Soulless Mate (comic story)

Soulless Mate was a standalone Jenny Everywhere comic story written by Alex Hernandez and illustrated by Scott D. M. Simmons. It was last in the official reading order of the original Barbelith Jenny Everywhere stories, although it may not have been the last in release order, and was branded as “A Spiritual Sequel to a Portion of My Bloody Valentine”, the first story in the reading order.

Jenny Everywhere and her human boyfriend David are headed to their first date at a concert. However, Jenny absent-mindedly paging through the Plasmanomicon as she shifts to get them there causes the pair to instead end up in another universe, a “Heaven” inhabited by Hindu Gods. There, they meet Shiva, who cast them out into a “dense”, decaying universe. The two are soon restrained by the demon-like wretches who inhabited it, with David being tortured by a Cactus Demon whose spines tear at his face; however, thanks to Jenny's verbal guidance, he is soon able to reach a spiritual awakening which empowers him enough to frighten away the demons and, seemingly, restore his soul to him. After sharing a first kiss which Jenny, he helped her lead the demon-creatures to rebel against their unjust gods. As they reemerge in Heaven, Shiva congratulates the two, as this was in fact what he had meant to happen all along.

Worldbuilding

Jenny

Jenny Everywhere can read Sanskrit.
Shiva attempts to convince Jenny that she is nothing but “a delusional child who's suffered a horrible car accident, and is living out the last days of life in these fractured fantasies”.

Universes

Jenny Everywhere and David reside in a relatively mundane universe.
They end up first in a realm which Shiva describes as “his vast and personal heaven”.
Shiva sends them down into a “dense”, decaying universe which he metaphorically describes as Hell, although it does not appear to be the same as the Hell where David apparently left his soul, of which Shiva is also aware. As it is denser than Jenny and David's home universe, their electrons spin faster than those of everything there, giving them special abilities if they can clear their minds.

Other

Shiva was originally a “shepherd of souls”.

Continuity

This story picks up the narrative of Universe A's Jenny and her boyfriend, begun in COMIC: My Bloody Valentine.
A flashback to the events of this story was briefly seen in COMIC: The Legend of Jenny Everywhere.

Behind the scenes

Homages

Paul Hoppe, creator of many works featuring Jenny Everywhere and Jenny Nowhere, created a portrait of Jenny and David's merged godlike form from this story in 2012.

Read online

Soulless Mate was originally available on the original Jenny Everywhere website, and later on the Shifter Archive. Both are now offline. However, the latter page was recorded on the Internet Archive, allowing us to reproduce the ten pages of Soulless Mate here.