“I really wanted to go to art school but my parents were afraid I’d turn into this flaky artist, so they made me go to a state school so I’d get a well-rounded education,” says Paige Braddock, who became a comic book artist.
She is the creator of Jane’s World-a comic now in its 24th volume that is also available online and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian and Swedish. It will be featured in upcoming exhibits in Madrid and Milan and one currently running in San Francisco. It has been nominated for an Eisner Award, the Golden Globes of the comic book world.
The motley cast of characters that populate Jane’s World are a diverse bunch with intricately intertwining stories. Jane herself is someone who is easy to identify with, particularly if you have a healthy touch of self-deprecation. “People can more easily identify with a likable loser than someone who’s perfection incarnate,” Braddock says.
Before the books, when Jane’s World was still a strip, Braddock says the main character “wasn’t gay enough for gay papers but she was too gay for straight papers.” Braddock had to hustle for the few spots available in alternative newspapers, facing intense competition that put her up against the likes of Alison Bechdel. “Even though she and I are at opposite ends of the lesbian spectrum,” Braddock says, pointing out that “I’m slapstick and she’s more political.”
“There isn’t enough lesbian slapstick out there,” says this resident of Sebastopol, a small town about 50 miles north of San Francisco. “What I’m doing is sort of a backlash against how serious Northern California lesbians are.” Seen this way, Braddock should be getting an award for her community service.
Other Jane’s World characters may be serious but Jane is the antithesis to stereotypical lesbian staidness.
According to Braddock she’s not the typical dyke: she isn’t politically correct, hates vegetarian restaurants, eats donuts, and doesn’t understand women. “She’s a vehicle for poking fun at all those strains in our culture-but not mean-spirited, just clueless.”
Braddock says a reviewer recently referred to Jane as “the lesbian heir to the hard-luck Charlie Brown, somehow always winding up as the punchline in her own comic book.” Of all the Peanuts characters the too-obvious choice for comparison with Jane would be queer icon Peppermint Patty. But Jane is more of a Charlie Brown who just happens to be a lesbian.
Braddock had never considered the Charlie Brown-ishness of her character, and the analogy struck her as not only apt but an amusing coincidence. Unbeknownst to the perceptive reviewer who drew the parallel, Braddock spends her days at Peanuts headquarters. She is senior vice president and creative director for Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates.
For nearly seven years Braddock worked full-time for the Schulz studio and spent her nights and weekends immersed in Jane’s World. But this year she cut back to three days per week at her day job in order to devote three full days to working on her books. Apparently she manages to squeeze in some rest on the seventh day, but she completes twenty pages of drawings per month.
In addition to the books, new panels are available online daily.
People sometimes conflate artist and subject, addressing Braddock as if they were talking to Jane. Braddock admits that Jane embodies one facet of her personality. But it shouldn’t take long for most fans who meet their hero’s creator to realize that, while Jane is goofy and often oblivious, Braddock is whip smart with a delectably dry sense of humor.
Braddock says Jane “gets to be the voice inside my head that I sometimes silence.”
She adds: “You know when you hear someone say something that’s really dumb? Or sometimes you want to say something that politically incorrect and just run with it and you censor yourself? Well, Jane’s uncensored.”
Pieces of Braddock also wind up in various other Jane’s World characters, such as Jane’s NASCAR-loving roommate, Ethan. A crumpled Charlie Brown-adorned NASCAR hood hangs in Braddock’s office, the place where it was originally designed and approved. They sent it back to her as a joke after Billy Elliott wrecked it in a race in Memphis, not realizing that she is a huge NASCAR fan.
Braddock’s characters are not only her livelihood but her friends-and not just the imaginary kind.
“I’m so invested in the stories and the characters that they seem real. So when I finish a book and I haven’t started working on the next one yet, I’m kind of depressed. Like I kind of miss them. That’s weird, isn’t it?”
She may joke about the deep connection she shares with her creations, but Braddock does value the ethereal. She traded in a successful 12-year career as a visual journalist for a graduate program in theological studies. “It gets me out of being grounded in the physical world and helped me think in a more expansive way,” she says.
She never intended to be a minister but was burnt out and looking for a new direction. Although she eventually left her theological studies program in Atlanta for her current job in California, she credits the stint at grad school with jumpstarting her brain.
“With journalism you’re dealing with facts all the time and you’re so grounded in reality,” she says.
She had been working for the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and, briefly, USA Today. Mostly she did op-ed and humorous illustrations, occasionally writing stories. It was a field she stumbled into in college at the University of Tennessee when a friend encouraged her to apply for an illustrator position at a local paper.
Atlanta and Knoxville are just two of the many Southern cities Braddock had lived in before settling on the West Coast. “I’ve pretty much lived in every southern state,” she says, noting that her seven-year stretch in California is the longest time she has spent in one place. Her father worked for the Forest Service, so the family moved every few years.
“I have that conservative, Southern thing in my head” Braddock says, explaining why she tells potential distributors that her books are for teens and adults. “It has some adult content, so I don’t think it’s appropriate for little kids, although there are some young people who read it,” she says. “But they live in California and their parents don’t care what they read.”
The world of comics has more guys than girls, Braddock points out, “so it’s a challenge to be a female creator with a lesbian character that guys actually think is funny. Tapping into the gay market is one thing, but crossing that next barrier and actually getting straight boy comic fans to like the book is really a challenge.”
“My lesbian readers are incredibly loyal, so I wouldn’t in any way minimize that part of my demographic,” Braddock says. “It’s just an interesting cultural switch to see mainstream audiences embrace these characters, I guess.”
Judging from the people who approach her at conventions, Braddock says her fans are a pretty mixed bunch of young and old, gay and straight.
She guesses that there aren’t a lot of gay comics readers, and gay fans are mostly men “because of whole muscle-bound characters in spandex. But for women, the female characters in comics tend not to be really well defined. Maybe with the exception of Catwoman.”
But she applauds PrismComics.org for getting gay and lesbian comics noticed in the larger comics industry: “They not only pick up on gay titles but they let people know about gay threads in mainstream books or gay creators working on mainstream books.”
The Eisner Award nomination will certainly increase the visibility of Jane’s World. Braddock is especially excited to be recognized by her larger professional community: “It’s that next hurdle I’ve been wanting to get past, where you don’t have that identifier of ‘gay’ comedian or ‘gay’ performer or ‘gay’ cartoonist. You’re just a cartoonist and it’s just a funny book and it just happens to be gay.”
That said, some fans have complained to Braddock that Jane hasn’t been getting enough action. Braddock listened and recently got her protagonist tangled in a love triangle. “So it’s pretty good for Jane,” she says. “I’m sure it’ll end badly. But she’ll have fun along the way.”
