Judy, cover date 27 August 1988
Norman Lee was an outstanding artist whose distinctive style graced the covers and pages of many girls’ comics and magazines in the DC Thomson range throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This one’s another great design.
On page 2, there’s a short Judy & Co. strip (again, drawn by Lee) telling the story of the cover. It’s short, simple and undramatic, but beautiful, evocative of long summers of youth – a vision of pastoral idyll not often seen in cheap weekly comics.
The pace, tone and imagery (that lovely silhouette under the tree) brought to mind those old Maurice Dodd/Dennis Collins Perishers cartoons, Wellington, Maisie and Marlon philosophisin’ an’ foolin’ around against the backdrop of an adult-free rural British landscape.
While IPC had long-dropped its girls’ comics lines by 1988, it appears to have remained a strong market for DCT. It was still publishing Judy, Bunty, Mandy and Nikki at this time. Judy had lasted since 1960 and still offered a fairly traditional mix of stories based around mystery, history, animals and sport.
Tough of the Pool is interesting to see, in part because the art is by another great of British comics, Ian Kennedy. It’s a reprint of a strip first published in 1971. I wonder whether the story was originally intended to be a girls’ version of The Victor’s popular serial The Tough of the Track.
The ‘talented young athlete living with a cruel aunt while struggling to succeed against a tough establishment’ sounds pretty similar to Tammy’s Bella at the Bar too. So many of these comic serials followed similar formulae known to succeed.
A seven-part adventure The Mystery of Room 13 begins this week. Young orphans Jill and Claire visit their cousin Miriam in London to coincide with a royal wedding. In their hotel, the sisters stay in room 124 while Miriam is in 13. Until the following morning, when she is nowhere to be seen and room 13 turns out to be a linen cupboard.
It’s a promising start. I’ve read the rest of the adventure; part 2 is properly spooky, as the girls find everyone in the hotel denying all knowledge of Miriam. Even the matron who runs their orphanage back home claims not to have heard of her.
The young sisters are left to fend for themselves, virtually penniless. Eventually it’s revealed that Miriam has been kidnapped by ‘a foreign power’ (shady-looking Arabs) because she knows the location of a visiting dignitary – subject of an assassination plot.
But exactly why everyone – including matron – denied Miriam’s existence is never explained in any of the seven episodes. The story was announced as ‘A Baffling Story to Keep You Guessing’, which seems like a fair description at the end of it all. It's a bit of a let-down.
