The print run sold out long ago, but I’ve been thinking of writing some stories for Jane. She came up in discussion and I remembered that we had made a digital version for printing, so there’s no reason it couldn’t be sold as an ebook. I could go through all the palaver of putting up on the ‘zon but at present I just can’t be bothered. Buy it now for 99¢ by clicking the button.

For those new to the character Elena Steier and I created, here’s the back story:

Who is Jane Quiet?

Epiphanies come in all kinds. I had one recently when I looked around me and realized that I was surrounded by a lot of really talented people and that I should be making better use of them. One of these people was Elena Steier, cartoonist and creator of The Vampire Bed & Breakfast and The Goth Scouts comic strips. We share a love of the macabre which infuses her artwork and my fiction, so I said, “Elena! We should do a comic together!” Fortunately, she agreed. All she asked was that we have a kick-ass monster.

I think it was Elena’s idea to riff on John Silence, the psychic investigator created by Algernon Blackwood, one of the masters of the weird tale, about a hundred years ago. John Silence was rich doctor, skilled in weird science and keen to explore occult phenomena. It was an idea ripe for reinvigoration.

Our Jane Quiet shares some of Silence’s characteristics, but we’ve made a few twists, too. Most obviously we’ve switched the gender of the good doctor. We’ve also moved her to New England (instead of “merry olde” England) and made her a little less of a loner than her prototype. Jane has a network of friends and a strangely devoted personal secretary, Dorayl (more about him in a later arc). While she has some of Silence’s reserved manner, Quiet has a little more patience with the less-enlightened public. However, she does share Silence’s subtle and mordant sense of humour.

This opening episode in the Jane Quiet saga plays with the theme inherent in both their names – it’s an entirely silent comic. Elena and I both found this kind of narrative a perplexing challenge at times, but a fitting (if ironic) tribute to Blackwood, that master of the subtle detail. While he achieved that subtlety through the slow accumulation of words, we hope to have achieved a similar effect with the swift juxtaposition of images alone.

And, of course, there’s a kick-ass monster.

Settle yourself in a comfortable chair, turn the lights down low and enter then strange world of Jane Quiet. Magic, mayhem, and mysteries await…