Insane Jane

Insane Jane is not your normal everyday superhero comic.  It comes from a darker place; think along the lines of Batman or Watchmen in some characteristics.  I love reading about the unusual type of superhero, one that doesn’t take after Superman’s clean-cut image so I was interested to give this one a read.  The cover though is a bit…off putting with the cut out letters and more poster like characters.  It doesn’t really sell my interest, but thankfully the art in the rest of the book is not like the front cover.

Jane is seemingly an average young girl with the average normal life—two loving, doting parents; an uncle who cares for her and looks out for her when he can; and a job at a local hair salon.  But Jane’s life becomes extra ordinary when she spots a robbery occurring and calls the cops who are able to nab the crooks, thanks to Jane’s help.  Feeling a new found sense of purpose in her life Jane stakes out the park and stops another would-be evildoer with a tennis racket.  Jane discovers she likes this new life and soon creates a costume to battle evil where it maybe as “The Avenging Star!”  But darkness looms and the Shadow Man begins to threaten and kill her loved ones.  Can Jane put a stop to it or will evil win?  The climatic show down comes and only Jane can stop the Shadow Man for killing a coworker.  But all is not as it seems and Jane’s life is in more danger than she knows.

Insane Jane needless to say is just a bit…insane and it’s an interesting enough story, with a few faults.  First it was pretty easy to figure out what was happening with Jane and what the plot twist would be, I mean seriously its right there on the front cover.  So for me that took a bit of punch out of the story.  Another issue that I have is that the characters are mostly superficial which makes it difficult to keep track of whose who with some of the supporting characters.  Even Jane isn’t really flushed out all that well in some regards, I just don’t feel like I can relate to her.  None of the characters seem to really want to relate to Jane in the early going, but there’s nothing in the story that gives a clue as to why.  So I really wish they had done a bit more character development.  The writers of course do borrow quite a bit from the Batman mythos, the dark caped figure battling evil in the night, no real super powers, even some of the characters in this comic look similar to Batman characters.  Overall though the story isn’t bad, it’s just a bit lacking in making the plot too predicable.

I do like the artwork in the comic, just not the cover or the chapter page breaks .  The body of the work though reminds me a lot of some of the modern webcomics, such as PVP and Wapsi Square.  It has a nice cartoony feel that works well with the story.  Even more interesting to me is the fact that with the exception of the first page, all of the characters except for Jane are drawn in gray scale (there are a couple of weird spots where that isn’t the case, but it seems to be an accident more than for any particular purpose.) It gives the comic an interesting feel and is reminiscent of something out of the 50’s/60’s TV era of good wholesome values.  Until Jane and her bright colors come smashing through showing that the world is a bit different, a bit darker, a bit more…insane.  The characters as drawn don’t have a lot of detail to them, but what there is works reasonably well.  It falters a bit with some of the supporting characters so its difficult to figure out which one is which, but overall it works.  Personally I don’t care too much for the comic cover or chapter page breaks because they don’t have the same style as the rest of the comic and they just don’t fit well.  They seem to be emphasizing the darker side of the story, but it just doesn’t pull it off well.  It also reveals more about Jane’s true nature than it really should so it’s a bit of a spoiler to the story.

Overall it’s an interesting comic, but not quite my cup of tea.  I wish that the writers had done a slightly better job of not making it so obvious what the “plot twist” was.  I’d recommend this book to fans of film noir and punk.