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The Story of JANE (or a reasonable facsimile, thereof...)
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Y'know, folks, I've been curious about Norman Pett's Jane comic strip ever since I saw an example of the strip in Mort Walker's book Backstage at the Strips (1975), which reprinted the oft-seen episode where Jane, while taking a bath, falls out of the tub and into a cafe filled with horny (and APPRECIATIVE) British soldiers.
Most comic strip histories, if they discuss the British newspaper strips at all, generally concentrate on Jane's popularity with the soldiers during World War Two, and most of the strip's reprint volumes, particularly the huge Jane at War (1976) omnibus, which reprints every strip produced between 4 September 1939 and 14 August 1945 bear this out (indeed, the most recent reprint volume, The Misadventures of Jane {2008} re-presents three continuities already printed in that earlier volume!!) My curiosity was about those strips published prior to the start of WWII, and since no one has as yet done a detailed search (of course that could be because, until fairly recently, relatively few historians have had access to copies of The Daily Mirror, the newspaper that published Jane for the entirety of its run), I thought I'd take a whack at it, myself!:D Jane's Journal, or "The Diary of a Bright Young Thing" first saw the light of day on 5 December 1932, and, from the beginning, was a somewhat dull affair, as Jane Gay, a somewhat dizzy young socialite, got into the usual business of fashions, parties and suitors, situations indistinguishable from most other pretty girl series of the era. Her one distinguishing characteristic, however, was in the strip's presentation as pages in her actual diary, with her handwritten entries superimposed over the somewhat scratchy illustration style of cartoonist Norman Pett, who depicted his heroine as tall and slender, with an almost boyish physique (not that were were able to see; except for the standard dressing table/dressing gown scene, we rarely saw Jane in anything more revealing than gym shorts in those first couple of years). But, of course, you all out there are wondering: "Yo, when do she start takin' her clothes off?!" It was an slow process, to be sure, but the earliest example I could find was on 28 April 1936 (fig. 1), in which Jane, while collecting rent from some rather burly tenants, comes away from the incident with her clothes in tatters, though revealing little more than bare shoulders, but, still, you've got to start somewhere. A more notable event occurred some four months later, on 19 August 1936 (fig. 2), in which our Miss Jane, while swimming in the sea, gets her legs tangled in seaweed and is rescued by a passing boatman who, in attempting to ffect said rescue, inadvertently removes Jane's top. But the strips turning point happened in the spring of 1937, which finds our Jane on holiday (that's vacation to the rest of us) showing off her newly voluptuized figure in a succession of swimsuits, which for 1937 were pretty skimpy, indeed. One strip from this era (24 April 1937 {fig. 3}) shows Jane's earliest Embarrassed Undressed Female, or EUF moment, when she accidentally shows a crowd of people her half slip. The biggest moment in Jane's history is yet to come. Stay tuned. |
History in the making, or "How Nude is Her Body?"
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[B]Throughout the late spring and early summer of 1937, Jane continued her adventures by the seaside, continuing to have more and more embarrassing situations in the bargain (Jane's little dog Fritz gets into a fight with another dog over Jane's dress; she ends up leaving the scene in tatters; Jane shows off her new beach wrap to her friends, but neglects to put on her bathing suit underneath; Jane puts on her daring new swimsuit upside-down, etc.)...but the ultimate embarrassment was just around the corner.
In early August of 1937, Jane and Fritz take a hiking trip through the English countryside (not the first time she's done this; she took a similar excursion in 1935), encountering a number of increasingly comical eccentrics along the way. On Saturday, 28 August 1937, The Daily Mirror published for the first (but not last) time, a full-page Jane's Journal episode, titled "She Goes Nudist" (fig. 4), in which Our Jane, for the very first time, strips off ALL HER CLOTHES in the woods to take a bath...and has her clothes promptly stolen by an escaped convict. Completely and utterly naked, our Jane dons a discarded newspaper (possibly the Mirror), and tries to infiltrate a nearby nudist colony, only to be barred from entry for "cheating", after which, in an episode printed on the opposite page (fig. 5), she is just as promptly arrested by the local cops. Th flood gates were open, ladiers and gentlemen, and thank the Lord for Norman Pett for turning the valve!!:D[B] |
More,more, more (How d'ya like it,how d'ya like it)
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For the remainder of 1937, and into 1938 and beyond, Jane would continue to be thrust into a myriad of situations where she (and in th coming years, some of her accquaintances) would find themselves in increasingly embarrassing states of undress.
Figure 6 (2 September 1937) is a direct sequel to the events of late August, and would lead to Jane embarking on a career as an artist's model, a trade that would serve her well during the war years. Figure 7 and 7a (11 September 1937) finds Our Jane dealing with uninvited guests while she's in the bath, something that happens to her a *lot* during this early period, and incrasing in frequency into the war years and beyond. Our next illustration (Fig. 8, 2 October 1937) finds one of Jane's friends in the midst of a striptease act---AT A CHURCH!! Even though our Jane is fully dressed, she stills suffers extreme embarrassment in this situation. (I've also included page 20 of The Daily Mirror for 2October{fig. 8a} to show how the paper oriented their comics in those days, with perrennial childhood favorite Pip, Squeak and Wilfred at the top, and the increasingly saucy Jane's Journal at the bottom, a rather jarring juxposition...kinda like playing Barney and Friends back-to-back with Sex and The City, don't you think?) |
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More Jane's Journal strips from 1937-38.
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This is a great series. Thanks for the history.
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Jane
Excellent work Joe
I knew there was more to see than what was printed in the mentioned books.... |
Indeed there is, Lotfw...the Jane's Journal strips actually get funnier after 1933 or so. For example, Jane's little dog Fritz actually has a personality in these mid-30s continuities, and Jane herself becomes a rather resourceful young lady, sort of like Fritzi Ritz before she got saddled with Nancy.
I'll post more info on Jane in the next few days. Thank you for the kind words!:D |
This is really, really fascinating. I am really glad that you took the time to compile all of these strips and post them. Thank you.
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Haha, good shit! Thx!
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Continuing "The Story of JANE"
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On Friday, 1 April 1938, Norman Pett's creation underwent a format change. The title was shortened to Jane, and, instead of being a single panel written from Jane's point-of-view, bcame a more traditional comic strip narrative, with dialogue and four separate panels (it is presumed this is when writer J.H.G. "Don" Freeman began writing the continuities for Pett, a job he would hold {in addition to scripting Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, Belinda Blue Eyes, and Garth}, into the early 1950s, when Pett's 1949 successor, Mike Hubbard, presumably took over the writing as well).
Instead of a daily gag, the strip is now a continuing storyline, with Jane being informed by her banker that she's lost her private income, and has to WORK for a living (figures 10 and 11). In due course, Jane sells all her worldly possessions, packs up her little Dachshund Fritz, and leaves her country home for London, where she finds a rooming house run by an attractive older brunet named Mary (fig. 12), who is engaged to a middle-age goofus named George, who's sole function is to be the butt of cheap fiance jokes (and repeatedly bitten by Fritz!). Figures 13, 14 and 15 show our Jane adjustment to her new surroundings, while figures 16, 17and 18 feature another character, the saucy redhead Betty, an old friend of Mary's who shares a room with Jane and was no stranger to public nudity, herself (fig. 19) (the trio's relationship could be compared to that of Ruthie, Wanda Homefree and Annie in Harvey Kurtzman's and Will Elder's Little Annie Fanny strip that ran in Playboy, with Ruthie fulfilling the "Mother Hen" role, and Wanda being the wild best friend who gets Annie into all sorts of embarrassing situations, much like Mary, Betty and Jane did some twenty-five years previously.) More to come, soon.:D |
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Some photos of the "real" Jane; Chrystabel Leighton-Porter. Chrystabel was actually the second model that Norman Pett used for Jane. The first was his wife Mary.
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This Jane series of posts is fabulous. Keep them coming please.
Also, thanks to lonmol for the photos. |
There was a UK TV series in the 80's I think, dont know if there are any pics though..
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Here's a link to an edited-together version of the first Jane TV series on youtube:
youtube.com/watch?v=H1kqO4nH8hA |
Here's a thread that should be of interest; https://forum.oneclickchicks.com/show...=glynis+barber
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A Word About Reprints
The Jane comic strip ran in The Daily Mirror from 5 December 1932 to 10 October 1959. The strip was also published in Australia, Canada, Italy and (briefly) the United States.
Following th strip's demise, a tribute volume, Farewell to Jane, was published in 1960, reprinting some wartime material. The next reprint was the previously mentioned Jane at War. Published in 1976, this huge volume reprinted all of the WWII strips, starting with the 4 September 1939 strip, which was right in ther middle of the "Jane's Love Story" continuity that began in the fall of 1938, and ended with the strip for 14 August 1945, right in the middle of the "Jane's Summer Idyll" storyline, which had begun that previous June. In 1983, there was a reprint tie-in to the Jane TV series, also with that title, reprinting the "Hush-Hush House" story (the basis for the first series of the TV show) and a later Mike Hubbard-illustrated continuity, "Nature in the Raw" (1951), which has our Jane at a nudist colony. The Jane at War book was partially reprinted in 1994, containing less than 3/4 of the original volume (plus, it came with a handy slipcase!;)). Finally, there's The Misadventures of Jane, published in 2009, which reprints "NAFFI Say Die" and "Jane at the Front" from the 1976 volume. The book also contains some never-before reprinted material from Pett's Jane's Journal magazine, including a few spot illustrations and a couple of multi-page stories, all in full color, printed on glossy stock paper. As far as I know, none of the original Jane's Journal-The Diary of a Bright Young Thing strips published between 5 December 1932 and 31 March 1938, the serial strips published between 1 April 1938 and 2 September 1939, nor any of Pett's strips done after the war and before he relinquished the feature to Hubbard in the late 1940s have ever been reprinted in full (Though I believe Hubbard's stuff was republished in Australia in the 50s...anyone having any definite info of this, please feel free to correct me). |
Jane
The Jane strip cartoon reappeared in the Daily Mirror in the 1980's. It was mainly contemporary but there were some flashbacks to the war time with some old stories redrawn. Worth looking for and sharing here if I find any.
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Let's not forget Modesty Blaise.
About the 1980s Jane strip...it ran in the Mirror from 1985 to 1990, and was actually about the original Jane's granddaughter. (I also neglected to mention Jane, Daughter of Jane, which appeared in 1961 and, as the title suggests, was the story of Jane's grown-up daughter {amazing, when you consider the original strip had just ended only two years before!}; this Jane, lacking the innocence and charm of the original, only lasted two years.) |
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Some miscellaneous Jane strips from 1937 and 1939.
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...And speaking of THE DAILY MIRROR...
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Jane's home newspaper, the Daily Mirror, was, for the first thirty years or so of its existence, a somewhat staid newspaper, although it did model itself after American periodicals like The New York Daily News and The New York Post, especially in regards to its treatment of the comic strip, of which it had several (in addition to Jane and the aforementioned Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, there was Beelzebub Jones, Buck Ryan, Ruggles, Belinda Blue Eyes {think "British Orphan Annie"}, and the American transplant Thimble Theatre, featuring Popeye the Sailor!).
Around the mid-to-late 1930s, the Mirror became a left-leaning liberal paper, and the headlines became more sensational as a result (it's no coincidence that Jane started losing more and more of her clothes at this time as a result). The change in attitude is best exemplified by the two Mirror pages reprinted below. The first image (July 7, 1938) details a near riot at a Lady Godiva festival, where the young girl portraying Godiva is nearly accosted by an overly moral zealot, who gets clobbered by the attending crowd for his trouble; the next front page (April 22, 1939) has a swimsuit-clad starlet plastered next to a story about the coming war (although one can't help but think that the headline to the right of the pin-up was put there for a dual purpose...after all, wouldn't she cause your "Allied Front" to GROW, too?;)) More about Jane soon1 |
Cartoonjoe, I am very interested if you would be willing to make a Jane cartoon, you know In addition to Miss Truth...:D
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More Early "Strips"-1936-1938
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Here are a few more examples of Jane's Journal's gradual transformation into Jane.
30 June 1936: We're not quite in London, and no where near France, but we DO get to see Jane's underpants for the first (but certainly not LAST) time...;) 4 February 1937: Jane has visitors while she's dressing (she really should close her curtains!); 28 May 1937: Stripping off at the seaside; 23 June 1937: Losing her top at the sea; 6 July 1937: An embarrassing distress call; 15 October 1937: Once again, close your curtains!!; 6 December 1937: The very first (not discounting the 28 August 1937 strips) full-frontal nudity (and another example of Jane's nude modeling stint); 15 December 1937: More embarrassment!; 20 December 1937: A rather odd punchline; 17 June 1938: Jane has more peepers while she's in her bath!! In my next update: The War years! |
I just love this series! Thanks cartoonjoe2004! Looking forward to your next Jane post.
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A couple of videos you may find interesting:
Jane www.britishpathe.com/video/jane shows cartoonist Norman Pett creating a typical Jane episode from 1943, using a model who is definitely not Chrystabel Leighton-Porter (try not to giggle as Pett looks around for his "rubber"); and Jane and Pett www.britishpathe.com/video/jane-and-pett ,which shows Pett actually sketching Miss Leighton-Porter (with Fritz in arms) as she poses---and STRIPS---for the artist. Quite fascinating to see the creative process around this feature.:D |
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Please help! Janes gradndaughter
Please! I beg of you! Help me find Janes granddaughter! When I was 13, I found these old magazines, I have not found them since, I want to find 1985 JANE Again online! Please help me! I am on a quest!
Anything you have please send msg to any info please!!!! or leave here in this thread! |
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Both of the Glynis Barber Jane TV series are available on YouTube now, with Dutch subtitles for some reason.
Jane is here: hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1kqO4nH8hA&list=PLiOCtd5INh2xvwbYqqPBOySQ Xq89vhIDq&index=30 and Jane in the Desert (which I had never seen before last night) is here: hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sesed5EAvk&list=PLiOCtd5INh2xvwbYqqPBOySQ Xq89vhIDq&index=29 there's also an interesting clip of Glynis promoting Dempsey and Makepeace and discussing "Jane" with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show - the way she explains the plot reminds me of the old Kenny Everett tagline ("But it's all in the best possible taste!") hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy3RN8Bj9oI |
Aw, ya beat me to it, Heisuke!!
hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4Sesed5EAvk
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Thanks Heisuke and Joe! Those are some excellent links.
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Found these scenes from a story printed in 1958, so near the end of the era. Will try to track down some more - HB
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While searching through the Internet Archives site, I discovered that someone had uploaded a few of the Jane's Journal annuals published by Rylee in the late 40s. Here are a few images:
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I love these old school adult cartoons. They were pretty racy for the time but look quite tame to our modern eyes. I can imagine how horny some of these must have made some young guys at the time.
I want to thank you for posting these. |
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