Comic review: "The Plain Janes" (2007)

Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg's graphic novel "The Plain Janes" (from DC Comics' Minx label) is aimed at teenage girls, but one of the copies missed and hit me. Truthfully, I caught a rave either in "Entertainment Weekly" mag or on www.avclub.com, but that sentence was too good to waste.

Rugg's black-and-white drawings are very Dan Clowes ("Eightball", "Ghost World"). His people have the same variety of expressions, and similar awkward bodies and slightly prominent heads. Except for the angry policeman, who has a comically undersized noggin...and who I shouldn't be mentioning yet.

Castellucci upends new-kid-in-school conventions with a spunky, capable heroine traumatised by a (subtly alluded to) terrorist incident, stifled by a now-paranoid mum and in love with a coma patient. "Main Jane" interacts easily with the cool clique, but struggles for acceptance from the outcasts.

Her solution is to convince "Sporty Jane", "Brain Jayne" and "Theatre Jane" to form P.L.A.I.N (People Loving Art In Neighbourhoods), a secret gang who nip out at night to perform their own brand of town beautification, such as erecting pyramids of rocks and flowers on a shopping mall building site.

These "art attacks" lead to condemnation, support, discovery, new recruits, a crackdown and inevitable punishment, just not in the ways you might predict...apart from the bust, which is obviously the doing of that cop I told you about. The conclusion is imperfect and all the more inspirational for it.

[The back-cover price is US$9.99, but I picked mine up for roughly the same amount in Aussie dollars. For that, you get 176 pages, including previews of three other Minx yarns, all of which lack the spark of "The Plain Janes".]