The Comp in Bunty and in Nikki

[peace355]

That's interesting to see what Bunty finished with. Quite a contrast to the the first issue which had 12 stories I believe (including 2 text stories). Further decline could be seen in the annuals. I have got the last Bunty annual (2009) which only had 8 stories altogether, 2 of which were photo stories and two text stories. Of course the annual wasn't even that big a mere 80 pages rather than the usual 128.

To get back on the topic of the Comp any later annual I have has them still at the comp rather than Merton High, though I suspect a lot of these stories were reprints anyway. So as far as I know there wasn't any Merton High stories, though I do have some gaps in my collection.

[Tammyfan]

As far as I can tell the main replacements for the Comp were two new serials - "The Truth About Tanya' and 'Backstreet Hospital' (though I'm pretty sure 'Backstreet' was a reprint, and 'Tanya' could well have been as well).

The comic strip content of Bunty no. 2244 breaks down as follows:

The Four Marys - 4 pages
The Truth About Tanya - 6 pages (looks like two separate 3-page episodes)
Girl Zone - 1 page
Backstreet Hospital - 3 pages
Penny's Place - 4 pages

One thing that disappointed me about so many of the later, glossy issues of Bunty was the way their covers tended to use photographic images to resemble a junior version of women's magazines such as Woman's Own. By contrast, when they did illustrate a comic strip with original art the results could be really eye-catching!

- Phil Rushton

(Ooops! I see that Phoenix beat me to it with a far more comprehensive list of contents)

Yes, Backstreet Hospital and The Truth about Tanya were repeats. It sounds like Living a Lie! was too (assuming that was about a girl who lets everyone think the headmaster is her father to prevent their being bullied).

[philcom55]

Yes, Backstreet Hospital and The Truth about Tanya were repeats. It sounds like Living a Lie! was too (assuming that was about a girl who lets everyone think the headmaster is her father to prevent their being bullied).

Yep! - That's the one.

- Phil R.

[Tammyfan]

I'll leave the extrapolations and analyses to you, but I believe that Bunty just about kept her integrity to the end, although it would be interesting to canvas ex-readers' views on the extent to which they were irritated, or even alienated, by the plethora of full-page photographs of ponies and kittens and gerbils and puppies and cutesy baby birds, when the pages could have been more fruitfully used for another serial, as was more the case in earlier days.

Maybe Bunty was trying to follow the trend of Animals and You? You know, the girls' comic that's full of cute animals? It used to have a regular (pet-related) photostory as well, but that was dropped and it became all cutesy animal pictures. So even the photostory has gone out? Sheesh! Or did Animals and You drop the photostory to save money? Anyway, I can't see Animals and You becoming a collector's item - after all, how collectible are pictures of cute animals?

But to come back to the final issues of Bunty:

Whatever it was with those animal pics, I'm not impressed. To me, it's a sign of laziness, cost-cutting or stop-gap measures. Yes, Bunty could have used those pages more productively. Perhaps for some complete stories, or a short serial or two. Or maybe use them to take one last look back over the past 43 years before the end.

[Phoenix]

It used to have a regular photostory as well, but that was dropped...../.....Bunty could have used those pages more productively for a short serial or two, as Jinty did with her final issues. Or maybe use it to celebrate Bunty herself and look back over the last 43 years.

Yes, the photostory. I remember there being quite a lot of antagonism towards them at the time. It was partly because people don't necessarily react favourably to change, but I think a more fundamental reason was the way the presence of actual people disturbed the traditional relationship between the reader and the clearly-fictional figures on the page. Years earlier, those children brought up on text stories, their imaginations soaring, had problems adjusting to the picture strip equivalents, particularly when characters they had an acceptably clear picture of in their heads, from The Rover for example, were drawn in a completely different way, one such being Alf Tupper. But introducing photos of real people into a strip was a different matter entirely. The result was a bit like a soap in a series of stills, with the same identity issues. Are we following the activities of Rita Tanner or those of Barbara Knox? Over the years, fortunately infrequently, some nutters certainly haven't been able to separate the fiction from the fact.

I was never as critical as others, probably because I had got used to them a lot earlier, reading the Fotonovelas equivalents in Spanish from the sixties. I even used them for language lessons from time to time in the same way as I used comic strips like Jaimito. There was one particular photostory in Bunty that I liked a lot. It was called Luv, Lisa. It was a kind of diary entry in two or three pages of pictures each week, mainly about Lisa, her family and friends in their day-to-day lives at school and home. So far, so ordinary, but unlike Bunty's other serials, which ran for a few weeks and then concluded, Luv, Lisa just went rolling along like the Mississippi, or the M6 on a bad day. But the really fascinating aspect of all this ordinariness was the fact that unlike The Four Marys, who barely aged a day in over forty years at St. Elmo's, Lisa grew up before her readers' eyes at the same rate, obviously, as those readers. She would be about nine when the saga started, sixteen when it finished, with the family emigrating to Australia. Just imagine the empathy possible from this incredible opportunity that Lisa is offering to her readers. She is prepared to share her life, her loves, her disappointments, and sibling rivalry with them, and for a fair number, I suspect, it will have led to a blurring of the real and the illusory. But there is, of course, another layer that, in this story at least, readers might just not notice, that being that Lisa and all her family and friends are almost certainly just actors, getting paid for a photographer to take a series of snaps of them once a week. In this saga, that is well disguised.

In fairness, I must just point out that I am rehashing some of the above thoughts on Luv, Lisa from the article Bunty - Fifty Years On, that I wrote in 2008 to celebrate what would have been Bunty's fiftieth birthday if she hadn't given up the ghost seven years earlier, and which was published in FOLLY, a journal for enthusiasts of girls' fiction.

[Tammyfan]

I wasn't really one for photostories - except where the story was good and grabbed my interest - because I always found the photos looked looked exactly what they were - posed. They were also limited in what stories they could do. They couldn't do, say, a fantasy story filled with witches, goblins and fairies or an SF story about an alien invasion. Mind you, with the advances in modern computer graphics they might be able to eventually.

Article in FOLLY on Bunty, eh? Now you've got me thinking what Bunty might be like if she had made it to her 50th and still going.

[Phoenix]

They were also limited in what stories they could do. They couldn't do, say, a fantasy story filled with witches, goblins and fairies or an SF story about an alien invasion.

You are absolutely right. In the article I did say, referring to a photoserial set in the past called The Hooded Angel, that it looked extremely odd.

To clarify, I didn't attempt to imagine any of the possible future directions that Bunty might have taken. My aim was to remind readers of just what had been lost without attaching blame. I didn't focus only on the fiction either, because I wanted to offer a few thoughts about the whole content of the paper across the years, trying to assess how the input from the editor, and the reaction of the readership added up to a pleasurable-enough experience that made Bunty the nation's longest-lasting and best-loved story paper for girls.

[Marionette]

I wasn't really one for photostories - except where the story was good and grabbed my interest - because I always found the photos looked looked exactly what they were - posed. They were also limited in what stories they could do. They couldn't do, say, a fantasy story filled with witches, goblins and fairies or an SF story about an alien invasion. Mind you, with the advances in modern computer graphics they might be able to eventually.

I thought the same about photostories - the composition is generally very bland and because they are entirely composed of posed images, there's no sense of movement or action in them. I think they were probably at least partially inspired by the photonovels of movies (I recall owning a couple of Star Trek photonovels) that appeared shortly before video recording made them obsolete. The difference being that the movie photonovels were composed of images of people in movement rather than stiffly posed.

However, I believe there were a couple of attempts in 2000AD and Eagle to produce SF based photostories, although the minimal budget for props and costumes is evident in every frame.

[stevezodiac]

They even had large format books where they turned famous movies into photonovels - I had Stagecoach and I think they also did Casablanca - as you said this was before videos. I have all of the Star Trek photonovels - nobody bid for them on ebay. I think there were twelve.

[Tammyfan]

To clarify, I didn't attempt to imagine any of the possible future directions that Bunty might have taken. My aim was to remind readers of just what had been lost without attaching blame.

Didn't think so. It was just that your remark about what would have been Bunty's 50th had me wondering what she might be like if she had reached that age.

I didn't focus only on the fiction either, because I wanted to offer a few thoughts about the whole content of the paper across the years, trying to assess how the input from the editor, and the reaction of the readership added up to a pleasurable-enough experience that made Bunty the nation's longest-lasting and best-loved story paper for girls.

Thanks for the gist of what the content of your article was about!

[Phoenix]

I have all of the Star Trek photonovels - nobody bid for them on ebay.

That's disappointing news as I have a set just patiently waiting their turn to be offered on eBay. Did you put them up all in one batch, Steve, or individually, and did you think it was the price you were asking that put people off? They are actually really attractive little volumes.

[Marionette]

They even had large format books where they turned famous movies into photonovels - I had Stagecoach and I think they also did Casablanca - as you said this was before videos. I have all of the Star Trek photonovels - nobody bid for them on ebay. I think there were twelve.

I'd completely forgotten about those large format books and I own several. I have a mind like a... um, one of those, you know, with the holes...

[stevezodiac]

I put all twelve photonovels on ebay as one unit and asked about a tenner for them. It now occurs to me that I haven't seen them for a while so maybe I did sell them. I'll search for them later - off to Greenwich now for a mooch. Maybe pie and mash in Goddards.

[philcom55]

...I believe there were a couple of attempts in 2000AD and Eagle to produce SF based photostories, although the minimal budget for props and costumes is evident in every frame.

Yes, Eagle's 'Doomlord' started out as a photo strip before Eric Bradbury took over - here are the opening pages from the first issue.





Much better, though, were the Misty-style tales of mystery and imagination introduced every week by 'the collector'. These combined photos with original art by the likes of Pat Wright and Ron Smith and were often surprisingly effective. There was a particularly nice story written by Alan Moore about an unscrupulous dealer who ended up being eaten by an ultra-rare horror comic!

- Phil R.

[Tammyfan]

...I believe there were a couple of attempts in 2000AD and Eagle to produce SF based photostories, although the minimal budget for props and costumes is evident in every frame.

Much better, though, were the Misty-style tales of mystery and imagination introduced every week by 'the collector'. These combined photos with original art by the likes of Pat Wright and Ron Smith and were often surprisingly effective. There was a particularly nice story written by Alan Moore about an unscrupulous dealer who ended up being eaten by an ultra-rare horror comic!

- Phil R.

Really? When did these stories come out? And how did you know about Alan Moore - did they have credits?