Octobriana
Octobriana, also known as N. Pacenikov, was an immortal avenger who travelled in Time and Space in the Wonder Machine. The self-proclaimed “Spirit of the October Revolution”, hence her name, Octobriana was a communist hero who would often fight against the corruption and tyranny of allegedly communist regimes in the Cold War. Several versions of Octobriana across the Multiverse were familiar with Jenny Everywhere.
Description
Physical appearance
Octobriana usually appeared as a tall, athletic woman with big hair and a distinctive tattoo of a star on her forehead. (PROSE: The New Mission, VIDEO: Legacy of the Masque) Although most versions of her had light brown skin, (PROSE: The New Mission) others were white, with pale skin and blond hair. (VIDEO: Legacy of the Masque)
Personality
to be added
Powers & abilities
Octobriana was capable of carrying out a space mission. (PROSE: The New Mission)
Biography
As N. Pacenikov
One version of Octobriana was also known by the more conventional name of “N. Pacenikov”. She was listed, under both her legal name and the “Octobriana” alias, as an associate of Jenny Everywhere on a wanted poster put out for Jenny across her incarnations by an alliance of various organisations. (PROSE: Wanted for Questioning)
With Glendalf and Jenny
In the Collapsed Cosmos, Jenny Everywhere and Glendalf reminisced about an adventure during which they had besieged the Tower of Zirma with Octobriana. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Legacy of the Masque
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One version of Octobriana once crossed paths with Miss Masque around the same time as a version of Jenny Everywhere. This Octobriana was a tall fair-skinned woman with blond hair; she wore blood-red lipstick. (VIDEO: Legacy of the Masque)
Mission Doppleganger
In one universe, Octobriana was a dark-skinned woman with light brown hair. She was active during the Second World War as a top Soviet agent. After the planet Doppleganger unexpectedly appeared in the solar system, America and Russia came to an agreement for a joint space reconnaissance mission that would beat Germany to the potential prize, and ascertain whether there was any life on Doppleganger (and, if so, if it was hostile). Octobriana was sent as the Soviet representative while spy-smashing superhero Miss Victory acted as the American representative. Also on the team was Jenny Everywhere. The two were seen off by the mechanic Neeta as they left for space. (PROSE: The New Mission)
Behind the scenes
Origins
Octobriana is widely considered the predecessor to Jenny Everywhere as an “open-source comic-book hero”, willfully created to operate in the public domain. She was an influence on the Barbelith community during the early stages of Jenny's creation in 2001, being cited by the Institute for the Future of the Book's Jenny Everywhere essay as Jenny's somewhat less successful “print prototype”.
Octobriana's origins are, however, somewhat murkier than Jenny's. The first two Octobriana stories, The Living Sphinx of the Kamchatka Radioactive Volcano 1934 and Octobriana and the Living Suns of Comrade Mao, were created by by the writer Petr Sadecký by reskinning unfinished comics he had commissioned from Czech artists Bohumil Konečný and Zdeněk Burian for an unpublished comic book series named Amazona, which would have no particular political background. Sadecky then brought his “Octobriana” stories to the West across the iron curtain without having actually paid Konečný and Burian for their work.
He published them in the book Octobriana and the Russian Underground not as original comics, but as part of a literary hoax claiming that they were only two extracts from a long-running series of Octobriana comics created in the 1960s by underground artists working in Soviet Russia. As Sadecky's claims included that “Octobriana's creators” had created her as a character that anyone could use, it is usually understood that he functionally released his creation Octobriana into the public domain. Unlike the Paragraph used for Jenny and related characters, Octobriana is not usually reckoned to require any kind of statement to be lawfully used in new productions.
