My grandmother would bring up to a dozen of these little magazines. They would be packed in her luggage when she
visited during Christmas in the 1960s. She worked for my great uncle, a
doctor, in California. Since she usually brought a year's worth at a time, I believe these were pulled from the waiting
room.
Anyway, I had not seen them before or since -- until I ran into a copy
at a thrift shop a few weeks ago. There were a couple of different
magazines: Humpty Dumpty's and Children's Digest. The Digest had Tintin reprints. That I remember.
Everyone knows about Tintin.
But Twinkle -- Twinkle has been forgotten. A six page Twinkle story was
in most issues of HD, back in the day. Here's my earliest copy, from
November 1957, that I bought from eBay. Twinkle alternately intrigued
me and terrified me when I was a tot. I mean, look at those trees:
leafless, bare of most branches. The woodcut approach was none too
cuddly in my little kid eyes.
And the star of the strip was literally an anthropomorphic fallen star. So weird.
There is little on the web about this feature, which ran from the 1950s
to the 1960s I believe. The table of contents would sometimes (sometimes
not) credit Twinkle as by Jay Williams, a prolific children's book
illustrator. I don't know if Mazin and Mr. Williams were one and the
same.
Now that I'm older, I like the style ... but I still think it's weird that a star is friends with forest animals.
-- Edited from a blog entry that originally appeared on September 25. 2013.
This brought back memories. I think we actually subscribed. My sister got "Calling All Girls", printed in identical format, aiming at slightly older but still preteen girls. "Humpty Dumpty" had cutout activities, many along the lines of a face whose eyes looked back and forth. There was one with Twinkle's face and instructions to cut it out, fold it a certain way, and drop it in a cup of water to open like a flower. Don't remember if I tried that, but it was weird to see Twinkle without his body.
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