Showing posts with label Cover Girls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cover Girls. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Cover story

The problem with not having many issues yet is that it's difficult to find much to say about them. But one thing I have been noticing is the change in cover styles Tammy went through.

The early issues have a fairly generic composition, although the style places it firmly in the early 1970's, with its sub-psychodelia influences. It's colourful but bland, inevitably showing a generic girl in the foreground and a simply realised scene behind her. It makes me think of a posed photo, only redrawn in a simplified paint-by-numbers style.

Then at some point we get a change of direction, and by 1975 we have two cover girls, who  appear regularly, often doing some Tammy-related activity. These covers often have some comedic element, or even meta-commentary. The odd thing, though, is the way their hair changes colour. Generally the short one with bunches is blonde, and the taller one with shoulder length hair is a brunette, but sometimes one of them is a very orangey redhead, and occasionally their hair colouring is completely reversed. I'm told they even had a story entitled The Cover Girls in one issue, but I don't have that one yet.

I believe they are supposed to represent Tammy and one of the various comics that Tammy swallowed up, but I'm not sure which one.



Then there's a period where they have a story starting on the cover. I don't know much about that as I don't have any examples from that era yet.



The Final cover style that took over in the last couple of years, along with a new title logo, was a fairly straightforward spotlighting of one of the features in the comic, often the popular Bela Barlow. I can't help feeling that the comic loses some of its warmth and individuality with the passing of the Cover Girls. Instead of giving you a fun little scene with the comic-obsessed duo, it's just an advert, sometimes even reusing art from inside the comic. Even the logo has gone rather bland.