*Girls’ Comics: Launched in 1967 as a companion to Bunty & Judy, Mandy quickly discovered its own niche: suffering! While cruelty of some sort had long been a mainstay of girls’ comics, Mandy, behind the perky covers featuring our can-do hostess and her faithful hound Patch, rapidly degenerated into a litany of misery, with the serials’ heroines abused, betrayed, neglected, abandoned, enslaved, crippled, blinded or deceived, only finding happiness (and their enemies getting their comeuppance) after many, many instalments of grief and woe. One generally optimistic strip was the long-running ‘Valda’, atmospherically illustrated by Dudley Wynne, in which an apparently ageless girl who appears to be in her teens roams through history, using her great strength and other supernatural powers to aid others – well, in her first story, she used them to cheat in a figure-skating competition, but she rapidly moved beyond that! Other strips included ‘The Sorrows of Laughing Anne’, ‘No Friends For Freda’, ‘Hard-Hearted Harriet’, ‘Heartbreak School’ and ‘The Lying Eyes of Linda Lee’, which gives you a fair idea of the chirpy optimism that was rife in the comic! We have 150 issues of Mandy newly added to our listings, from 1967’s #4 to 1976’s #516. If sad songs – as the song says – say so much, then these tales of woe should send you off with a smile on your face and a spring in your step!