@LoCarbLife That. Is. Amazing. I am not even joking, I am super impressed. I must have been about 12 when drawn stories transitioned to photo stories and I would have given an arm and a leg to have been in one. They all looked so glam!
You reminded me of another one - a magazine called Hi! Does anyone else remember this? I had a letter partially printed in it - I tried desperately to be funny and wrote some godawful rubbish about oranges and finished it with a mildly amusing line I’d nicked from a letter published about 2 years previously that had tickled me. They didn’t print the whole letter, just that one line! Never admitted to anyone I’d plagiarised it lol, though I remember being very hmmmm about the fact they clearly hadn’t remembered it from the original author. They sent me a T-shirt though, which I was thrilled with! I wore it until it literally fell apart. My cousin had introduced me to the magazine - she was a few years older than me and a TEENAGER so therefore immediately cool and I imagined how jealous she must be of me. I don’t think she gave a shit.
There was a long running serial about 4 girls who were best friends at school - it started off as a drawn story but transitioned to a photo story and I was blown away at how alike the real life versions were to the drawn characters. Does anyone remember this? For years I thought it was the Four Mary’s but it can’t have been. I’m thinking it was something like The ___ Girls.
Some other fractured memories from various stories in various comics, if anyone can help with these at all - might have been Twinkle, Bunty or Mandy but could be from anywhere tbh:
- A girl who was kinda wild and could talk to animals - might have been called Velda?
- A serial I always thought was Angel (which I loved) but can’t have been as it was set during WW2, and Angel was Victorian - I suspect it had a similar premise. I remember one bit where they were trying to get to a shelter and a doodlebug was flying ahead of them. First time I’d heard of a doodlebug and I was
- A vague memory of a girl in a dress she’d saved up for that had a white blouse part and a yellow skirt, and a yellow ribbon on the blouse. Lots of people were admiring it.
It’s so weird - I remember reading stuff in the late 80s that had been published in the late 70s and it had such a distinct old-fashioned feel to it even then. Even as a child I felt like I was reading something from a completely different era. That’s like a girl today reading something published in 2012 and I just don’t think there would be that same weirdly nostalgic sensation. Maybe I’m wrong because I’m older now, or maybe because the 70s, 80s and 90s all have their own distinct flavours but 2000-2022 just feels so bland, like it doesn’t have that sense of being its own time period. Maybe because the older comics used to focus so much more on history, so lots of stories would be set during the war etc. Do kids comics even do that any more? I feel like there has been a big shift away from that type of ingrained knowledge about history. I was watching The Two Ronnies recently and they has two separate sketches where they referenced Nell Gwynn in the sort of way that indicated everyone In the audience would know who she was And I can’t imagine that happening these days.