On this day, 23 June 1984: Tammy — GREAT NEWS FOR ALL READERS!

Jun 23

Jun 23 On this day, 23 June 1984: Tammy

Cover artwork: main artist unknown; Jim Baikie (The Forbidden Garden)

Industrial action by the NUJ in June 1984 led to IPC cutting a number of weekly and monthly magazines and comics from its roster. A number of titles were withdrawn from the schedule with no forewarning; where these were serial anthology comics, that meant that ongoing stories stopped short on cliffhanger endings. Horror comic Scream! was one of these publications (its fifteenth and final standalone issue carrying the cover date of 30 June 1984), but was saved to some small extent when unfinished stories such as Monster and The Thirteenth Floor were picked up by Eagle a few weeks later. Less fortunate was Tammy, for which the issue cover-dated 23 June would turn out to have been the last in its proud thirteen-year run. The title 'Tammy' was added to the masthead of Girl, but this would be a merger in name alone, as none of its uncompleted serials were carried over. It could be argued that Girl was only half a comic - it carried photo-stories and photo-articles in higher proportion to drawn strips - and that would mean that this Tammy was the very last pure issue in IPC's fine and longstanding production of girls' comics.

Mistyfan has written an excellent review of the issue, and the circumstances surrounding its cancellation, here.

I've posted some scans from the issue below, including the final panels of all the serials, and their 'Next week' trailer lines promising a future that never came. In some parallel universe, new story Secret Sisters ran for more than one episode, Cora Can't Lose reached its thrilling conclusion, and long-running favourites Bella and Pam of Pond Hill continued to please their loyal readers for many weeks more. But not in our world, alas.