Paige Braddock is dedicated to comics. She’s written daily Web (and, since 2005, also print) comic Jane’s World since 1998. She’s also held down a day job in the licensing side of the industry for most of that time, at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates, and has even illustrated several Peanuts books. Finally, she runs Girl Twirl Comics, a one-woman publishing house. That’s a lot of comic for one person. One reward for that dedication is Jane’s devoted and diverse following, which reaches far beyond the demographic you might expect for a strip (an earlier example of which is shown above) with a lesbian star and a largely lesbian cast; another was Braddock’s 2006 Eisner award nomination for best artist/writer, humor.

In the first part of our interview, Braddock talks about working with Charles Schulz, balancing humor and drama, and her Eisner nomination. You know: the serious stuff. In part two of the interview, she’ll tell us about the comics she reads, her Battlestar Galactica fandom, and her forthcoming scifi/comedy comic. You, know: the fun stuff.

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Garage Band
By Gipi
First Second Books

Garage Band is a slice-of-life book that anyone who’s witnessed (or lived) the drama that surrounds every garage band ever will find familiar. Italian artist Gipi’s new graphic novel captures in brilliant, evocative pencils and watercolors the hope, anxiety and, frenetic energy of a band during its occupancy of one particular garage. It’s a quick read, but, while you might initially be disappointed at how quickly you fly through the story, you might also find yourself paging through Garage Band again for quite a while after, soaking up Gipi’s considerable visual talent.

Gipi (Italian artist Giannini Pacinotti) creates panels filled with informal, rough-edged sketches—a perfect match for his four would-be-musician protagonists, who are also informal, rough-edged sketches. The raw, aggressive pencils give these kids a sort of half-finished look that seems just right for teenagers on the edge—of becoming adults, criminals, or even, just possibly, real musicians.

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New Tales of Old Palomar #1
By Gilbert Hernandez
Fantagraphics and Coconino Press

The Hernandez Brothers have been busy. There’s an embarrassment of new and semi-new riches for reviewers–we’ve got new collections of early Love and Rockets stuff (Jaime’s Maggie the Mechanic and Gilbert’s Heartbreak Soup); Luba: Three Daughters, the conclusion of the Luba in America trilogy and book 23 in the large-format L&R graphic novels; Sloth, a new non-Palomar graphic novel from Beto, and even plain old Love and Rockets #18. All of them deserve (and will probably eventually get) their own reviews.

The most exciting new offering from Los Bros Hernandez, however, is New Tales of Old Palomar #1, a return to the beginning of the epic Beto’s been working on for 25 years. For L&R fans, the only comic event that could match it would be a new story from Jaime about a young Maggie’s Prosolar mechanic days—you know, from when Love and Rockets actually had rockets in it. Who knows if that’ll ever happen? In the meanwhile, there’s New Tales, which takes place just after the first Heartbreak Soup stories from issues three and four of the original series.

Fantagraphics gives New Tales the deluxe treatment; it’s one of the first of their special Ignatz series of books. It’s big–even bigger that the original L&R books from the 80s and 90s–and it’s printed on heavy stock, with a heavy-stock jacket. The swanky treatment is great, but it’s the appearance from very first pages of Sheriff Chelo, Carmen, and a soccer genius Pipo that make this a very special book. In the course of its 32-pages, we see, among others, Luba, Gato, Vicente, and even Martin el Loco—many of the characters that made early L&R required reading.

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