Edie Ernst: USO Singer, Allied Spy (96 8.5x11-inch pages, b/w; Pib Press paperback, $19.99) by Brooke McEldowney is an absolutely enthralling story of love and sex and the tenterhooks of espionage. This volume reprints the longest continuity in modern comic strip history, the ten-month tale told by the grandmother at McEldowney’s 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 prisoner 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 usual 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.
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