I picked this up off the classroom shelf the other day, annoyed for two reasons; firstly, because my tutors hadn’t shown up; and secondly, because I was planning to write a comic in my third year called “Plain Jayne”, about my life. Just goes to show how original I am.
As always, watch out for spoilers.
Written by Cecil Castellucci, with artwork by Jim Rugg, The P.L.A.I.N Janes follows, you guessed it, Jane, a girl who has just survived a terrorist attack in her home city. The attack disrupts her life, turning her from a fashionable blonde city girl, into an emotional art-freak with a bob of black hair. Her paranoid parents move from the city to the cosy, but ultimately boring, suburbs.
On her first day of school Jane is invited to join the popular girl’s table, but rejects them in favour of a bunch of misfits who ironically are called Jane, Jayne and Polly Jane. This was the first thing to irk me. I know this can happen in real life (I once knew four Emmas in the same class) but I found it so predictable. The term Plain Jane can refer to any girl of limited presence. I found it a bit lazy to name them all Jane.
“Main Jane”, the protagonist, is your typical I-feel-everything art student, almost emo-like. She has a few redeemable qualities, but as a whole character I found that I couldn’t connect with her constant moping. Perhaps because I’ve never been in a terrorist attack.
Then we have the other three Janes. Theatre Jane is an overly dramatic, over-weight Shakespeare-spewing stereotype in a scarf. Brain Jane is a big nerd. And Sporty Jane is an athletic chick with a monobrow. What we have here is the Disney Channel show, Recess. Main Jane is a combination of TJ and Spinelli, whilst her comrades resemble Mikey, Gretchen and Vince.
Now I’m all for minor clichés and stereotypes, but I like to see something original in a character. For this reason, I could not connect with any of the main characters, because they were all very hollow. I found that by the end of the story, I couldn’t care less about them.
Now the story, it had some promise. Main Jane, trying to rebuild herself as an artist, tries to inspire her neighbourhood to be creative by performing art attacks with her friends under the guise P.L.A.I.N: People Loving Art In Neighbourhoods.
The idea is cute, and a good way to inspire the town. However, it doesn’t appear to work. Apart from inspiring some of her fellow high school students to sing randomly in class, she never comes close to helping her overprotective mother to relax her rules, or the town’s adults ease up and see her projects as art and not graffiti. There seems to be no resolve to the story, and no sense to the random acts of creativity that P.L.A.I.N produce, which is a shame because they had some great ideas, such as filling the town fountain with washing up liquid, and planting hundreds of garden knomes outside of the police station in protest.
Their final act ends in disaster, and leaves the book’s love interest facing expulsion, and yet none of the Janes do the honourable thing, which would be to come clean and confess. Instead they all carry on with their increasingly dull lives, and this left me both wishing for more, and yet not wanting to read it.
The artwork however is remarkable. It’s a style reminiscent of Daniel Clowes (see below). However, where The P.L.A.I.N Janes fails is that it pretty much tries to be Ghost World, with the loser characters and anti-climatic ending, but it never reaches the same brilliance because it is aimed at a totally different audience. Ghost World is aimed at those who’ve seen all, done all, lived through it and accept that life does, quite eventually, suck. The P.L.A.I.N Janes tries the same route, but aims it at younger teenagers, still in high school, who don’t want to know that life is hard yet.
This is why I believe the book failed to grasp me. It tries to be too smart and too original before it’s time. I understand there is a sequel called Janes in Love, but I don’t feel compelled to go out and read it.
I’d recommend this to you for the interesting creativity ideas put forward. I particularly like Main Jane’s motto: “Art Saves”. But story-wise it’s completely forgettable. Unless perhaps you’re a fourteen-year-old emo girl.
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