artist. A lot of the communication we’d perhaps expect to be happening was just not on the cards: for instance it does not seem that Alison was very aware of the extent of her stories’ popularity, and certainly she was not aware that “Stefa’s Heart of Stone” was reprinted in Princess in 1984. (Indeed, in a reply to a reader’s 1981 letter, this story was described as one of Jinty‘s most popular stories.) Translations into another language were presumably something that creators were unaware of the existence of, except as a vague possibility.

(In a separate email, Alison says ‘I did know that DC Thomsons had a room with magazine journalists seconded to doing this, syndicating picture stories for European countries. As the payment slips freelancers like myself got always had at the foot, “All copyright for all purposes”; this meant they could do what they liked with picture stories etc, once they had paid the writer and artist a one-off payment. However, I had no idea that IPC did this as well – but I didn’t keep any payslips from them, and I can’t remember what was written on them. It must have been on these lines.’ From my own personal knowledge, I was involved with the SSI – the Society of Strip Illustrators – in the early 1990s and there was much talk at the time about work-for-hire contracts and the rather brutal agreements in place. There was little or nothing in the way of a formal contract, and instead as Alison says, your actual payment slip confirmed that this was in consideration of all your creators rights. There would have been no way round this if you wanted to be paid! At the time I was involved in these areas, there was a lot of work being done to change this situation, but at one time it was very normal and not even questioned by many.)

However, it is clear that there was a lot of this translation going on over the years, in many directions. The Dutch auction site Catawiki is an invaluable resource for many British comics but particularly so for this question; although details are not all complete in every cases it lists stories by issue, artist, writer, and original title. Many stories were reprinted in the Tina series Tina Topstrip, as albums collecting the whole story with a new cover. Usually the protagonist was also renamed to something locally suitable (so the protagonist of “Becky Never Saw The Ball” turned into “Eefje”). There was also a monthly magazine, Tina Club, which reprinted stories in an anthology format with what looks like a couple of stories in each one. For instance, “Gwen’s Stolen Glory” was translated as “De droom van een ander / The Dream of Another” in 1975.

Some of the individual Tina Topstrips I have looked at on Catawiki are listed below.

• “Girl In A Bubble” was translated as “Gevangen in een luchtbel / Caught in a bubble” in 1981 with a new cover
• “The Haunting of Hazel” was translated as “Hazel en haar berggeest / Hazel and her mountain spirit” in 1981
• “Spell of the Spinning Wheel” was translated as “De betovering van het spinnewiel / The magic of the spinning wheel” in 1982
• “When Statues Walk” was translated as “De wachters van Thor / The guardians of Thor” in 1985
• “Combing Her Golden Hair” was translated as “Kirstin, Kam je gouden lokken / Kirsten, comb your golden hair” in 1985
• Also in Tina Topstrips:
  • Creepy Crawley, Cursed To Be A Coward!, Curtain of Silence, Guardian of White Horse Hill, Paula’s Puppets, Sceptre of the Toltecs, Tricia’s Tragedy, Wenna The Witch, Wild Horse Summer

As can be seen from the above list, a number of the Jinty creators were represented in these Dutch translations – prolific artists Phil Gascoine, Jim Baikie, and Phil Townsend were all published in this series, and popular writer Alison Christie is represented too, along with Pat Mills. Nowadays the flow of material will presumably be more likely to go the other way, if at all (Trini Tinturé has recently had original Dutch material being republished in UK magazine Girls & Co).

I’m not in the best position to check, but I would love to know more about the details of these translated editions. How faithfully was the translation done? What changed, apart from names and covers – were story lines ever abridged or even amended? Were credits given to artists and writers in any cases? (I do have one or two of the Tina Topstrips and don’t believe anyone was created apart from the local artist who drew the new cover.)

I would also love to know whether this was limited to Europe or not? Once you’ve translated material into Spanish or Portuguese then Latin America becomes available as a market, but it is a lot further away for connections to be made and that may well just not have happened. I know that Brazil and Mexico have their own local comics publishing traditions, as does Argentina (I don’t know about the other Latin American countries), with quite a different feel from the British weekly comic. Certainly in Brazil and Mexico if you see a foreign translation then it is very likely to consist of American reprinted material: Disney material such as the Donald Duck stories, and the Harvey comics such as Little Lulu and Richie Rich. Marvel and DC also make a strong showing in those markets, but the sort of emotional long-running story seen in British girls comics is not very prevalent as far as I know. They would match well with the interest in telenovelas (soap operas) but perhaps this connection is one that was never made?

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Further information from Sleuth of Catawiki:

I have never closely looked at the translations done in the Netherlands. My impression is that stories are usually complete and properly translated, although the names are often changed (“Patty’s World” is translated as “Peggy’s wereldje”, probably because there already was a “Patty” strip in Tina at the time). Having said that, I should compare “Gail’s Indian Necklace” to the translation: reading the story in Jinty I found an episode in London with Gail travelling the tube that might have been taken out as it seemed new to me. Perhaps too outlandish! They always tried to make it look like the stories took place in Holland. That did not work for the school stories with all the uniformed girls of course (no uniforms at school here). I read somewhere that a girl had even asked her parents to send her to boarding school because of the stories in Tina. She did not like it very much when she got there. Boarding schools here are for children whose parents are travelling or for children with behaviour problems or illnesses which cannot be taken care of at home. Another story that I should compare one of these days is “Maartje het ganzenmeisje” (Marge the goose girl). The story very much resembles the story of “The Goose Girl”, but the story takes place in Holland and is drawn by Dutch artist Piet Wijn.