When Casting Calls (comic story)
When Casting Calls is a Jenny Everywhere comic story written by Jason Frank, illustrated by Scott Wegener and coloured by Lawrence Basso, with a cover and backcover by Christian Ward, additional art by Nelson Evergreen, and lettering by Jeff Powell. Designed as an attempt at a “proper” Jenny Everywhere comic book, it was branded as an actual “Jenny Everywhere #1” and released commercially as a print-on-demand physical comic on IndyPlanet, as well as being available for download as an encrypted PDF.
Contents
Plot
Jenny Everywhere has been helping out a movie studio. She is messing around in a Western set when her friend Walt interrupts her play to take her to see the boss of the company, who explains that he has learned that Jenny is an adventurer and hires her to find Barbara Mattel, the studio's top star, who appears to have gone missing. Jenny and Walt begin looking for her and soon find themselves in a perilous chase with the numberless henchmen of the sinister supervillain Alexander — their mission rendered all the harder when it turns out that these henchmen have good team spirit and instantly recognise Jenny and Walt as intruders even after they pull the old “capture two henchmen and steal their outfits” trick.
However, taken to see Alexander, they discover that Barbara actually moved in with him willingly, eloping from the studio; they believe that the other is the only one who understands them, Alexander because he feels a genius supervillain has no place in the modern world, Barbara because she is unable to relate to people less “perfect” than she is. Though not particularly drawn to either of the pair, Jenny realises the best way to help them is to shift them to universes where they'll fit in, something to which they both enthusiastically agree. Jenny returns to the movie studio to find that the boss has decided that he didn't want a star like Barbara anymore anyway, and instead wants Jenny to become the studio's new shining star. Thoroughly uninterested, a panicking Jenny shifts away right from his office with hurried goodbyes.
Worldbuilding
Jenny
- Jenny Everywhere appears in an incarnation who wears beige trousers, a dark blue shirt with a large red star design, black goggles with red lenses, and a white scarf with red trimming.
Universes
- This story mostly takes place in a largely mundane universe with the occasional supervillain, where Jenny has taken a job as a movie actor.
- The metafictional prose introduction sees an in-universe Jason Frank reflect on his encounter with Jenny in his own universe, in Brooklyn.
- Barbara Mattel moves to Dimension 12:51:908 and Alexander to Dimension 87:50:545.
Other
- While with Walt, Jenny has been secretly sleeping on the studio backlot — on the couch in the middle of the set of the sitcom Everyone Is Ambivalent Towards Miranda, to be exact.
- A Killer of Demons comic is seen.
- On the back-cover illustration, Jenny is seen reading the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Multiverse.
Continuity
- This story's version of Jenny later appeared as the host of the short-lived in-universe Jenny Everywhere Twitter account.
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 in 2013.
Read online
The story is still available for purchase, both as an encrypted PDF and as print-on-demand, on IndyPlanet.
