First comes a 3-page serial called 'Remember, Rosanna...Remember!' in which an amnesiac singer tries to recover her memory in order to find out why she is wanted by the police.
To my mind this is probably the weakest strip in the issue, with an irritating number of pictures in which Rosanna is shown gazing tearfully into the middle distance. In spite of this, however, there is very little romance to be found, with the mystery of a stolen painting providing the main focus of the plot.
Next there's a stylishly-drawn 3-page episode of 'Sugar Jones', about a glamorous but self-centred model and her more down-to-earth PA. Although this particular story does little more than underline Sugar's vanity and greed there are some intriguing hints about her past which suggest that she is in reality very much older than she looks...perhaps even immortal!
Then comes 'Patty's World' - perhaps the best, and best-known of Pink's strips. Drawn, as ever, by Purita Campos this fascinating and realistic series features a central character who is allowed to grow older in 'real time' - to the extent that here she already seems noticeably more grown up than when her earliest adventures began in the pages of Princess Tina. In time, of course, she became an adult with a daughter of her own, and - though her strip is no longer published in the UK - it continues to this day in Spain.
And finally we have 'The Island of Stones' and 'The Sea People' - two 3-page serials that deal with fantastic elements that might have been more at home in the pages of Misty:
...Obviously Judy has never seen 'The Wicker Man', as she decides to ignore the train guard's advice and spend the night in this creepy Cornish village in the middle of nowhere!
While it's true that the protagonists of all these stories tend to be a little older than the schoolgirl-heroines of more traditional girls' comics I think it'd be a mistake to dismiss them under the generic label of 'Romance'. In fact, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a single 'Swoon', 'Sob' or 'SWALK' in any of them - nor even an 'Oh Brad!'
(...I could have done without the Gary Glitter centrefold though!
)- Phil Rushton
