Joshua Hechinger still hasn’t reached drinking age (that comes in July), but he’s already crafted a true comics gem in Grave Doug Freshley, a mash-up of comedy, horror and Spaghetti Western.

Cowboy and tough guy Doug Freshley takes a bullet to the head at the story’s start, but that’s not enough to stop him from a zombified revenge mission in the five-issue series from Archaia Studios Press. Hechinger recently spoke with me about where that idea came from, his love of Westerns and his upcoming projects.

COMICMIX: First, I’m curious about your choice to do a Western. Is that a genre you’ve long held an interest in? How did the idea of the book come about?

JOSH HECHINGER: I didn’t really care about Westerns one way or another for a while, actually. And then in high school, a friend of mine lent me The Good, The Bad and The Ugly… Pow, that was it. Instant Western fan.

As for Doug, well, a few weeks after watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, I was doodling in class instead of paying attention. And I doodled this zombie cowboy and a kinda Huck Finn-y kid. I didn’t really do anything more with it, but it sort of hung around in the back of my head until Marv [artist mpMann] came calling.

CMix: How much comics writing had you done previously?

JH: Well, this is my first real book. But I’d been writing comics nobody else saw since eighth grade or so, and I wrote something like 400 pages of various scripts in a year and change of college. I was doing three to five pages a session, twice a day. Although to be fair, most of it was kinda completely crap.

But anyway, by the time I started Doug, I at least knew how to sit down and just pound out pages. The pages probably weren’t crackling with genius, but I find it easier to clean up something than to nail it on the first draft anyway. The important thing was that I wasn’t sitting down and getting psyched-out by a blank page.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series of reviews of the five books coming out from DC’s Minx imprint this year. Previously, Van Jensen reviewed Rebecca Donner’s Burnout. -RM]

There’s a touch of classic teen lit like The Babysitters Club to Minx’s Plain Janes series of books, as it features the not-so-original plot of a disparate group of teenaged girls bonding together for a cause and surviving adolescence.

That the series, with the second installment Janes in Love ($9.99) out in September, transcends its genre owes to writer Cecil Castellucci, who takes the conventional setup and spins it in unconventional ways.

The group of friends – all named Jane – in this case unite for the cause of art, seeking to beautify their small town through subversive means. Picking up from the first installment, the main Jane is caught up at Valentine’s Day with affection for two boys and a lack of funds to continue her art.

While those seem simple enough problems, the true center of the book are the unresolved tensions from the terrorist attack in the first volume, which sends main Jane’s mother into a near-coma. Subtly, all the plot threads take a similar tone as the characters, teenagers and otherwise, struggle with fears and insecurities.

The subtle complexities of the characters are captured with reserved perfection by Castellucci and rendered with great skill by artist Jim Rugg, who wields a masterful command of expressions in each panel.

The two [[[Plain Janes]]] books not only have been the best of the books Minx has published thus far, but also among the very best of young adult fiction. Sure, the cover’s pink and has flowers on it, but this is a comic for just about everybody.

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) gmail (dot) com.