How great is Paige Braddock? Not only did she take the time out of her work day as the licensing supremo at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates to do an interview with us (the evidence is here and here), not only did she send us an early copy (one she ran off at Kinkos herself) of her latest book, Jane’s World Volume 7 (the review is here), which comes out next month, but she also sent us a possible cover image for the next volume of Jane’s World, to run as a guest strip. Sweet! What’s that? It’s not technically speaking a strip, you say? Shut up; it’s still super-cool.
The drawing of Jane and Chelle shows the pair of star-crossed something-or-others thigh deep in a swamp full of gators. Apparently, the two have crash-landed there on their way to a vacation. Things go rapidly (and humorously) downhill from there, Braddock tells us. The book isn’t due out until April or May of next year, however, so don’t blame The Daily Cross Hatch if Braddock tweaks, changes, or even abandons that storyline altogether. We’re just happy to snag such a nifty exclusive from Braddock, especially one that shows our two favorite Jane characters: Jane herself and, of course, Chelle. See the whole image after the jump.
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Jane’s World, Volume 7
Paige Braddock
Girl Twirl Comics
Paige Braddock returns early next month with another dose of loveable misfit Jane in a book chock full of “girl-on-girl action, chicks with guns, a vegan menace, vintage Winnebagos, and the transformative energy of the Sedona vortex.” You know, the usual—for stability-challenged Jane, that is.
Jane is, you see, one of those people to whom things just happen. She combines mild-mannered amiability with indecision, a severe lack of style- and nutrition-savvy, and just plain wishy-washiness. It seems she’s also (slightly) irresistible, much to her own bewilderment, since she seems to have only the vaguest of clues about the same sex (she happens to be a lesbian). In short, she’s a magnet for the kind of drama that makes for good comedy.
Whether it’s friends who see her as one of the guys (her roommate Ethan), women who see her as a fixer-upper (vegan surfer Skye), or figures of mystery who find themselves attracted to her in spite of themselves (badass ex-cop Chelle), or just nice, normal women (Jane’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Dorothy), everyone around her finds themselves being sucked into the maelstrom of drama, coincidences, and serious enmeshment issues that surround Jane. The results are funny, sexy, silly, and sometimes dramatic—the last thanks mostly to the flashbacks of Chelle and her current (romantic and otherwise) ex-partner Jill’s days as cops and the resultant side plots that continue to unfold in the storyline’s present day.
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Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Howard Chaykin, Mike Mignola, Al Williamson
Dark Horse
It’s rare that a comic book adaptation of anything is worth reading, let alone reviewing, but that’s not the case here. In fact, it’s practically a crime that Chaykin and Mignola’s take on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser has been out of print for over a decade. This collection does an excellent job of translating science fiction and fantasy master craftsman Fritz Leiber’s most famous creations—and the unique flavor and wit of his stories—into comic form.
Let’s get one thing straight: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are not a Dungeons and Dragons spinoff, as most who saw me reading the book seemed to think. If anything, the reverse is true. In fact, Leiber’s unlikely duo of the huge (and big-hearted) barbarian Fafhrd and the smaller, tricksier thief Mouser helped to create the sword and sorcery (a term Leiber himself coined) genre that eventually spawned the role-playing game industry. The first story about the pair, Two Sought Adventure, came out in the pulp magazine Unknown in 1939, and the last nearly 50 years later, in 1988.
Leiber’s series lasted so long and remains so readable today because he produced what even the most famous of his pulp contempories (Lovecraft, Howard, Smith) mostly didn’t: quirky, clever, urbane, funny, and well written stories. Howard Chaykin does Leiber’s work justice in a skillful adaptation stripped down to the essentials: the pair’s great friendship, recklessness, sense of humor and lust for life (and strong drink, brawling, and dancing girls, obviously—they are pulp heroes, after all).
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God Save the Queen
By Mike Carey and John Bolton
Vertigo
Mike Carey and John Bolton’s graphic novel God Save the Queen has nothing to do with Queen Elizabeth (either one)–or even Helen Mirren. The title refers, instead, to both Queen Titania of Fairy and the Sex Pistols track that gives the book its rock-and-roll attitude. This compelling urban fantasy fuses the glamour and horror inherent in both punk rock and fairy tales, and the result is something disturbingly lovely. God Save the Queen isn’t quite a masterpiece (it’s too short, for one thing) but it’s still a solid piece of work from two major talents.
Faithful Vertigo readers will be pleased at Carey’s take on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman treatment of Shakespeare’s rendering of traditional fairie characters like Titania, Mab, and Oberon. Carey’s respectful of and refers to Gaiman’s work, but not to the point that you need to dig through Vertigo’s back catalog to understand what’s going on. If your prior only exposure to the Fairy courts is reading Midsummer Night’s Dream in school, you’ll be fine. If you’ve never read the play, I don’t know what to tell you, other than that you probably should.
The heroine of God Save the Queen is Linda, a teenaged Londoner on the edge—one who doesn’t, however, remain on the edge for long. In the book’s first scene, troubled by a depressed, hard-drinking mother and a mysteriously absent father, she abandons her homework assignment (she’s supposed to be writing an essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course) for an ill-fated night in the London scene.
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Gilbert Hernandez is one of the biggest names in alternative comics. With his brother, Jaime, Beto (as he’s known) helped bring non-superhero books into, if not the mainstream, then awfully close. A new Gilbert Hernandez book gets thoughful reviews in a press that never would have treated comics so seriously before the brothers’ flagship book, Love and Rockets, and the revolution in comics that it helped to create.
Beto’s enormous Palomar work is now being reissued for a remarkable third time, in series of new collections designed to make an easy entry point for new readers, and a handier reading copy for those that already have the complete Love and Rockets collections (which include lots of other material) or the massive Palomar coffee table book, which is beautiful, if a bit unwieldy to carry on the subway.
Hernandez took the time to talk to us recently; in part one of the interview, he talked about his New Tales of Old Palomar title and the end of serialized Palomar storyline (in fact, all his serialized storylines) in Love and Rockets. In part two, he talks about Sloth, his recent graphic novel from Vertigo, a standalone tale of mystery, comas, urban legends and body-switching with no ties to Palomar or any of his other works; Julio’s Day, a generations-spanning standalone Latin-themed story that has been running in Love and Rockets for several years; and Chance in Hell, the novelization of one of Palomar regular Fritz’ B-movies. The commong thread here? All of three were conceived of as graphic novels, unlike his Palomar work serialized in Love and Rockets.
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When I interviewed Gilbert Hernandez, he told me that his spunky comic-book loving child-heroine Venus was going to be making her official exit from Love and Rockets in issue 20. Venus has been a favorite character of mine since the Letters from Venus serial in New Love back in the 90s, so I was understandably devastated.
I managed to manfully hold back my tears, however, until Beto explained that while Venus was going to be visiting all the remaining Love and Rockets characters as his way of saying farewell to the entire Palomar cast, those characters wouldn’t disappear entirely. Instead of serializing their exploits in the venerable L&R, he plans to continue their stories in graphic novels.
When Hernandez later agreed to do a guest strip for us, we were excited, but when it turned out that the page he generously sent us showed a now-teenaged Venus talking to her mother’s ex-boyfriend Hector, well…again, with the barely restrained tears. Hernandez tells us that this page is “self rejected” from the very same L&R issue 20 he told me about in the interview ; it might show up later when the story is collected, he says, but until then it’s a rarity The Daily Cross Hatch is proud to host. Click the link below to see the whole page.
–Sean Carroll
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Paige Braddock has been doing Jane’s World forever. Well, since 1998–which is about the same the thing for a strip that began life on the Internet. Jane made the jump to pamphlet-style books a few years ago. She’s now also made the jump to manga-sized collections that are beginning to pop up in all kinds of bookstores that had never previously carried a Jane book.
Part one of this interview was all the serious stuff about writing and drawing Jane; Part two is a pretty free-ranging, chatty interview–Braddock riffing on her influences. We could have pared it down to the bare comic-related essentials, but it seemed a shame to cut out the feel of a chat with the lively Braddock. We talked about Jane’s prospects for the big and small screens, Braddock’s favorite TV shows, and the comics she reads and the artists that inspire her; we even got the low-down on her new comic collaboration.
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If you haven’t heard of Love and Rockets, you don’t know much about alternative comics. But that’s O.K., because this ground-breaking book by Gilbert Hernandez and his brother Jaime (with occasional participation from brother Mario) recently celebrated its 25th anniversary with the release of new softcover editions of Gilbert and Jaime’s best-known storylines.
If you’ve never read Gilbert’s stuff, pick up Heartbreak Soup, the recently released first volume of Gilbert’s famous Palomar series; you’ll be struck by its intricacy, depth, and above all, compelling female characters. Beto (as he’s known by his fans) has something up his sleeve for long-time fans, tool: brand-new stories set in the early days of the series, in New Tales of Old Palomar.
In the first part of our interview, we spoke to Gilbert about revisiting the work that made him famous, the differences between the Palomar stories of today and those of a quarter century ago, and his upcoming farewell to serial-form comics. There’s plenty more of the interview to come, and an exclusive guest strip later this week, so stay tuned.
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Army@Love
By Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine
Vertigo
Depending on how susceptible they are to Fox News, readers will doubtless either be shouting “Too soon, too soon!” or “Not soon enough, not soon enough!” when they’re assaulted by the premier issue of Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine’s sharp new black-humor comic from Vertigo, Army@Love. Veitch rubbishes the idea of maintaining dignified front on “something as catastrophic as a misconceived war,” and turns a viciously satiric pen on the “Afbaghistan” conflict, imagining just how absurd it’ll be five years from now.
The formula for satire–as Veitch quotes Lenny Bruce, in the afterward to the first issue–used to be “tragedy plus time.” Not any more: There’s no more waiting twenty years for a M*A*S*H that uses one war (The Korean War) to comment on the absurdity of another (The Vietnam War). In the era of the Internet and epidemic ADD, this war is already so old most Americans (including those who started it, apparently) are already hazy as to why we even invaded. So Veitch uses this war to comment on itself.
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Journey into Mohawk Country
By Messrs Van den Bogaert & O’Connor
First Second Books
Lots of comics are collaborations between artists and writers who never actually meet face to face, communicating instead via e-mail and telephone. Probably not many artists get as few notes to work with, however, as George O’Connor did on his collaboration with writer Harmen Meyndertsz Van den Bogaert, since Journey into Mohawk Country is, you see, the graphic novelization of the Dutchman’s actual journal, written in 1634-35. It seems unlikely he left O’Connor any rough layouts or character sketches.
Journey was clearly a labor of love for O’Connor, who dedicates the book to his father, “who loves the Mohawk.” It’s also a testament to First Second Books’ sticking to its mission of putting out quality books for readers of all ages and tastes. The question is, however, exactly who is Journey’s target reader? After all, it’s not often you hear someone in a comic-book store shout, “Sweet! A comic-book adaptation of an unabridged seventeenth-century travelogue! I’ve got to have this.”
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Guest Strip | Sean Carroll May 24, 2007 | 
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