Comics UK

Than strip is familiar. I do remember having a series (in a Spanish mag) about something similar. Can someone put up a page? So I can compare and see if I have it, and if so, I can translate it (provided they didn't change it much in Spain, something more frequent than not, maybe they didn't have good translator at the time!)

Here's the penultimate episode from Tammy's last issue.

I think I might have it. The author, by the way is Juliana Buch. I have a couple of originals I bought recently (not of this strip).
Going to swim between comics for a while!!

Wow! That's one heck of a cliffhanger to leave dangling for 28 years!

(I assume you meant to say that Juliana was the artist by the way Ruth?)

- Phil R.

Yes, sorry, I meant the artist. I don't know who wrote the story, though. I am looking through my comics. So far I have looked through all my Pecosa's [54] and Gina's [97] with no luck. I need to check my Esther's (I don't have them all but I doubt this kind of story was published there), and Janas. The thing is, the story is very familiar and I don't more than a couple of Tammy's and not from the end, so I must have seen it somewhere. I don't have many Tammy's so I will leave thouse comics to check tomorrow.

There's something weirdly prophetic about an ad campaign for a product called 'Skips' being launched just two weeks before IPC 'skipped' a whole month of their most popular comics - not to mention one of those titles being airbrushed out of existence altogether!

As a matter of interest, here's the original version of the announcement shown above (with Tammy taking pride of place in the centre) as it appeared in 2000AD for the issues dated 30 June and 7 July:



And here's the comic strip advert that accompanied it in the first of those comics:



It's interesting to compare this detail, in which a copy of Tammy & Princess is clearly shown, with the following detail from a later advert where the 'Tammy' logo seems to have been crudely replaced with a second copy of Whoopee!




(Does anyone know whether 'Colin' was an existing IPC character btw - or was he a brand-new creation for this promotion? And who is the artist?)

- Phil Rushton

Incidentally, I love the sound of 'swimming in comics' Ruth!

The Colin strip was drawn by David Mostyn. I think it was exclusively advertising.

The coupon was changed after the strike finished. The original coupon said it had to be one each from four different comics, but this was whited out during the late stages of the strike once Tammy was cancelled, and the coupon was completely changed afterwards.

Considering the extra profit IPC must have made by selling strips from Tammy all over the world (though none of this income was ever seen by the writers and artists who, for the most part, were as surprised as anyone to discover their work being reproduced in foreign publications while holidaying on the Costa del Sol) it seems doubly odd that they should have suddenly decided to cancel the title as a result of a few local difficulties during 1984. Then again, insiders often said that this huge conglomerate found the whole business of publishing to be more trouble than it was worth - unlike the traditional publishers they'd swallowed up during the wholesale takeovers of the 1960s.

Here, for no other reason than I just picked it up off a local market stall, is a French digest comic from 1983 which reprinted Giorgio Giorgetti's Cat Girl stories from IPC's Sally - along with the original appearance of the cover image from Sally itself.





'Cat Girl', by the way, was one of a handful of strips that continued for a time in the pages of the merged Tammy & Sally - along with 'Maisie's Magic Eye' which can also be seen on that cover.

- Phil Rushton

Seeing those covers for France and Sally I will share too the Spanish one. It was, as you can see, inspired in those two covers but drawn by Trini Tinturé for the Joyas Literarias collection.

That's fantastic Ruth! I must admit that I've never understood why Spanish publishers needed to reprint British material when they had so many brilliant artists of their own.

- Phil R.

Well, if they didn't... then we would have never been able to read such wonderfull series as The Happy Days, Cathy or so many others!

It really p***ed me off that Tammy vanished before the final episode of Cora Can't Lose. That story had me hooked and I was dying to see the last episode. Even now I would love to know how that story ended. Was Cora reprinted in one of the Spanish comics? Or is there some way we can track down Juliana Buch and ask her?

I could track down Juliana. As I said that story of cora is very familiar to me, but I haven't come across it as yet. I have around 2500 comics so it's being slow...

RuthB wrote:I could track down Juliana. As I said that story of cora is very familiar to me, but I haven't come across it as yet. I have around 2500 comics so it's being slow...

Thanks! I have tried finding Juliana myself through the Internet but didn't have much luck.

I think she's still living in Barcelona, and must be around 74 years of age. I did track down Angeles Felices, another "usual" artist in those days. I had her phone from Madrid but she had just moved to Zaragoza. Thaks to Edmond I was able to get her new email and phone las month.
By the way, Edmond is after opening a blog, i don't remember if I mentioned here: www.edmondripoll.blogspot.com