This is Universal Love, a month-long spotlight on LGBTQ comic book stories that I have enjoyed over the years. This isn't meant as a "Best Of" list, since there are so many great works out there and so I'll spread the love around a bit, as it were.

We had some formatting delays over the last week, so I'm still catching up on the last few entries from my June spotlight features, including the aforementioned look at great LGTBQ comic book stories. I conclude the Universal Love series with a look at Paige Braddock's Love Letters To Jane's World, a collection celebrating the long-running comic strip series, which ran from 1998-2018.

As I note in the opening, Universal Love is not necessarily about picking out the best of the best, as I would like to believe that you already know that, say, Fun Home, is a brilliant graphic novel or that there a number of famous gay superhero characters, like Midnighter and Apollo, Northstar and Batwoman. Therefore, I wanted to go a bit more off the beaten paths to spotlight some stories that I loved that don't get quite as much mainstream attention. However, I made a notable exception with the first entry, Howard Cruse's historic Stuck Rubber Baby, and I'm making another exception as I close things out, with Paige Braddock's brilliant Jane's World, the first LGBTQ-themed comic strip series ever carried by a major comic strip syndicate online (United Feature Syndicate, which is now part of Andrews McMeel Universal, which features Jane's World here). Tragically, there is a bit of a connection between my first and last Universal Love entry (by the way, this isn't it for the feature period. I'll do more in the future, just not 30 of 'em in a row, ya know?), as the late, great Howard Cruse wrote the introduction for Love Letters to Jane's World, a collection released by LionForge to celebrate Jane's World's 20th anniversary. It's sad to think that we no longer have a comic book great like Cruse with us, but I'm sure it was meaningful for Paige Braddock to have had such a nice introduction from him before he passed away.

Before I talk about Jane's World, let me do a quick aside. I honestly don't put too much thought into the personalities of the people behind these works, as I'm not really all that familiar with everyone I'm covering. With that being said, Paige Braddock is not only an excellent comic book creator, but she's an excellent person, and I figured that that was worth a mention.

The basic gist of Jane's World is that it follows the misadventures of Jane Wyatt, who is generally based on Paige Braddock herself, a lovable, but quirky, woman trying to make her way in the world. Jane goes through many jobs and girlfriends throughout the series, and even as things don't work out with all of her exes, she's so endearing that most of them remain as recurring characters.

The most prominent ex of Jane's by far is Chelle, who looks like Trinity from the Matrix and has a background in special ops. She is basically this over-the-top badass who is friends with this down-to-Earth semi-slacker like Jane. It's an adorable pairing and when they were dating, it was quite bizarre (but funny). They first hooked up on a camping trip where they both initially attended with other women...

Jane's roommate, Ethan, is one of her closest friends and probably the main person who can match Jane in terms of an ability to get caught up in bizarre circumstances. One of the things that stands out about Jane's World is that it as down-to-Earth as Jane is as a character, her surroundings are not always like that (as seen by the fact that she has a special ops ex who looks like Trinity from the Matrix). Sometimes, Braddock will go way out there, including a trip to Amazon Island (which has a brilliant gag about Silver Age Superman in it), but that turned out to be a dream. What DIDN'T turn out to be a dream is when Jane, Ethan and Ethan's then-girlfriend, Dixie, who Jane wants to look down on for being a stereotype of a Southern "charmer," but can't help but actually admire, get abducted by aliens. Jane and Dixie discover the alien's transporter room and Jane goes to teleport them out of there, but screws up and instead transforms Dixie into a monkey...

I love, right in the middle of all of that, Jane's reaction to the fact that she didn't actually read the manual as, come on, who actually reads the manual first, right?

One of my favorite recurring characters is a lovable spoof by Braddock of her fellow cartoonist, Stephan Pastis, creator of the blockbuster comic strip, Pearls Before Swine. In Jane's World, Stephen is "Shallow Breast Guy," as a teasing reference to the way that Pastis draws the women in his strip. At one point, Stephen takes over control of Jane's World and it becomes his idea of what a lesbian comic strip would be like, which would look like it would fit in well with late night Cinemax....

With a strip that went on for twenty years, there really was no room for Jane to have a steady girlfriend throughout the series, but it became clear relatively early on that she was almost certainly meant to be with Dorothy, her other best friend besides Ethan. The two were SO close to each other that it was hard to get them together, but man, they are so adorable together. Braddock, clearly, was greatly influenced by some great cartoonists like Charles Schulz (Braddock worked with the legend late in his life and has worked at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates since 1999, becoming Chief Creative Officer a few years back) and Bill Watterson, and I've always found Dorothy to be the character who seems like the most traditionally "cartoonish," but I mean that in the best sense of the word. She is absolutely charming and I imagine that one of the most difficult things for Braddock over the years was to keep Jane and Dorothy apart once she decided to get them together in the first place.

Love Letters to Jane's World is a massive tome and it's under $25, so really, you owe yourself a duty to just buy the darn thing.

If anyone else has a suggestion for a great LGBTQ comic book, feel free to continue to send in suggestions to me at brianc@cbr.com!