4 out of 5

While it kind of blows my mind in a “didya know??” factoid kind of way that there are comics from previous generations to which we truly cannot ascribe credit – the business at that point often obscuring the writers and artists, and so some works are still unclaimed / unidentified – it also, of course, frustrates me that we cannot give credit where it’s due. Mike Hubbard’s name appears on this collection of “Jane Bond” strips, but he is the artist, and though undeniably instrumental in the strip’s look and feel – intuited from David Roach’s intro – one of the reasons I found this so enjoyable was due to how it was written. Though leaning into the secret gadgets and world-conquering villains one might associate with James Bond, which the naming of the character / title clearly is relying upon, whomever wrote this strip had a lot of fun making agency “Worldpol” its own, rather charming, spy organization, and Jane – who works for Wordpol as their top agent – into her own character. She’s not just James Bond in a dress, in other words, and we aren’t subtituting lookalikes for Bond villains. While none of these setups of crop-destroying potions and the like will surprise, there’s something so humble and amusingly innocent about the setup that the churn of “Jane, we need you to travel to X and go undercover to stop Y” never gets boring. And churn and tropes aside, Jane’s ability to navigate through any situation, thinking on her feet, feels more intelligently effected than not only strips of the same era, but even such material today: despite the overblown concept, the writer of Jane Bond subverts it by making everyone sort of a believable human being, and it’s fun to watch them battle each other on that level.

But, yes, Hubbard is a big part of that working, as there’s a fair amount of talking heads happening here alongside the globe-trotting and evil-plans foiling – the walls of dialogue can slow the read a bit, even though it’s fun once you dig into it, and due to these being two-page strips, there’s always some plotting overlap as we catch the reader up, slowing things down further – but despite that, Hubbard’s linework swoops across the pages, communicating a ton of story movement within single panels. The evolution of a single detailed leading panel to the fully gray-tone washed panels of the collection’s latter half is very satisfying – while Hubbard’s presentation of Jane is fully confident and formed from the the get-go, it’s a nice sign of how he was projecting more and more of that confidence as things went on. It’s just a beautiful looking strip, but then also incredibly technically efficient.

The collection from Rebellion is well-printed in the slightly-squared UK sizings (versus more traditionally rectangular sizings for us US readers), with images that take up as much of the page space as possible without losing anything in the binding – at about 100 pages, it’s too slim to lay flat, but you don’t have to crack the spine to experience all the art and words. There’s the aforementioned intro from Roach, which lays out a bit of history, and a praising afterword from Claire Napier. The latter feels a bit unfocused, and I wish the former had a visual timeline, as Jane’s printing is pretty confusing (true for a lot of UK comics, merged into other books along the way), but both are well-written. While there are page numbers, it would’ve been interesting to maybe separate the sections when the book switched publishers / titles; all episodes are presented back-to-back.

The treasury reprints have been a boon in general for those of us who want the chance to experience these things, and the quality of the collections is consistent, but Hubbard’s art is especially clean – he’s very precise – and so looks quite amazing. While I think a reader should be able to tell if they’ll enjoy this just by reading the first page, it’s a book that manages to entertain the whole way through, and doesn’t have to be read with much of a nostalgia lens to wholly appreciate.