Good news, Wild West fans! It looked a little shaky at one point during its run, but in the end animation fans united to successfully fund Piko Interactive’s The Legend of Calamity Jane: Box-Set DVD and Comic Kickstarter campaign, which will collect the entire 13-episode series, taken from the original masters and presented in its original running order.
(The unfortunate shakiness was caused by a complete, head-scratching lack of interest in the project by comic book, animation, and entertainment websites that never bothered to post the press material—including promotional art—to let potentional fans and backers know there was a Kickstarter campaign going on. So, thanks go out to the fans who discovered and backed it, and then tweeted about it—that helped a lot!)
In case you’re unaware, The Legend of Calamity Jane was a Western series that appeared on the Kids’ WB network in 1997 and presented a heavily fictionalized, heavily stylized take on the life and times of the real-life Martha Jane Canary, a gunslinging, bullwhip-toting cowgirl who was famously known across the United States as “Calamity Jane.” It starred Barbara Weber-Scaff (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) as the voice of Jane, with Frank W. Welker (Megatron and others of the Transformers cartoons and movies, Freddy of Scooby-Doo) as Jane’s sidekick, Joe Presto, and Clancy Brown (Superman: The Animated Series, Highlander) as Wild Bill Hickok.
The Legend of Calamity Jane: Box-Set DVD and Comic comes with The Legend of Calamity Jane: The Devil Herself, a full-color comic book for Piko’s Virtual Comics imprint, written by Steven A. Roman (that’s me!) and drawn and colored by Eliseu “Zeu” Gouveia (Lorelei: Sects and the City and the Saga of Pandora Zwieback comics). It picks up the continuity from the series, moving the action to the present day. Jane is on the hunt for a stolen relic: a gun that belonged to her old friend Wild Bill Hickok. But more suprising than the identity of the gun’s current owner—a series villain from her past—is the even bigger mystery it sets up: How can Calamity Jane still be alive today, and not looking a day older than she did in the 1870s?
So now Piko will be turning out the DVD sets in the months ahead, and Zeu will get to work on completing The Devil Herself. There’s talk of making the DVDs and comic available to a general audience after the backers receive their copies; if so, I hope you’ll enjoy checking out Jane’s newest adventure!
