About Bunty

Bunty

Bunty was a British weekly comic for girls published by D. C. Thomson & Co. of Dundee from 18 January 1958 to 17 February 2001. Across that forty-three-year run it published 2,249 issues, making it one of the longest-lived titles in the history of British girls' comics. It was an anthology: each issue gathered together a number of short comic-strip stories, typically three to five pages each, alongside letters pages, competitions, puzzles and other features aimed squarely at its young readers.

The comic belonged to a flourishing post-war market in which Thomson, from its Dundee base, supplied a whole shelf of girls' titles, among them Judy, launched in 1960, and Mandy, launched in 1967. Bunty outlasted almost all of them, absorbing several of its stablemates along the way, and its name became so familiar that for many British women of a certain generation it simply stood for the girls' comic itself.

Origins and publication history

Bunty debuted with its issue of 18 January 1958. Sources note that, in contrast to earlier and contemporary comics, it was aimed primarily at working-class readers under the age of fourteen, and that its contents were mostly fictional stories rather than the factual or instructional material found in some older papers for girls. Its mixture of school stories, ballet stories, adventure serials and humour, presented in short self-contained instalments, proved durable from the start.

The title character herself appeared in the strip Bunty — A Girl Like You, whose premise — a heroine presented as an ordinary girl much like the reader — summed up the comic's approach. The slogan was later remembered by commentators discussing the comic's science-fiction and fantasy stories, which placed girls at the centre of adventures of a kind more often reserved for boys in the comics of the period.

Format and features

An average issue of Bunty contained several short comic-strip stories, broken up by letters pages, competitions, featured readers, puzzle pages, promotions, previews of the following week and advertisements. The back page at first featured a cut-out doll with paper clothes for readers to collect and dress; that long-running feature eventually gave way to a wall poster.

Beyond the weekly comic, Thomson published Christmas and summer annuals, and from 1963 to 1997 stories from the comic were reformatted and reprinted in the Bunty Picture Story Library. The annuals continued to appear after the weekly comic ended in 2001, increasingly filled with general girls'-magazine features such as horoscopes, quizzes and celebrity facts once no new strips were available, and their regular publication ceased with the 2009 annual, although one-off books reprinting classic Bunty material have appeared since.

The Four Marys

The comic's best-known strip was The Four Marys, which appeared in the first issue and was still running in the last, in February 2001. It followed four schoolgirls, all named Mary, at St Elmo's School for Girls: Mary Field, Mary Radleigh and Mary Cotter, and their friend Mary Simpson, a scholarship girl from a less wealthy background. Known by the nicknames Fieldy, Raddy, Cotty and Simpy, the four shared a dormitory, had adventures and solved mysteries, with two fellow pupils as their regular rivals.

The strip was first drawn by Bill Holroyd, who was responsible for its earliest instalments, and passed through the hands of several artists over its forty-three years, among them Manuel Cuyàs, Selby Donnison in the 1980s and Jim Eldridge in its later years. Its extraordinary longevity — present at both the beginning and the end of the comic — made it the strip most closely identified with Bunty as a whole.

Ballet stories: Moira Kent and Lorna Drake

Ballet was a staple subject of British girls' comics, and Bunty had a long-running example in The Dancing Life of Moira Kent, the story of an aspiring ballerina that appeared in the very first issue. Moira Kent remained a regular feature for many years as the character progressed towards international stardom, and she continued to appear in the annuals even after the weekly strip ended.

When the Moira Kent storyline was discontinued in the weekly comic, it was replaced by Lorna Drake, another ballet story, set at a dancing school run by a former ballerina whose own career had been ended by an accident. Such stories, built around talent, training and perseverance, were central to the comic's appeal, and readers' letters quoted in later years recalled daydreaming about riding schools and ballet boarding schools discovered through the pages of Bunty and its contemporaries.

Other regular strips

Among the comic's other well-known regulars was Luv, Lisa, presented as a diary illustrated with photographs — the comic's only regular photo-strip, although one-off stories also sometimes used photographs. Its narrator wrote about the people, boyfriends and situations in her life, with her brother and mother as the most consistent supporting figures.

The Comp, drawn in a style similar to The Four Marys but set in a mixed-sex comprehensive school, had begun in the Thomson comic Nikki and transferred to Bunty in 1989 after Nikki folded; it ended shortly before Bunty itself, with a storyline in which its school, Redvale Comprehensive, closed and its pupils dispersed. Penny's Place was another long-remembered regular. Across the decades the anthology also carried a wide range of shorter serials — school, adventure, mystery, sporting and speculative stories — by artists who included Barrie Mitchell, Sean Phillips and Ron Smith.

Mergers and the changing market

As the British girls' comic market contracted, Bunty absorbed three other Thomson titles: Suzy in 1987, Nikki for Girls in May 1989, and Mandy & Judy — itself the product of an earlier merger between two other long-running Thomson girls' comics — in 1997. Each merger transferred readers, and in cases such as The Comp, characters, into the surviving title, a standard survival strategy in the shrinking weekly comics market of the period.

The 1990s redesign and the end

With the issue of 28 March 1992, number 1785, Bunty's covers changed from illustrated, comics-style artwork to a photograph of a teenage model, making the title look more like a fashion magazine than a comic. The change reflected the direction of the wider market, in which traditional story comics for girls were losing ground to magazine-style publications built around fashion, pop music and celebrity content.

Bunty became a monthly in 2000 and ceased publication after a further five months, its final weekly-era total standing at 2,249 issues, the last dated 17 February 2001. Its closure, following those of Judy and other stablemates in the same period, effectively marked the end of the classic British girls' story comic.

Reception and cultural echoes

Scholarly and popular writing on girls' comics has treated Bunty as a central example of the genre: a comic aimed mainly at working-class girls, filled with stories of aspiration and social mobility — scholarship girls, aspiring dancers and orphans making good — as well as serials in science-fiction and fantasy modes that allowed girl heroines to lead adventures. Collections such as that of the Glasgow Women's Library hold its summer specials as artefacts of twentieth-century girls' reading culture.

The comic even left traces in popular music. The punk band the Damned drew on a Bunty ballet story for the song "Melody Lee", written by Captain Sensible, who also wrote a song celebrating the Four Marys by their nicknames — a sign of how deeply the supposedly old-fashioned comic had lodged itself in the memories of its generation of readers.

Legacy

Bunty's legacy rests on scale and endurance: 2,249 issues over forty-three years, a run matched by few British comics of any kind, and a roster of strips — above all The Four Marys, which bookended the entire publication — that defined the girls' comic for several generations. Reprint volumes and annuals kept its classic material in circulation after 2001, and it remains a standard reference point in histories of British comics and of working-class girls' reading in the post-war decades.