Cars (comic story)

Cars
First page of the story.
Contents
Hero(es)	Jenny Everywhere
Featuring	Jenny's friend
Setting	Unnamed bar, unnamed universe
Technical Specs
Length	5 page
Format	Black & White, Pencils
Crew
Writer(s)	Steven Wintle
Artist(s)	Steven Wintle
Background
Dates	February 6, 2002‎
Original link	[1]

Cars was a standalone Jenny Everywhere comic story created in 2002. It is unclear whether the story is complete in its current form (having been intentionally hastily-created as part of a twenty-four hour comics challenge‎) or if more pages and/or inking of the existing pages was planned. The comic is notable as one of the only two Jenny stories ever created by Steven Wintle, Jenny's principal creator; as such, the version of Jenny used is almost exactly the one in the original public-domain sketch created by Wintle.

If the story is in fact considered finished in its existing form, then it holds the distinction of being the first completed story to star Jenny Everywhere, having been released in February of 2002, several months before the usual candidate for the title, Name's Not Down.

Contents

Plot

Jenny Everywhere is performing at a bar when she spots someone in the audience and begins flirtatiously singing to them. She invites them for a walk, and, while walking hand in hand, begins telling them that she liked them 'the second [she] saw [them]' in the audience, which causes the person to realise that Jenny doesn't remember them.

Worldbuilding

Jenny

• This story features a version of Jenny with the standard scarf, goggle, short hair and Asian features. She wears a small flower hair-clip.

Universes

• This story features no shifting and takes place all in one nondescript universe.

Continuity

• Steven Wintle returned to Jenny's relationship with her unnamed friend from this story in his single other Jenny Everywhere comic, COMIC: Tribute, where the bar they usually meet up at is dubbed the Flat Earth.
• This story's incarnation of Jenny was one of the incarnations glimpsed by the Nommo in COMIC: Say The Word.

Behind the scenes

Background

Steven Wintle created the story as part of a twenty-four hour comics challenge.‎ He would later attempt another Jenny comic for the same challenge in 2003, but fail to complete it within the time limit; consequently, the story was never posted. He would go on to participate in the challenge again in 2005, producing COMIC: Tribute.

The image file of the fifth and final known page of the story, as released on Geocities, is actually Page6.jpg; there is no actual Page 5. It is unclear if this was a typo or if a missing Page 5 was never completed - the twenty-four hour comic format making it entirely possible that a fifth page was planned, skipped with the intention of being completed later, and never reached before the time limit was up.

Indeed, the question of whether the story in its current form is actually complete or not has been a subject of some debate, especially because it is one of the only comics created by Jenny's original creator and because, if complete, it is a candidate for the first finished Jenny story. Wintle (under his username "moriarty") posted about the story in the "Collective Comics Project." Barbelith thread with very little commentary - first posting a (now offline and unarchived) preview image apparently from the third page on February 5, 2002, with the note that it was "from [his] 24 hour comic", before posting the link to the comic, hosted on Geocities, early the next morning, with the commentary "So...tired...". None of this contains any indication that the story is unfinished, nor do any of the complimentary replies to the post seem to assume that this is the case; indeed, the very fact that Wintle posted the story can potentially be seen as evidence that the comic is complete, given the fact that Wintle attempted the twenty-four comic challenge again in 2003, was unable to complete the comic in time, and declared the attempt a failure, never posting the comic in question.

However, the earliest known version of the now-defunct Shifter Archive's page on the story recorded it as being unfinished, appending the following note:

This was originally apart of an ill-fated 24 hour comic project (That's where you try to make a comic at a rate of 1 comic per hour)

—The Shifter Archive

The page also featured the note that page 5 of the comic appeared to be missing, presumably due to the fact that, as noted above, the Geocities upload of the comic refers to page 5 as 'Page6.jpg'.

The Shifter Archive's commentary must be taken only as speculation, as it does not appear that the Archive had access to any further information about the story than what can be gleaned from the original Barbelith posting. The uninked artwork, seemingly-unresolved and (without context) somewhat obscure plot, and the aforementioned file name would likely have caused the Archive to assume that the story was unfinished, but the context in which the story was created gives rise to the possibility that the sketchy quality of the art was intentional and that, rather than being the orphaned beginning of a longer story, it was only intended as a plotless vignette focusing on Wintle's Jenny's difficulty connecting with ordinary human life despite her desire to do so, a theme revisited in Wintle's second released Jenny story, COMIC: Tribute, the knowledge of which makes Cars much easier to interpret as it stands.

The second version of the Shifter Archive's page listed the date of the story as "circa 2003?", which is known to be incorrect. This raises the slight possibility that the Archive had mistakenly conflated Cars with the unfinished 2003 story, although it is more likely a coincidental misdating.

Despite this lack of concrete evidence from either of the two known sources concerning the comic, there is still a very real possibility that the comic is in fact unfinished. The original twenty-four hour comic challenge, as created by Scott McCloud, specifically called for the creation of "a complete 24-page comic" within the time limit. Although Wintle never specifically mentioned this page goal when working on his 2003 comic, he did link to McCloud's webpage, and it is notable that COMIC: Tribute, Wintle's unambiguously-finished 2005 twenty-four hour comic, is in fact twenty-four pages (not counting the cover). This would seem to indicate that Cars's status as a five-page comic makes it very likely that it is not in fact a completed work, despite the lack of notes to this effect on the occasion of the comic's posting - also raising the possibility that this lack of specific clarifications about the comic's status (and the Shifter Archive's later assertion) was simply because it would have been obvious to those familiar with the rules of the challenge that the comic was unfinished due to its page count.

Without further evidence, however, it is impossible to be completely certain about the comic's status.

The song which Jenny sings is "You're All I've Got Tonight" by American new wave band The Cars, who are presumably the source of the story's title.

Read online

Cars was originally available under the /flatearthcomics/ domain on Geocities, but has since gone offline. We reproduce its six pages here.

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