[cartoonjoe2004]

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!

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.