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Paige Braddock

Paige Braddock: Finding Alternative Routes

For someone hip-deep in the business of marketing cartoons—in this case Peanuts, the most popular comic strip in the world—Paige Braddock has certainly taken a more personal approach in creating and publishing her own work. As Senior Vice President and Creative Director of Charles M. Schulz Associates in Santa Rosa, Calif., she is charged with managing the creative integrity of Snoopy and the gang as they appear on everything from T-shirts to rides at a Tokyo theme park. But as the creator of Jane's World, she has developed a very personal little universe that she shares with her readers online.

Jane's World is basically Braddock's world, about a woman and her friends and the silly or serious things that happen to them. ("A friend of mine described it one time as a cross between Ellen and Seinfeld—it's really about nothing at all and the main character is this androgynous-looking female. And I think that's a pretty good description.") Some of the characters and storylines are based on those in 36-year-old Braddock's real life, such as Jane's friend Ethan, or the time Jane goes to a spa in northern California and has an "enzyme bath." Published on her own website (www.pb9.com), and offered to 60 newspaper websites through a service called Toonville, Jane's World has developed a close following of readers who get concerned when a character gets out of line or a scenario hits close to home.

"I had this one storyline where one of Jane's sisters left her husband for a woman, and as a result her daughter came to live with Jane, who doesn't know what to do with a kid, really. But what happened was, her niece was there asking all these tough questions about relationships and what was going on with her mom, and how people get to be gay," Braddock says. "And I sort debated doing that storyline because it went down this path and I thought 'Man, this is really heavy—I don't know if that's the sort of topic I really should be doing in the strip.' But I got so much good feedback on that storyline it was amazing. Like from this dad in Virginia whose kid asked him about this sort of thing and he had to try and explain it to him. It was cool."

Braddock took a winding career path before finding this sort of interaction. She started attending UT in 1983 where she developed her first strip, about a college student named Sadie, for both the Beacon and the Journal. After graduation, she advanced her illustration and graphic design career by working her way up through a string of newspapers: Pensacola News Journal, Orlando Sentinel, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution... By '91, however, she yearned to create her own strip so she started developing Jane's World with the goal of syndicating it to alternative weekly papers. It originally started as a single-panel gag strip, but the characters insisted on growing.

"I got to the point where I wanted to write more developed storylines and I wanted to develop a set number of characters," says Braddock, "and so that's when I started publishing it online because it's really hard in weekly papers—you're competing with a bunch of other cartoonists for the same amount of space, and you usually only get published once or twice a month, so it's really hard to build a readership or develop characters and storylines in that sort of format."

Braddock has been publishing them online since 1994 at her own website and at various newspaper websites such as the Alameda Times Star, Canton Ohio Repository, or Daily Washington. She's yet to have any editor object to any of her storylines. "I think there's a little more variety on the Web and there's more tolerance for different sorts of features," she says. "Print newspapers are really conservative. It's so ridiculous—I mean, it's what happens in real life but nobody wants to read about it on the comics page."

In the next month or so, Braddock plans on publishing her own comic book—in print—and selling it off her webpage. And then she's going to shop it around to publishers. Later, she may even take another stab at syndication, though not with Jane's World.

"I sort of like that Jane's World is this fun, goofy, no-topic-is-too-sacred strip...It would be hard to tone it down and make it more mainstream. She can cuss and do things that strips in the paper can't do."