• Brother Juniper
  • Brother Juniper at Work and Play
  • Brother Juniper Strikes Again
  • Inside Brother Juniper
  • More Brother Juniper
  • Well Done, Brother Juniper
  • The Whimsical World of Brother Juniper
  • The Ecumenical Brother Juniper

The Rejuvenation Project

I am proud to reacquaint you with a comic character who, despite being hilarious and even timeless, has been housing spiders and dust-bunnies, out of the public eye of newspapers, for roughly three-and-a-half decades. And he hasn’t been sandwiched between the front and back covers of a paperback book for almost fifty years.

I remember coming across the Brother Juniper mass-market paperbacks at used-book sales and garage sales when I was a kid. I collected comic paperbacks so, by default, I collected Brother Juniper. Even though I was not directly able to relate to some of his antics, I found him engrossing.

Recently I was getting rid of some crawl-space clutter and came across one of my old Brother Juniper books. I cracked it open…and I laughed. I was curious about the other books that I suspected didn’t make it to my crawl clutter. As I shopped around I was appalled to learn that in those thirty years the world had zipped toward the future but seemed to have forgotten poor Brother Juniper.

He doesn’t show up at book sales any more. The internet contains a mass of information on just about everything but it is sorely lacking in regards to Brother Juniper. I knew I had to change that. I didn’t want this amazing little character to fall through the cracks.

I was delighted to discover I was just in time. I tracked down first printing trade paperback editions of the series so as to provide readers with the highest quality drawings possible – and show McCarthy and Brother Juniper the respect they deserve. It felt like I was acquiring the last copies of these rare books in existence. And there were only a handful of the mass-market paperbacks despite them being printed in larger runs.

After extensive pixel-level editing and remastering of the best possible source images, I present to you the “rejuvenated” Brother Juniper series. I hope you enjoy him as much as I do. And through digital archiving, we can both sleep easy knowing he will never be in danger of slipping through the cracks again. He will now be available to entertain for as long as the human race is around to laugh with him.

-A.Nicolai
Empty-Grave Publishing

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Lorraine October 18, 2014 at 7:13 am

Thank you…I was cleaning my house and found a book from my mother’s home. She loved to read us quick funnies from Brother Juniper. For just a moment she was with me as I read. I miss her dearly, in a pause of reflection I went to the computer (as we all do now)…and found your website, thank you from me, my mom and my family. God Bless you!

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Juniper October 11, 2012 at 3:15 pm

Thanks for the information Ellen! I’ll take a look into it to see if we can get a photograph and some additional information for the website.

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Ellen L. Oldis October 10, 2012 at 4:58 pm

I just visited my Catholic elementary school in the Bronx, NY – Holy Cross – for my 50th. reunion of 8th. grade graduation this past Sunday. It was a Franciscan church and school until a few years ago when it was turned over to the New York Archdiocese. We had a tour of the school and in the basement in a dark room, once used for storage, there is mural on the wall and one of the attendees said it was done by a Franciscan brother who was a cartoonist in the 1950s or 60s. Perhaps someone should take a look at it.

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