EDIE ERNST: USO SINGER, ALLIED SPY

An absolutely enthralling story of love and sex and the tenterhooks of espionage, Brooke McEldowney’s Edie Ernst: USO Singer, Allied Spy (96 8.5x11-inch pages, b/w; Pib Press paperback, $19.99) reprints the  longest continuity in modern comic strip history. McEldowney’s superb comic strip, brimming, always, with mature topics given a light humorous touch and a profound humanity, 9 Chickweed Lane is what a newspaper comic strip could be if they all grew up. The Edie Ernst story ran an unprecedented 11 months from late 2009 to mid-2010. With its length, McEldowney violated most syndicate dicta about such things, and when he got to Edie’s love life, he also violated syndicate prohibitions against alluding to human sexuality. (But he’s done that before — always with taste and discretion, and for the sake of the story.)

For the book reincarnation, McEldowney dropped some strips because, he says, “they digress from the story in book form.” But “in propitiation, and for the fun of it, I’ve thrown in some new art.” “For the fun of it” probably describes how he approaches doing his daily and Sunday strip: as published, the final product fairly hums with the good time he’s having.

The eleven-month tale is told by the grandmother at 9 Chickweed Lane about her World War II career as a USO singer. Edie, the grandmother, was, during the 1940s, a spectacularly seductive beauty. She was recruited to spy on German POWs and managed to fall in love with (1) her American handler and (2) a German officer who was a superb singer. The former was sent off on a suicidal mission and presumed dead. Edie was separated from the latter at the end of the War. Both, however, show up about ten years later. How Edie deals with two men, both of whose love she returns, passionately, is the rest of McEldowney’s tale, which he tells with his customary narrative flourishes of humor and compassion.

Pib Press is McEldowney’s imprint, so you should order directly from him at either pibpress@gmail.com or Pib Press, P.O. Box 942, Kennebunk, Maine 04043. You won’t regret it.