"Do your friends a favour - lend them your "Bunty!""

[greenmask]

I am doing just that.

Last Bunty-post we talked about how much worse Bunty got towards the end, mostly based on memories and bitterness. Well, we were right. There was a MASSIVE drop-off in quality somewhere after 1979. I know, because eBay told me.

So let's revisit the good times. Let's take a look at what the six-to-twelve year olds got to read about in 1977. On Shakespeare's birth/deathday*!

I'm not scanning this story for you, because the episodes I have aren't very interesting, but get a load of this convoluted premise:



For those who're struggling with the tiny print, it reads: Tessa Trent's inheritance had been stolen by her wicked cousin, Tansy, who looked very like her. tessa was told that she was Tansy, the poor relation, anf her claims to be the rightful heiress were dismissed as a jealous disorder of the mind. Tessa was kept prisoner in a grim nursing home run by Dr Wardour where a servant-girl, Dorrie, who believed Tessa's story, obtained work. Dorrie and Tessa's former nurse, Nurse Ellis, tried without success to find somebody who could identify the real Tessa Trent. Then, one day, Tessa escaped from Winterhall.

..Now I know why I like commas so much.





Yes - a warning against arrogance that reads a little like a warning against girls doing boy stuff. NO FEAR, though, because the stories within do not take that tack.

I am super-sorry that the writing is so small on some of these. I hate using scannerrrrs!

These are the first four pages on an ongoing story - I took the executive decision that as the magazine does call it's serials "stories" and since they do begin and end (except for the Marys, natch), it's within reasonability to post the full four pages from this one issue. Nurse Dinkum appears in the July '77 issue I have, but she's done with by March '88.









Child psychology: that is what children love stories about. Or maybe it isn't, which is why Dinkum was gone within a year? The July '77 story is about a boy learning what happens when you play with matches (cats die).

It's a neat enough story, though, and it's got a protagonist with things like "pluck" and "integrity" and whatever. The 'leaning out of leafy windows at night' art reminds me of a Bunty story I am forever trying to re-find that was about the headmistress of a girls' academy who was also secretly a wrestler/vigilante.

Something about it just feels good to read, even if it is a bit over-earnest. No?


This is my favourite page of the issue, though: Maid Marian (as seen in my modhat icon), teaching girls how to handle themselves.



I can't tell you how many time I've thoughtbubbled "I've got to enforce my authority or they'll never obey me again". I only thought it about children, though. Not merry men.

:'[

To cheer me up, let's do fashion.


Can I have your yellow shirt thing, Bunty?

As usual, there are no creator credits anywhere.

*Shakespeare nerds, afford me no kinship; I just live in Stratford and cannot avoid the man.

Comments

[whitesycamore]

The starburst bubble to the right of Nurse Carol's head proclaiming that "she's got four legs!" led me to believe that the story would be quite different to how it actually was. :D And I love the art in this, it reminds me of the illustrations from a bunch of mouldy hard-cover Famous Five books I once had.

Something about it just feels good to read, even if it is a bit over-earnest. No?

Yes, basically. It's pat and sentimental, but it has some mysterious quality that marks it out as worth reading in a way that the later Bunty stories don't. I don't know, is it gravitas? It's painfully corny, but it's corny about stuff that matters!

[whitesycamore]

Also, I didn't quite realise that the writing above the Domestic Superintendent's head was supposed to be a sign on the door - at first glance I thought she was being labelled for audience benefit.

I feel a bit bereft now I know that she wasn't.

[greenmask]

Hahaha!

[whitesycamore]

Like a Richard Scarry book!

[greenmask]

Haha, I knowww, but alas - no body horror in THIS story. Maybe I'll post some of Bunty's Supergirl later. She's bionic!

It's sort of that as well as just being all earnest, these stories are also told in earnest?

[whitesycamore]

It's sort of that as well as just being all earnest, these stories are also told in earnest?

I feel like you just said something important here, but I'm too silly to understand it. Do you mean that the later writers of Bunty perhaps *gasp* didn't take their responsibility to write stories that were actually good very seriously?

[greenmask]

Do you know, I think that may be it?

I bought four late seventies issues and four mid-nineties issues this week, and the 90s covers.. okay, May 27th, 1995, the cover has these words:

BUNTY
for girls

eat to the beat! Bassett's Jelly Babies SUPER COMPETITION

2 NEW brilliant stories

groove SEAN MAGUIRE pin-up

loadsa puzzles

Compared to the '77 one in the post, it's pretty darn weak. It specifies FOR GIRLS, the cover image is just a photo of a girl in an awful 90s hat, and only a quarter of the cover copy is about its narrative content. In the seventies the cover was a poem-story by itself! The price has gone up to 50p by 1995, also, though I don't know what inflation would do to that difference. The stories are to do with chocolate, boys, annoying friends, boys, boys, and another evil identity-switch story. I think we can assume that the creators just did not give a fuck when one of the stories in a pre-teen comic magazine is titled When Harry Dumped Sally.

[whitesycamore]

Grr why write a girls' comic if you don't even caaaaaare any more!

[greenmask]

I dunno. What changed, Bunty team? What changed??

[icon_uk]

Strangely, the only time I ever bought a magazine for a Sean Maguire pin up (well, cover in this case) was this one, and I just can't think why! ;)

[greenmask]

Hahaha! Icon, you are incorrigible.

Actually I think I may have owned that same issue - whether or not Declan Donnelly picks his nose is sounding really familiar to me.

[icon_uk]

Yeeess... you bought it "for the articles" I'm sure! ;) (Actually that was the first time I ever realised that such magazines, which I never paid any attention to for more reasons than seems fair to list, DID pictures like that. That one was the gold standard to me, even after I found this one, featuring a boyband I'd never heard of before, nor again and whose music I only heard once on TV, let's just say that the gags probably improved matters)

[greenmask]

Hahaha, I don't remember why I bought it, I was seven!

Wait a minute.. "When we went to Taiwan we saw a waitress that looked like Freddie Mercury"? That does not fit the theme of the photoshoot at all! Though I suppose it might arguably, if the actual theme is "light kink" instead of "lol, kidnapping"

[whitesycamore]

if the actual theme is "light kink" instead of "lol, kidnapping"

Well, one of them mentions a fantasy about running around on a desert island in shorts - and surely that's more "marooned" than "kidnapped." So...

And this is really weird, but the question of whether or not Declan Donnelly picks his nose sounds familiar to ME now too. I seem to remember the answer was "yes, he does" So unless that's just a question that comes up a lot in Dec interviews, all three of us bought that same magazine. Perhaps it was FATE.

Woahhh

[greenmask]

That's what I thought too!

Maybe it WAS fate. :O!!

I mean.. that's not the sort of thing that counts as need-to-know pop star (they were still pop stars then, right?) information, is it? Not like posh spice thinking her boobs were too small or.. I dunno, how D&G was Ronan Keating's favourite clothing brand. It surely wouldn't come up more than once?

Re: Woahhh

[whitesycamore]

Unless this particular magazine just made a habit of asking pop stars that question, in which case I might be confusing him with someone else!

hey were still pop stars then, right?

Oh wow, I had forgotten about their ill-fated music career. I just remember him as one half of the duo that put me off paint-balling for life.

Actually that whole series put me off youth clubs for life. So. Bleak.

Re: Woahhh

[greenmask]

MY EYES, MY EYES! PEE-JEAH ARE YOU OKEAH? AH CANT SEE!

I don't think Northern fiction is allowed to be un-bleak. :/

Re: Woahhh

[whitesycamore]

I was so disappointed to re-watch that scene on youtube and NOT be able to find/hear the part where he says "I cannae see!"

I'm sure he said that when it originally aired. I'M SURE. Otherwise, what were all the joking playground cries of "I cannae see!" for *years* afterwards based on?

Re: Woahhh

[greenmask]

It's on youtube?? *searches*

..Either he definitely said it, or we went to the same primary school. >_>

Re: Woahhh

[greenmask]

Oh oh memory-flash - wasn't the AH CANNA SEE from an episode after the fact, where Duncan's all "well I guess things are back to normal or whatever!" and PJ reacts poorly to this idea?

Man, Byker was hard on its characters.

Re: Woahhh

[whitesycamore]

Well they certainly milked the tragedy of PJ's blinding for all it was worth.

I seem to remember yet *another* episode where video footage of the paint-ball accident was played on a huge projection screen at a large gathering (WHY I couldn't say), and PJ had a sort of PTSD freak-out. In public. Rough.

Of course, all this was before he had to leave the Grove in order to go to "blind school" :/

Ugh, that series was so distressing it actually used to give me stomach-ache. Didn't stop me watching it though for some reason.

[icon_uk]

if the actual theme is "light kink" instead of "lol, kidnapping"

Never underestimate the desperation of a boyband PR machine that spots their charges falling into obscurity!

[whitesycamore]

I was idly checking up on this post, all angsty and wondering why no one seems to care about classic Bunty any more (fools!) - and then you turn up. With bondage.

:D

[icon_uk]

The July '77 story is about a boy learning what happens when you play with matches (cats die).

I now have an mental image of some kid stabbing a cat to death with his matches.

[greenmask]

I'm not sure that you don't overestimate Bunty, there. It was all up for excitement, sure, but..!