Bunty was written by Judy

Jean's Journal with Jean Farrell

The Bunty annual, pictured here, is the very first one. It was published in 1960. Whether you are male or female I bet it was in your house - for if you didn’t get it from Santy, your sister probably did!

The first Bunty comic was published on January 18, 1958, by D C Thomson, a media company based in Dundee, Scotland.

That was 65 years ago, when I was nine years old. My sisters and I began reading Bunty then and continued to do so for many years. We especially loved The Four Marys, Moira Kent and Lorna Drake. My little sister loved Toots.

Recently I came upon an interesting interview with a woman who wrote all the stories in Bunty. Her name was Judy! She lived in London and the Bunty was published in Scotland.

From 1960 until 2001, Judy Maslen wrote thousands of different comic strip episodes for DC Thomson. Here is Judy’s story, in her own words.

“In 1959 I answered an advertisement for comic writers where we had to submit a script. My first one was rejected with the words, ‘We don’t feel you would be suited to this type of writing.’ But something just told me it was a mistake and I could do it, so I promptly sent off another which was accepted with the words ‘By jings girl, you can write!’

I will never ever forget that first acceptance letter. It was probably one of the most pivotal moments of my life!

Right from the start of writing for comics, I was told by fellow-writers, in my Writers Group, that ‘It’s not proper writing. You shouldn’t be wasting your time on trash,’ so I never thought of myself as a writer, just as someone doing a job.”

Judy Maslen began working on Bunty in the early 1960s. She worked until DC Thomson’s closed down the girls comic in 2001. She wrote all the stories for the Bunty comic and the annuals.

Judy continued, “At times I was working on five or six stories a week, one instalment a day for each serial. They always ended with a cliff-hanger of course, and luckily, I never found it a problem to keep them all separate in my head. These stories sometimes ran into 20 instalments.”

Twice a year, the editor would travel from Dundee to meet the writers of his comics at St Ermin’s Hotel, in London. We would be handed bundles of newspaper cuttings and bits of paper. These contained ideas and suggestions for plots. I also turned up with my own selection. The idea was to pick items in the news. We were to place our heroine in the middle of it and see how it turned out.

For instance, I saw an item about a child who was so allergic to sunlight that she could not leave her home in the day and this inspired one story.

Another story was based on a news item about a private school who had brought over a child from Vietnam to educate her. My story was how I imagined things would go for her once the novelty wore off.”

Judy wrote: “The best moment when working for DC Thomson was when I was asked to take over ‘The Four Marys.’ The previous writer was a gentleman of 80. (This explains why the Marys were a bit dated, in the beginning.) I was the main writer from then on. ‘The Four Marys’ became my constant companions for many years. Grown women have hugged me when they’ve learned I used to write about the goings-on at St Elmo’s.

Of course there was no internet in those days. My scripts were bashed out on an old typewriter and they were then posted daily up to Dundee for DC Thomson. I never kept copies of the scripts and, as I didn’t have a computer at that time, nothing was ever saved. All I did have was 40 years of the actual comics and annuals going yellow in the loft, which eventually got sent to the tip when we moved.”

Judy continued, “There was the divide between male and female writers. My editor travelled down from Dundee and met me in a London hotel several times a year, but was always given a mid-morning appointment. He would say, hopefully “You’ll not be wanting a coffee”. Eventually, when I got brave enough to say I would like a coffee, he reluctantly brought out a purse and picked out the coins like gold dust. I later found out that the men had lunchtime appointments - with lunch!

At Christmas, I was given a box of shortbread but one editor did let it slip that the men got a bottle of Scotch.”

What a wonderful woman Judy Maslen is! I just loved her stories. Reading them weekly, as a child, led me on to become an avid reader of fiction all my life. I particularly recall a great story, in Bunty, about a wagon train making its way across America to Oregon. It was so good that my mother would sit us all down beside her, after the Rosary on a Monday night. She’d read each weekly episode of that particular story to us.

Altogether 2,249 issues of Bunty were published before it ceased publication in 2001. The success of Bunty led DC Thomson to publish Judy, which was also successful. Judy Maslen wrote some stories for that comic too. Between them, Bunty and Judy achieved a circulation of more than one million. Judy was printed from 1960 to 1991.