Instead of a Misty Halloween offering this year, the Treasury of British Comics have dived into Jinty’s archive, to reprint 2 stories – A Spell of Trouble and Creepy Crawley, the latter getting the cover name. This also gives the opportunity to highlight the wonderful work of Trini Tinturé, with a special hardback cover with original art by Tinturé also offered on the Treasury of British Comics shop website.
Although both stories are about even in length, each taking up half the book, it is strangely only A Spell of Trouble that is highlighted both on the cover and the description on the back, whereas Creepy Crawley gets just a one sentence mention at the bottom of the description. Both stories start with a popular and accomplished girl at school, but after that they diverge completely. In the comedic A Spell of Trouble, Carrie Black has used her witchy powers to stay top of the class, then a distant cousin, Angela White, comes to live with the Blacks and Carrie’s easy life turns into a mess! Angela is full of good intentions but is also clumsy and has no interest in becoming a witch. This becomes a bigger problem when their Witch’s Coven say if she doesn’t become a witch then they will take the Blacks’ powers away. While Carrie and her family have never had to work hard to earn anything, and they do some questionable things to try and get rid of Angela, they are not evil witches, and we can sympathise with their frustrations when Angela keeps messing things up. It’s a very fun story, a highlight for me is the hijinks caused by a bodyswitching plan, throughout the story there’s lots of laughs to be have, and Tinturé does great job displaying the witciness and comedic elements, so it’s easy to see why this is the highlighted story for the collection.
In Creepy Crawley, Jean Crawley becomes jealous of new girl Mandy who outdoes her at everything. When she gets an old scarab brooch from a shop closing down, she finds she can use to get rid of her rival. The brooch has a particular power over insects, but when Carrie wants to stop her vendetta, the brooch can’t be gotten rid of and its influence turns her more cruel. Only a timid girl Sheila begins to suspect the truth in time and tries to stop her. A step further than other evil influence stories, the scarab has a bigger agenda in hand – a complete insect takeover of the world. Again the art and some of the more complex story beats puts this story above other similar stories.
The book itself is only 80 pages, there is no additional features just the two stories back to back. It would have been a nice opportunity to talk more about Trini Tinturé (like some of the artists in the Misty collection have got), but she gets a short paragraph in the back. While Rebellion do always try to deliver high quality books, it is clear sometimes they are hampered by not always having the original artwork. This means some pages aren’t as clean and crisp as they should be. For the most part this doesn’t take from the story, but there is particular page from Creepy Crawley, that it is more noticeable than others. These are minor complaints though as the book is still of good quality and the stories and art are of a high standard, an excellent read.
It is also reasonably priced, The Treasury of British Comics website offers a few different options for purchase, starting at only £9.99 for digital edition, the paperback is £14.99 and the special edition hard back is £24.99 https://shop.treasuryofbritishcomics.com/catalogue/RCA-G0016
There is also currently a sale on until December so a perfect opportunity to pick up some older releases if you haven’t already, you could pick up other Jinty books like Concrete Surfer for just £4.99 or Fran of the Floods for £7.79 or just look through their growing collection to see what catches your interest.
