Jane

By (Pelham Books/Rainbird)
ISBN: 0-72071-456-7

Jane is one of the most important and well-regarded comic strips in British, if not World, history. It began on December 5th 1932 as Jane’s Journal: Or The Diary of a Bright Young Thing, a frothy, frivolous gag-a-day strip in the Daily Mirror, created by the cartoonist Norman Pett. Originally a series of panels with cursive script embedded to simulate a diary page it switched to the more formal strip frames and balloons in late 1938, around the time scripter Don Freeman came on board.

Jane’s secret was skin. Even before war broke out there were torn skirts and lost blouses aplenty, but once the shooting started and Jane became an operative for British Intelligence her clothes came off with terrifying ease. She even went topless when the Blitz was at its worst.

Pett drew the strip, famously using first his wife and then actress and model Christabel Leighton-Porter until May 1948 when his assistant Michael Hubbard assumed full control of the feature (prior to that he had drawn backgrounds and male characters). Hubbard carried the series, increasingly a safe soap-opera and less a racy glamour strip to its conclusion on October 10th 1959.

Jane’s war record is frankly astounding. As a morale booster she was reckoned worth more than divisions of infantry and her exploits were cited in Parliament and discussed by Eisenhower and Churchill. Legend has it that The Mirror‘s Editor was among the few who knew the date of “D-Day” so as to co-ordinate her exploits with the Normandy landings. In 1944, on the day she went full frontal, the American Service newspaper Roundup (provided to US soldiers) went with the headline “JANE GIVES ALL” and the sub-heading “YOU CAN ALL GO HOME NOW”. Christabel Leighton-Porter toured as Jane in a services revue – she stripped for the boys – during the war and in 1949 starred in the film The Adventures of Jane.

Since there still isn’t a definitive collection of this fabulous strip (although the occasional brief tome has slipped out over the years) I’ve chosen to review this slim gem that was originally released in 1983 to tie-in with a BBC TV series starring Glynis Barber. It features “Hush-Hush House” from 1940 (incidentally the adventure adapted as the aforementioned TV show) wherein the simple ingénue becomes a British agent and is sent to a code-breaking site where a spy is causing havoc, and also “Nature in the Raw”, a gentle mystery with genteelly salacious artwork from 1951, drawn by the criminally underrated Hubbard.

Although the product of simpler, if more perilous times, the innocently saucy adventures of Jane, patient but dedicated beau Georgie-Porgie and especially her intrepid Dachshund Count Fritz Von Pumpernickel are landmarks of our artform, not simply for their impact but also for the plain and simple reason that they are superbly drawn and great to read. Let’s hope that one day that fact will be acknowledged with a definitive reprinting.

© 1983 Mirror Group Newspapers Ltd. All Rights Reserved.