School Friend Comics

School Friend had a mixture of comic strips and stories and later joined up with Girl's Crystal.

School Friend was around long before the 1950s - in fact, it was first published in 1919. However, it folded after about fifteen years, and was re-launched in 1950.

Her most enduring legacies were the Storyteller, the pipe-smoking teller of spooky stories and Bessie Bunter, the sister of Billy Bunter. Bessie Bunter is the guzzler of Cliff House boarding school. Her brain (of which she shows nothing of in her schoolwork) is always coming up with sneaky ideas to swipe food, dodge classes, or raise money. These sometimes work out well for Bessie (after a fashion), or she ends up guzzling something even better than she anticipated. Other times things backfire, and she ends up writing lines or doing some other punishment task meted out by the headmistress, Miss "Stackers" Stackpole.

Bessie and the Storyteller were so popular that they survived two merges - School Friend merging with June, then June with Tammy. When Misty merged with Tammy in 1980, Bessie shifted from a regular weekly to a character to be seen "from time to time." When Jinty merged with Tammy in 1981, Bessie's days were well and truly numbered, along with the Storyteller, Wee Sue (from the 1973 Sandie merge) and Molly Mills, who had been with Tammy from the first issue.

Characters Included:

Babs and the Family

My Friend Sara