The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles (comic story)

The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles was a Jenny Everywhere webcomic created by Benj Christensen, with Scott D. M. Simmons illustrating the third of its three arcs. The stories revolved around Jenny Everywhere's fight against the agents of the villainous Chaos, but several different incarnations of Jenny, sometimes at different points in their lives, were featured non-linearly in the chapters.

Notably, Christensen released the various characters and species introduced in the comic to the public domain as truly open-source, with no paragraph or attribution needed.

While the monster is busy climbing out of the crater created by her fall, however, Jenny is confronted with Magistrate Harless, the leader of the commune of pacifists. Opposed to her stated intent of continuing her fight with Nyx, he telepathically paralyses her, only to be crushed underfoot by Jenny's giant companion Raleigh who materialises by her side. Raleigh informs Jenny that the monster she has been fighting is Chaos's disciple Nyx, whom the two, and the rest of the Wilson's crew, have met before.

Nyx reemerges in a new form, however, and the raygun hastily shifted into her hand by Jenny fails to be any use against her. She stabs Raleigh, forcing enny to teleport him back to the Wilson and continue the fight alone, trading her gun for a sword. This new weapon proves more effective, but after she has sliced Nyx apart, the monster warns her that she chose a body that would cause a huge nuclear blast if she died.

Jenny barely has time to shift herself and Julian into the Infinite before Nyx's body detonates, destroying Julian's homeworld. After taking him to another actual universe, she explains the Multiverse and Chaos to him, and offers him the opportunity to join the crew of the Wilson.

Chapter 2: Lit

In an apparent flashback to the times before the Michael incident, Jenny, spacewalking in a huge exosuit-spacesuit hybrid, encounters a radiant humanoid. She tells Chuck, her contact onboard the Wilson, that it's nothing to worry about, however. The humanoid explains that he is the Illumination, an Abstract and former companion to Michael.

She brings him onboard, but their conversation is interrupted by the sounding of an alarm (which also prevents them from noticing that Chaos has come onboard). Amy is able to trace the signal to its source and find an image of it: Odious, another, much more dangerous Abstract. With Michael off “testting synch calibrations with Stix”, Jenny has to take a reluctant Amy down planetside to deal with whatever Odious is doing.

Chapter 3: The Short Road to Nowhere

In another universe, the local Jenny is Jenny Jacobs, who acts as a teenaged superhero under the name of the Shifter in the Wisconsin city of Westbrook, fighting off threats from other universes which keep falling into her world, such as an Ogre wielding a flail and shouting gibberish.

One night, while looking out for dangers on the rooftops, Jenny sees a meteor falling into a street. Hopping to the crater, she finds an unblemsihed crystal orb, which she brings home. She finds her father, who knows her secret, doing some tinkering in the garage, and helps him by shifting in a bottle of glue from another universe after he runs out. She then heads to her room, where her sister Julie sees the bauble; Jenny claims that it is a gift from her boyfriend Alan.

Jenny and Julie are then called to the dinner table by their mother, alongside their father and their little sister Jordan. While the Jacobs family eat in good cheer, however, a strange negative-image double of Jenny grows out of the orb she left in her bedroom. Jenny walks back in to find the doppelganger looking at herself curiously in the mirror. She explains that she is a Vertginite, one of a species of alien doppelgangers. Jenny, revealing herself to be struggling with some kind of depression, surprises the duplicate by offering to let her take over her life. However, Jenny recovers her senses when the duplicte states that when she spoke of “taking over”, she meant taking over the entire Earth.

She shifts the two of them out of the house and begins to fight the Vertginite. However, the latter realises that as Jenny's duplicate, she also has shifting powers, and she begins to use them, albeit a little haphazardly. Finally, Jenny manages to get the duplicate — “Jenny Nowhere” — to confess that she was sent to Earth by Chaos, although she insists that she doesn't know anything about Chaos's wider plans. Stunned, Jenny lets the duplicate run away, and is left wondering what Chaos might want with this incarnation of her.

Worldbuilding

Jenny

Chapters 1 and 2 of this story feature a Jenny with the standard Jenny Everywhere look of a lean Asian young woman with short hair, wearing a scarf and goggles; her scarf is a grayish beige with red strips on each end. While adventuring with Michael Wherever onboard the Wilson, this Jenny had dyed one lock of her hair crimson, but she seems to have abandoned this trait by the time she meets Julian.
Chapter 3 features “Jenny Jacobs”, alias “the Shifter”, a teenaged superhero in Westbrook, Wisconsin and the adopted daughter of Simon Jacobs and his wife. Neither her day clothes nor her red superhero outfit include goggles or a scarf, although the superhero outfit does include an “S” logo on the chest that resembles the scarf of the previous Jenny.
Various other Jennies are glimpsed in the Infinite, with the Wilson Jenny noting that although most are just passing through like herself, some live there permanently, “performing various tasks”.
Jenny is shown to be able to turn people in the realities she visits into Anchors; this process, which momentarily stuns the Anchor, allows her to gain native-like knowledge of the dimension, and also shifts her appearance subtly to match.

Universes

This story opens in a universe where the pacifist community governed by Magistrate Harless.
Jenny shifters herself and Julian to a a different universe with a red sky.
Odious is reported as being active in Universe Juliet-Two-Two-Six.
Jenny Jacobs lives on Earth in an an outwardly normal universe, notwithstanding the threats from other universes which keep ending up in Westbrook and which she must fight off.

Other

The Illumination is an Abstract. He wears a high-tech collar which keeps his power in check. He notes that he “did not name himself”.

Continuity

In Benj Christensen's earlier COMIC: Infinity Apartment, a very different incarnation of Jenny Everywhere from Jenny Jacobs ended up marrying a man named Alan. This Alan was a non-homicidal vampire, from a different universe than Jenny's, as well as a struggling artist. There is insufficient information in The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles, however, to strictly speaking conclude that its Alan, the off-screen boyfriend of Jenny Jacobs, was definitively a counterpart of that Alan, rather than some other love interest of Jenny's who happened to share the name.
Amy and the “Jenny Jacobs” Jenny made cameos at the interdimensional Christmas party in COMIC: Merry Christmas Everywhere.
In 2010, Benj Christensen created an untitled one-panel comic for Jenny Everywhere Day featuring Jenny, Michael and Chaos.
Michael also appeared in The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game, as well as the Abstracts, with a particular focus on Odious.
The Wilson, including Lit and Michael, later reappeared in PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere. Jenny's friendship with Lit was also mentioned in COMIC: Jenny Everywhere in the House of Terror and PROSE: Family Business.
The Abstracts were referenced in PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere, which also featured a part of Westbrook which had been integrated into the Redoubt; the narration noted that the city was very familiar to Jenny.
In PROSE: Morning After, when she suffered from shifter hangover, another version of Jenny got glimpses of this story's Jenny Jacobs's life, including her father and his workshop.

Behind the scenes

Homages

Paul Hoppe, creator of many works featuring Jenny Everywhere and Jenny Nowhere, created a portrait of this story's iteration of Jenny Nowhere in 2012.