Jane’s habit of losing her clothes (in the best possible taste) proved invaluable for maintaining morale during the conflict, and it inspired a fondly remembered BBC TV adaptation (which has criminally never been released commercially, so don’t bother searching for it on Amazon), as well as a couple of less successful feature films. The strips ‘Hush-Hush House’ and ‘Jane’s Rival’, which appear near the beginning of this volume, provided the basis for the first series of the TV show. Despite supposedly being a ‘funny’ strip, ‘Jane’s Rival’ contains some decent espionage thriller elements in between the wit and the wardrobe malfunctions. The same can be said of several other stories, such as ‘Factory Girl’ and ‘Behind the Front’.

Other compilations have tended to reissue smaller amounts of material from the same wartime period, though a 1983 book, simply entitled ‘Jane’, does include a 1951 strip, ‘Nature in the Raw’, alongside a reprint of ‘Hush-Hush House’.

Apart from some dated national stereotypes, the only real downside of ‘Jane at War’ is that its strict dating criterion means we join our heroine partway through a story (a romantic comedy narrative which quickly shifts gear to reflect real-world events) and leave her partway through another, ‘Jane’s Summer Idle’. It would have been good to read what happened next.

You can now do so, by the way, by subscribing to (or joining a library that has access to) The British Newspaper Archive, which boasts a near complete collection of the ‘Daily Mirror’ from 1938 to 1979, in PDF format. However, navigating through thousands of PDF pages is not as pleasurable a reading experience as turning the pages of a book – like this one.

The ‘Jane’ strip ran for decades between 1932 and 1959, with sequel series featuring her descendants in the early 1960s and late 1980s, so there’s plenty of scope for compilations from other eras. Why none have ever been published is beyond me. Until the day when any such follow-ups materialise, ‘Jane at War’ remains the most complete collection of her exploits ever to appear in print.