The nude comics of Jeffrey Catherine Jones
In Idyl & I’m Age, a trans artist inked wandering women, elliptical thoughts, and a world without men
I was recently going through my large collection of Heavy Metal magazines, considering getting rid of a good portion of them. I was really into it in my late teens and early twenties, as packed as those magazines were with incredible, predominantly European, comic creators whose work I’d never seen before anywhere else, typically in sci-fi and/or fantasy settings, with lots of nudity and violence. As I got older, a lot of those comics lost their appeal, and I realized how tiring the highly sexualized nudity was and the sexist conventions most of them were trapped in.
There was one standout, though: from 1981 through 1987, there was a black and white single-page strip published in the magazine called I’m Age, created by Jeffrey Jones. There was no plot, no named characters. The strips were typically just these elliptical, poetic musings of incredibly drawn nude women. Sometimes there was a joke, but more often than not, there was just this feeling of ennui or a lingering question. The women aren’t sexualized; they simply exist. It was such a striking difference from the fully painted and more outrageous work that surrounded it. Every issue I owned that had an I’m Age strip in it, I stopped and lingered to look at.
The full name that Jones eventually went by starting in 1998 was Jeffrey Catherine Jones. I remember being confused by the name when I eventually saw it online, and I think it was my first experience encountering an artist who was transgender. I myself, as of this writing, have been doing HRT (hormone replacement therapy) for nearly seven months, so seeing the I’m Age strips again, thinking about her eventual transition years after making them, got me wanting to read as much of it as I could, along with any other comics she made or any other personal work of hers.
Jones got her start in the late 60’s and early 70’s as an illustrator, doing comics here and there while also cranking out fully painted covers for sci-fi and fantasy books. The comic work that put her on the map was “Idyl,” a single-page, black-and-white strip published in National Lampoon from 1972 through 1975. I hadn’t heard of it before, but it turns out the entire strip was collected in a book shortly after her death, and that book also happened to include the entirety of I’m Age. I ordered it right away. I also found a documentary on Kanopy called Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones.
The book, simply titled Idyl - I’m Age, was an eye-opening experience. Idyl starts off a little more like what you’d expect from the pages of National Lampoon. The first twenty-two strips feature predominantly nude women, and a man (or maybe different men), hooded and with a giant phallic nose, shows up from time to time. There are children here and there too, also nude. There’s an air of casual cruelty for humor’s sake here and there: one boy confesses his love to a little girl until she falls off a rock, at which point he turns his attention to another girl nearby. A woman is stomped on by a giant. A turtle is mistaken to be immortal and thrown off a cliff. The women are generally kind of aloof, with no real past suggested or future hinted at, simply existing in the present and pondering their surroundings. The phallic-nosed men have an arrogance to them, sometimes criticizing the women in the strips where they appear, only to wind up being the punchline themselves.
But then there’s a change: the book titles the next batch of strips as Idyl in Excess. These strips all star a pregnant woman, whose name matches the title. As Jones herself puts it in Better Things, “Idyl was pregnant, but she was never to have the baby. She was a woman fulfilled, and expectant of something happening that hadn’t happened yet, roaming around in her world discovering things.” Idyl never encounters any other humans in her strips, only interacting with various animals, flowers, a tree, a dinosaur, and some rocks. In other words, nature.
This is also when it becomes more elliptical, and the crude violence of the previous strips is gone, replaced with Idyl’s meandering thoughts. “Being alive is just about the best way I know to get dead,” a line she speaks at the end of one strip has been stuck in my head ever since reading it.
This shift, with a recurring pregnant character and different approach to humor, is somewhat explained by a story that Michael Kaluta tells in Better Things. Jones turned in a strip to National Lampoon one day, a poetic thing featuring rats in every panel, the only strip without any humans in it. The editor asked where the naked girl was, telling Jones that they publish the strip because it has a naked girl in it. So Jeff gave them Idyl herself, and Kaluta ends this story by stating, “it was a conscious decision for her to become pregnant so that they’d get a girl, but Jeff would get [her] way. Which is, I’m doing my stories, and you can’t fuck this girl. I’m sorry, she’s pregnant.” I love this. Again, apart from some of those earlier strips, Jones does not sexualize the nude women she draws, and clearly rejects the notion that her women should be drawn for the male gaze. It also says a lot about National Lampoon that they let her do whatever she wanted, so long as a naked woman was involved.
I’m Age continues to be my favorite of the two strips, though it is very similar. The biggest difference between the two is how Jones drew them: Idyl was typically done on a nine panel grid, and inked with a brush, utilizing heavy shadows and more detail. I’m Age is inked in a much scratchier manner with a pen, with fewer solid blacks and much more hatching to give its characters and setting volume. There are fewer panels per strip too, Jones working mostly with a six panel grid and cutting things down to four panels in later strips. It’s lighter, it breathes in a way I’m simply not used to seeing in comics. In Heavy Metal especially, comics would be crammed with so many intricate details and colors, the opposite of her bold simplicity.
I’m Age follows various women, most of them predominantly nude until later strips, musing about their surroundings similarly to Idyl. More frequently here we have multiple women interacting, and the only male presence comes from a little boy or two. Men are suggested, hinted at with an air of fear and death. Nature still plays a role, and the setting, with early strips including cave paintings, suggests a prehistoric time.
I don’t always grasp what the joke is, or what it is Jones is trying to say through these women, but there’s still just something that draws me in and compels me to linger on each strip, beyond the simple beauty of each line she puts down on paper. I want to be like these women and live in this open world with them.
As much as I enjoy having these strips collected together, there are a couple of issues with Idyl - I’m Age that I need to address. First is, it’s not actually complete. There is one I’m Age strip missing, and I guess the book was never reprinted since the publisher includes a print of it with each order as well as sharing a JPEG to print yourself if you’ve got the right sized paper to do so. I imagine it’s due to the same production error leading to this strip being missing, but there’s also one strip in particular that’s printed twice in the book, and I’m not sure which spot is the correct one for it, where it’s supposed to be.
The other issue is more personal: the book never once uses Jones’ full name. Catherine is completely missing. On top of that, the book, including George Pratt’s forward and afterward, never once mentions her transition, which I think is so crucial to better understanding why she made these comics. It’s so clear how much she identified with these women she drew, and to ignore that just feels wrong. Again, Jones changed her name in 1998 when she started HRT and came out as a woman. She never really seemed to care that friends continued to call her Jeff and use male pronouns, and trans voices were especially rare back then, but it still rubs me the wrong way. In Better Things, only one person, John Mayo, who only shows up in one clip, uses female pronouns for her. There are so many comic creators and illustrators I admire who appear in the documentary (and unfortunately, noted sexual predator Neil Gaiman) and seeing all of them repeatedly misgender her and make a half-assed effort to discuss her transitioning (something it's clear none of them really understood) was just supremely uncomfortable, especially when at times it felt like the director was more excited about meeting and interviewing all of these artists than she was in telling Jones' story. Everyone is so eager to discuss her art and how it impacted them, but when it comes to her transition they just casually go “oh I don’t care,” unable to see that her femininity is integral to the beauty of her art. Especially when you can see for yourself in the documentary how transitioning saved her life and made her whole.
Jones passed away in 2011, not long after her segments of Better Things had been filmed. Idyl - I’m Age was released in 2015. There’s no excuse for omitting her full name.
Still, the strips themselves are beautiful, the way she inked is simply magical, and I’m glad to have it on my shelf. Jones was an incredible artist and these comics are a big inspiration. If future Asada & Mischa strips start getting weirder and more sparse, you’ll know why. 🪐
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Brett, Thank you for a very eye opening article. It is enriching to learn of such a dedicated artist and how she reflected her own life into her creations. Your last sentence left me wondering, why weirder and less frequent? Planet Nude appears to be receptive of pushing the envelope and offering a large forum for sharing, discovery, and reflection. I hope to actually see more.