Tina #17/1976
Tina #17/1976 is a representative issue from the magazine's first major transitional year, arriving just weeks after Oberon shrank the weekly's physical format beginning with issue #8 — a redesign that signaled the publisher's intent to consolidate its Dutch-produced content alongside the translated British and Spanish material it had long relied upon. The issue carries an instalment of 'Noortje,' the gag strip by writer Patty Klein and artist Jan Steeman that had debuted only months earlier in 1975 and was already becoming the defining homegrown feature of the magazine — one that would run continuously for over four decades, eventually earning recognition as the longest-running Dutch comic series produced by the same creative team. Alongside Noortje, the issue continues serialising 'Peggy's Wereldje' (the Dutch edition of Purita Campos and Philip Douglas's 'Patty's World'), whose supporting cast of Peggy Lucas, Annelies Mees, and Jeroen Rekers was popular enough that Oberon produced a full stage musical tie-in LP under the same title that same year. Together these strips illustrate how, by mid-1976, Tina had evolved from a colour reprint of a British girls' anthology into a genuinely hybrid publication with strong Dutch creative roots — a shift that shaped the Dutch girls' comics market for a generation.
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Tina launched on 10 June 1967 as a Dutch-language, full-colour adaptation of the British weekly girls' comic Tina (later Princess Tina), published initially by De Spaarnestad and subsequently, from 1972 onwards, under the Oberon imprint created when the youth-publishing arms of De Spaarnestad and De Geïllustreerde Pers merged. Under general editor Frans Buissink, Oberon steadily expanded Tina's roster of original Dutch-produced strips from the early 1970s onward, commissioning work from Dutch creators like Patty Klein, Jan Steeman, Lo Hartog van Banda, and Piet Wijn alongside a large stable of Spanish artists coordinated by the Madrid agency Creaciones Editoriales — among them Purita Campos, who painted the magazine's covers and drew the title strip. The year 1976 marked Tina's first significant format redesign, reducing the page dimensions from issue #8, and in 1977 Oberon began collecting the magazine's best serial stories in the 'Tina Topstrip' album line, of which 71 volumes would ultimately appear.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Tina was the first Dutch comic magazine published exclusively for girls, launching 10 June 1967 as a colour adaptation of the British weekly girls' comic of the same name.
- By 1976 the magazine was published by Uitgeverij Oberon BV, the specialist comics imprint formed in 1972 from the merged youth-publishing divisions of De Spaarnestad and De Geïllustreerde Pers.
- Issue #17/1976 falls within Tina's first major redesign year: beginning with issue #8 of 1976, Oberon reduced the magazine's physical format from 22.5 × 28.9 cm to 21 × 27.1 cm.
- 'Noortje' — scripted by Patty Klein and drawn by Jan Steeman — had debuted in Tina #37/1975 and was by 1976 an active weekly feature; the strip's protagonist is Noortje Visser, a clumsy, red-headed teenage girl, and her father Jan Visser is drawn as a self-portrait of artist Jan Steeman.
- Steeman adopted a semi-realistic rather than cartoony drawing style for 'Noortje' on the editorial advice that the teenage readership would better identify with recognisable, non-caricatured depictions of girls their own age.
- The issue also contains an instalment of 'Peggy's Wereldje,' the Dutch edition of Purita Campos and Philip Douglas's 'Patty's World,' whose principal cast includes Peggy Lucas, her friend Annelies (Annelies Mees), and supporting character Jeroen Rekers — names confirmed by the cast list of Oberon's 1976 stage-musical LP 'Tina Presenteert Peggy's Wereldje.'
- Purita Campos, the Barcelona-born artist responsible for both 'Peggy's Wereldje' and Tina's painted cover portraits, created those covers directly for the Dutch edition after the British parent title ceased publication; she continued doing so until mid-1983, when the magazine switched to photographic covers.
- From 1977 onward, highlights from Tina's serial strips — including material first published in issues like #17/1976 — were reprinted in the 'Tina Topstrip' album collection, which eventually ran to 71 volumes by 1985.