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Bunty was a girls' magazine that contained lots of comic strip, girly stories. Regularly there was a story about four girls all with the same name. I remember it was something like 'The Four Marys'. More...
Didn't they also have The Four Penny's about four girls named Penny? ISTR they were Penny Farthing, Penny Dreadful, and two other puns. Or maybe that wa another comic.
Many magazines for girls have come and gone over the years, but one of the most endearing had to have been Bunty. Created by prolific publishers D.C. Thomson (famous for many other comics including The Beano and The Dandy and who produce more than 200 million comics each year) it ran from 1958 to 2001, allowing many generations to grow up with its sometimes funny, sometimes serious and sometimes downright peculiar comic strips. The tales were primarily concerned with issues that were familiar to young girls: i.e. friends, family, school and boyfriends, although as we’ll see in a while, the writers did go on some extreme flights of fancy with others. They were mainly comic strips, three to five pages long and were interspersed with regular magazine features: letters pages, promotions and adverts and previews for the following week. There was also the opportunity to join ‘The Bunty Club’, which gave you the chance to enter exclusive competitions.The covers were, at the start, drawn depictions of blonde-haired Bunty herself, often engaged in some sort of rosy-cheeked, snowy outdoor pursuit but in the mid-nineties they were brought up-to-date with a photo of what was presumably the publisher’s idea of their typical reader. As an avid Bunty devourer in the early 1980s, however, my favourite part was always the back page: a doll you could cut out and dress in her own paper clothes. Later on this was changed to a poster instead. As well as the weekly comic, summer and Christmas annuals were also produced, along with the collectible ‘Bunty Libraries’ – small books featuring one complete story. These always had great names: ‘The Strange Changes in Jenny Jones’; ‘Fearless Flo – Stunt Girl’; ‘Galloping Gran’ etc., which invited you to dive in and read more. The most well-known and the longest-running story in Bunty was ‘The Four Marys’, a comic strip drawn by the artist Barrie Mitchell (who later took on that comic footballing icon, Roy Race – you know, of the Rovers?) that started when the magazine began and ran in it until Bunty packed up her skies/skateboard/ice skates. You’ve probably already had a stab at what ‘The Four Marys’ may have been about, haven’t you? It featured four (you’d figured that one out, I’m sure) teenage female best friends, who were all coincidentally called (yep, you’re one step ahead of me, aren’t you?) Mary. They attended the girls-only St. Elmo’s boarding school in fictional Elmbury and while the Mary’s first names were the same, the girls’ backgrounds and personalities were supposedly very different. Personally though, I found that because they did absolutely everything together at all times they ended up blending into four clones of the same girl, which meant that I was only ever able to tell them apart by their hairstyles
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