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 26 April 1975

Stories in this issue

• The Jinx from St Jonah’s (artist Mario Capaldi)
• Tricia’s Tragedy (artist Ana Rodriguez)
• Jinty Makes It: Table mats – Feature
• Merry at Misery House (unknown artist – Merry; writer Terence Magee)
• Dora Dogsbody (artist José Casanovas)
• Do-It-Yourself Dot (artist Alf Saporito)
• Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe… – complete story (unknown artist – Merry)
• Cinderella Smith (artist Trini Tinturé)
• Bet Gets the Bird! (artist Phil Gascoine)
• Face the Music, Flo! (artist Jim Baikie)
• Daddy’s Darling (artist Philip Townsend, writer Alison Christie)
• Jinty’s Favourite Spooky Stories – The Fair Rosaleen (text story)

Katie helps the local greengrocer out with deliveries, and finds out what goes on behind the doors of a health farm. Eating a huge serving of lovely greasy fish and chips in front of a bunch of people trying to lose weight isn’t a great idea though! Shame about the stereotypical fat people all running after her trying to nab the food off her – amusing though it will have been at the time.

Tricia is being followed in town by her cousin Diana. But how can Diana find her way round so effectively, if she’s blind? Her horrible cousin and family are tricking her – nowadays we call that emotional abuse and gaslighting. Trisha has made her mind up to stand her ground, even though she hasn’t yet realised what lies they’re telling her.

On a craft page, Jinty shows you how to make a set of table mats out of stout card and string. They look like the sort of thing that might well come out looking rather effective.

Merry has recovered her memory, but evil butler Haig is trying to blackmail her as he also knows her secret. Merry has no choice but to run away so that the blackmail doesn’t work. The same unknown artist who drew Merry is also drawing “Wednesday’s Child” in this issue – a complete story based around the rhyme. Moira is always grumbling, but she doesn’t realise that her mother really has something to worry about – the father of the family is on a fishing boat that is well overdue on its return. Moira snaps out of her grumbling and is able to be some help for once.

The cousins are after Cindy Smith, who is trying to post a plea for help to her father. They stop her from sending it, beat her, tie her up, and deprive her of food and water until she signs away her money to them.

In “Face the Music, Flo!”, the twins are at loggerheads. Greg is trying out his act on stage and doing well, but Flo thinks it is bound to all end unhappily and wants to prevent him from breaking his heart seeking the unobtainable. Greg’s manager is happy to keep them apart, too. Greg is still trying to please his sister, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to last for long.

“Daddy’s Darling” Lee is still trying to defend her friends Joe and Maggie from her uncaring father. Maggie has won a school prize for writing a great essay; will this change the heartless father’s mind about the two evacuees?

There is a spooky prose story this issue: I suspect it is an Irish folk or traditional tale, retold. The Fair Rosaleen has a hard-hearted father; as she lay dying she asked him to make sure he looked after the poor people nearby, so that she can rest peacefully. Of course he breaks his vow and the ghost returns to remind him of his promise – which he then keeps faithfully thereafter.

Jinty 5 July 1975

• The Jinx From St Jonah’s (artist Mario Capaldi)
• Blind Ballerina (artist Ana Rodriguez)
• Dora Dogsbody (artist José Casanovas)
• Merry at Misery House (writer Terence Magee)
• The Valley of Shining Mist (artist Carlos Freixas)
• The Green People (artist Phil Gascoine)
• Beyond the Call of Duty! (spooky text story)
• A Basinful of Super Prizes…worth over £400! (competition)
• Cinderella Smith (artist Trini Tinturé)
• Daddy’s Darling (artist Phil Townsend, writer Alison Christie)
• Face the Music, Flo! (artist Jim Baikie)
• Do-It-Yourself Dot (artist Alf Saporito)

The competition featured on the cover reduces Katie the Jinx (who normally starts on the cover) to a two-pager. This time Katie jinxes herself – with sunburn on her tummy. Meanwhile, in Dora Dogsbody it’s tennis trouble this week when Mrs Siddons goes all out to impress the Chairwoman of the local tennis club.

Barbie impresses the judges with her dancing, but her blindness and refusing to tell anyone about it causes a misunderstanding that gets on the wrong side of them. And they give her a humiliating punishment that jealous Sylvia is taking advantage of.

Mrs Maynard of the Valley of Shining Mist offers to give Debbie violin lessons – but Debbie must pass a series of tests to receive them. Yes, this story is well and truly in the spirit of fairy tales now.

Cinderella Smith pulls the same dirty trick her cousins pulled on her – tricking them into signing a contract – in order to get her modelling career started. But that’s the easy part. The problem will be keeping up her modelling against the ill-treatment from her cousins.

New girl Hilda Bolton arrives at arrives at Misery House. Like Merry, she’s been wrongly convicted. Worse, she’s clearly ill and not strong enough to take the misery – which the staff and Adolfa make extra-worse for her. Eventually she collapses and Merry fears she is dying.

Jinty has started a run of spooky text stories – something we will see on a regular basis in Misty. You have to wonder what the motivation could be here for such a series and how long it lasted. Jinty had a brief stint on text stories in her early issues, but did not run text stories in earnest until 1981, with spot panels from the stories being enlarged for the covers.

Things keep going wrong for Flo, and she gets into more and more trouble with her brother. Things are not going so well for the Green People either when authorities discover a ladder they left behind is made from an unknown metal. Now the military are involved! And in Daddy’s Darling, Daddy gets worse than ever when he discovers who his new maid really is. But the blurb for next week suggests that the hard-heartedness he showed in this episode is going to rebound on him. And we also learn it’s the time Japan bombed Pearl Harbour.

Ads tell us it’s now the third issue of Lindy, which would merge with Jinty after 20 issues. They also inform us that the Lindy Summer Special is on sale from 3 July. Only three issues in and Lindy is already producing her first summer special? Perhaps  it was so the special would time with the summer holidays.

200th Entry: Jinty Annual 1975

• Eve’s Dream (artist Manuel Cuyas)
• Cooking Magic! (recipe feature)
• Token of Gratitude (text story)
• Happy Memory Coverlet (feature)
• The Helping Hand (artist Jim Baikie)
• Puzzle Time (feature)
• Four on the Road – (update: reprinted from Sally)
• Dreaming Again (feature)
• The Jinx from St Jonah’s (artist Mario Capaldi)
• This Beautiful World 1975 (feature)
• Sarah – the Spellbinder! (text story)
• The Snobs and the Scruffs
• Can You Take a Joke? (quiz)
• Happy Ever After…. (artist Audrey Fawley) text story
• The Hole in the Wall
• How to be a Witch! (feature)
• Mystery of the Devil Dancers (writer Linda Blake) text story
• Desert Island Daisy (artist Robert MacGillivray)
• Second Best Sally
• Birthday Budgie (game)
• “Starlight” Saves the Train
• Midsummer Madness and Michaelmas Magic (feature)
• It’s a Laugh! (feature)
• All Right on the Night (poem)
• Holly Takes the Plunge! (text story)
• Dora Dogsbody (artist Jim Baikie)
• Ideas…Big and Little!
• Strawberry Fare! (recipe feature)
• Oh Dear, David! (text story)
• Animal Crackers (feature)
• Button, Button…Who’s Got the Button? (feature)
• Shirley Finds Her Feet
• People of the Sea (feature)
• Date with a Dreamboat (artist Phil Townsend)

It is the 200th entry on this blog, so what to do to celebrate? Well, The Best of 70s Girls’ Comics Annual reprinted the cover from the 1975 Jinty annual, so it seems appropriate to now take a look at the annual itself – which is in fact the first annual Jinty produced!

Jinty herself appears on page 124, saying it is the first-ever Jinty annual and she was granted the right to be the first person to read it. But ye Editor suddenly realised he forgot to include Jinty herself in it and had to take fast action to redress the oversight. So Jinty appears on page 124 rather than page 1, with Gary Glitter himself! What a way to make it up to her and give the readers an extra treat!

The annual has six text stories (oddly, one of them, “Mystery of the Devil Dancers” actually credits the writer, Linda Blake), six picture stories, at least ten features, and the regulars are The Jinx from St Jonah’s, Dora Dogsbody, The Snobs and the Scruffs, and Desert Island Daisy. The last two are unusual because they were the most short-lived features from the original Jinty lineup. And Daisy actually appeared in two Jinty annuals after a short span in the regular comic. By contrast, Merry from Misery House, one of the longest-running stories from the original Jinty lineup, did not appear at all in the annuals. Perhaps Jinty was aiming for more lightweight features with her annuals. Or perhaps Merry was regarded more as a serial than a regular and therefore did not qualify to appear.

Dora Dogsbody is drawn by Jim Baikie instead of her regular artist, José Casanovas. In fact, this was the case with all the annuals Dora appeared in. Do-It-Yourself Dot, the longer running of Jinty‘s funnies, makes no appearance while the short-lived Snobs and the Scruffs does. Another oddity in the lineup.

The Jinx from St Jonah’s retains her regular artist, Mario Capaldi. Katie is unsure about joining the latest roller-skating craze at school because she is klutsy enough on her own two feet. The prospect of being selected for a roller-skating/swimming show decides the matter. Katie sure is determined to get into the show, but will her jinxing wreck her hopes – or the show, maybe? Or will Katie land on her feet somehow, skates and all?

As was frequent with young IPC titles, the annual reprints material from older annuals as she was not old enough to reprint her own material in the annuals. The early Jinty (and Tammy) annuals reprinted a lot of old material (some of it under revised titles) from June, and this was very likely the case with “Four on the Road”; there can be no doubt it was originally a serial, and it may or may not be appearing under a revised title. The story concerns two orphaned Italian children Lola and Toni, who are faced with an orphanage after their grandfather dies. Then their adventures begin when their landlord, Signor Borani, has the children collect two dogs and then they get stranded, forcing them and the dogs to take the the road in order to deliver the dogs to their new owner.

Update: I have found that “Four on the Road” originally appeared in Sally.

One text story, “Holly Takes the Plunge” was ironically reprinted in the last Jinty annual in 1986. Talk about bookends.

Some of the shorter stories such as “Eve’s Dream”, “Starlight Saves the Train” and “Shirley Finds Her Feet” may be reprints from older sources as well, because they are not drawn by Jinty artists. “The Helping Hand” and “Date with a Dreamboat” may be Jinty as they are both drawn by regular Jinty artists. The former is an intriguing story about a student nurse who is struggling with her training until she gets help from a strange character dressed as a jester. Then she sees the same jester in a portrait and discovers he founded the hospital 800 years ago. Someone playing a joke or did the founder return to help the nurse? Whatever the truth, Jinty seems to be stretching credibility a bit with a jester founding a hospital – even if he did persuade the king to grant him the land for it. All the same, the story is fun to read. The latter, quite surprisingly for the times, is a boyfriend-themed story. Claire takes a fancy to Tom, but soon finds herself in a love triangle with Susie – Tom’s boat! And Susie seems to be just as unhappy with the situation as Claire when Claire joins Tom for a sailing in Susie. But of course things work out in the end.

The first Jinty annual can be regarded as an enjoyable read. It cannot be described as having a full Jinty feel as it is a mix of Jinty stories (some of which are a bit surprising) and reprints of older IPC material. But that is understandable as Jinty was still getting established and did not yet have enough material to fill her annuals with her own material. It is a good start to the run of Jinty annuals that would sadly end on a whimper. The last two Jinty annuals were Jinty in name only; they were just a collection of reprints from older comics and not a trace of Jinty material anywhere.