Spores of Doom (comic story)

Spores of Doom
First page of the story.
Other Titles	March of the Monerans
Contents
Hero(es)	Jenny Everywhere
Villain(s)	Monerans
Featuring	A shepherd
Setting	Unnamed universe
Technical Specs
Length	2 pages
Format	Black & White
Crew
Writer(s)	Grant Balfour
Artist(s)	Paul McCann
Background
Dates	2003 (script completed) August 27, 2005
Original link	[1] [2]

Spores of Doom, also known as March of the Monerans, was an unfinished Jenny Everywhere comic story written by Grant Balfour and drawn by Paul McCann. Only two pages are currently known to exist - it is unclear if they are the only pages that were ever completed or if more pages were completed but never released. A full script is known to have existed, but is lost.

Contents

Plot

As huge gelatinous monsters called the Monerans threaten a shepherd's flock, Jenny Everywhere tries to make a stand to defend it. However, her attempt to throttle a Moneran with her scarf proves pointless, and the two humans end up absorbed by the Moneran.

Worldbuilding

Jenny Everywhere

• This story features an incarnation of Jenny Everywhere who wears a very long, striped scarf. She is short and stout, and wears a plain skirt. She notably has the flower pin in her hair.

Universes

• This story entirely takes place in one universe.

Continuity

• The same incarnation of Jenny Everywhere appeared in an untitled one-panel comic by the same author.

Behind the scenes

The unillustrated script for Spores of Doom was fully completed by Grant Balfour and was posted for download from the Jenny Everywhere Blogspot website on July 16, 2003, alongside the script of COMIC: By The Book, also by Balfour, which was later drawn by Withiel S. Black. This website is now offline, and the downloadable PDFs were never archived, meaning that these scripts are no longer known to be extant.

On January 8, 2004, John Miers (under his Barbelith username "lentil") posted in the thread "Jenny Everywhere Clearing House and Update Point" to announce that he would be drawing Balfour's script, noting that the user "sleazenation" had convinced him to do so.

My next Jenny story will be "Spores of Doom", scripted by our very own Grant Balfour! It's available to view on the jenny website, so that in a year's time people can compare the text to my illustrations and tut "ooh, I wouldn't have done it like that"

—John Miers

On October 4, 2003, Miers posted again to mention that, due to a crisis in his work life, he had been unable to begin work on the comic, and apologised to Balfour. In a response to his comment, the user "Tamayyurt" described the story as "the one with the mushroom spores", mentioning that it was "great", with which Miers agreed, promising that he would finish the comic eventually.

On May 2, 2005, the user sleazenation posted:

I'd like to see Meludreen take a stab at another of grant's scripts... the one with the the giant all consuming Paramecium...

—sleazenation

In response, the user "meludreen", a pseudonym of Paul McCann - later to be known as "iamus", the sole name to which the story was credited on the Shifter Archive - posted

I think that producing artwork for somebody else could be a good experience. Having somebody's expectations on me might give me a boot up the arse too.

—Paul McCann

, later following this with the comment that he would be illustrating Balfour's script for the forseeable future, with Balfour clarifying that:

Withiel went with the Bible one, so Meludreen got the giant germ/mushroom one

—Grant Balfour

The two known pages of Spores of Doom were posted on the Barbelith Forums on August 27, 2005 by meludreen as a preview, noting at the time that they intended to colour them at a later point. These two pages were later recovered and posted on the Shifter Archive, which was at the time unable to determine the date of creation or writer of the story, crediting it only to "iamus" with a qualifying question mark; although that page, too, is now offline, these pages were saved on the Internet Archive, allowing us to reproduce the two known pages of the story below. The Shifter Archive's page for the story also mentioned that it was "Possibly also known as: “March of the Monerans”", although it is unclear where this title originated, as the Jenny Everywhere blog and all known Barbelith posts had referred to it as "Spores of Doom".

In 2006, Iamus posted a fully-coloured version of the second page to the original thread, noting at the time that they still intended to finish the story at that point despite the relatively long period of time which had elapsed since taking on the project, and noting that it was at that time "nine-page(s)... fourteen, broken up by my layouts" - seeming to imply that more than the two previously-posted pages had been, if not fully completed, at least planned out. No further updates seem to have been posted.

A panel from the colourised version of the page was posted on the Jenny Everywhere Facebook page on May 9, 2016, where it was credited to Paul McCann and Grant Balfour - the first time that these names were publicly associated with the story instead of their usernames.

Read online

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  Page 1/2.

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  Page 2/2.

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  Colourised version of the second page

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  Colourised panel