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Jenny and the Gang: An Interview With Joe Macaré & Nelson Evergreen

Today, October 24th, 2023, marks the 21st anniversary of Name’s Not Down, commonly regarded as the first completed Jenny Everywhere comic story. The work of Joe Macaré and Nelson Evergreen, it was formally released into the public domain on Jenny Everywhere Day last year alongside its sequel, Damn Fine Hostile Takeover, at my own instigation.

Having managed to track down both of these highly esteemed creators — long since departed from the Jenny Everywhere community — it was then my duty and my very great pleasure to conduct the first-ever joint Jenny-centric interview of two of the honoured few who shaped the character in her infancy.

Goggles on! Shift to Interviewspace in three… two… one…

How would you introduce yourselves to Jenny Everywhere readers?

Joe: My name is Joe Macaré (he/him), and I was raised in the Midlands (UK) and now live in the Midwest (US). I work in fundraising and communications, currently for a LGBT+ rights advocacy organization.

Nelson: I’m Neil Evans, a Welsh illustrator and comic artist occasionally going by the pseudonym Nelson Evergreen. I moved back to my hometown of Wrexham, North Wales in 2017, after twenty merry years in Brighton on the south coast of England. Illustration work this year includes a version of George Orwell’s 1984 (Oxford University Press), an anthology of weird — and often terrifying — Christmas folklore from around the globe (Cider Mill Press) and a 72 page graphic novel detailing the life of Mamie Phipps Clarke, the psychologist and activist whose research with her husband Kenneth was key to the abolition of racial segregation in US schools (Magination Press). Between jobs I’m busy with various ongoing personal labours of love, a couple of which are, after years of agonisingly glacial/troubled development, tantalisingly close to shareable. You can find me at neil-evans.net!

How did you originally learn about Jenny, and what led to your creating full comics starring the character? If those are different questions, what did you/do you like about the character — was it the open-source nature of the project? The appeal of Jenny herself as a protagonist? Something else?

J: I was active on the Barbelith message board from 2000-200something; closer to the truth to say that around the time Jenny Everywhere was created I was deeply, deeply enmeshed on that forum and in that community. It was my first internet “home” and so it’s probably accurate to say that I was initially drawn to the character because it was a Barbelith creative project and therefore something I wanted to be a part of. But also, when Steven “Moriarty” Wintle drew that first sketch, it definitely popped. Jenny, especially with the paragraph description attached, seemed like someone I knew, or someone I would like to know. An idealized avatar in some ways, but a plausible person in others.

N: I found Barbelith not long after I began “boxsetting” The Invisibles (very belatedly, it was close to the end of the comic’s run), and got quite addicted to the forum. It was a good place. I’d been messing about making music in bands for a few years, neglecting the illustration/comic side of things, and wanted to get back into drawing… and Barbelith happened to have lots of folk who were very good with words. So I posted a few pieces of work and asked if anyone had any comic scripts they wanted drawn, and I’m guessing Moriarty/Steven’s Jenny thread must have appeared at around that time or very shortly after..? Joe and I had certainly already touched on the idea of working together, so when Jenny appeared I think we just took it as read that that was “the one”. With Jenny, the initial appeal for me was the very unique nature of her potential: the dozens/hundreds/thousands of different ways the character could go, depending on who’s working with her. Also, I’m generally quite content in my own company - god knows, you have to be when you’re illustrating comics - but I loved the online hubbub around her at that time. There was something really… *cosy* about knowing others were working on their own versions of this character. So that was another huge part of the appeal, that sense of community.

Even though the multiversal gimmick is one of the first things people hear about Jenny, neither Name's Not Down nor Damn Fine Hostile Takeover make any direct reference to it. Was this a conscious choice, and if so, what motivated it?

J: For my part it was a conscious choice and it had a lot to do with the kind of comics I was reading at the time and being influenced by. At the time, complicated continuities and parallel universes seemed like slightly embarrassing excesses that characterized Marvel/DC superhero comics. They were prog rock, and were being challenged by a new wave of what Oni Press called “real mainstream” indie comics. Punchy, punky, often black & white, and very self-consciously influenced more by movies, TV, and music than by superhero comics. You could put fantastical elements in there but nothing that demanded a long explanation. Now, not only did the idea of making comics without multiverses become the mainstream, so that they were more like movies and TV, turn out to be onto a losing proposition and *the exact opposite of what happened,* for better or worse, but half the star writers and comics “thinkers” of the time later turned out to be predatory creeps. Whoops! But at the time, this was the cultural scene that shaped what I wanted to write. A comic you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading at the zine fair or dance party. Of course, goody nerd that I’ve always been, I couldn’t help but include Smallville references, so any attempt to be consciously cool was always somewhat doomed.

Were there any interesting, non-obvious inspirations or references baked into these stories, that you'd like to share?

J: Oh god, sometimes I think those scripts were nothing *but* references and it’s quite possible I’ve forgotten some of them now. I mean I’d be very embarrassed by all the Smallville references were it not for the fact that I remember that in the UK, the show was aired in the Sunday morning block which made it perfect hangover television. Clea was named after Clea Duvall. Bradley was named the somewhat obscure 2000 AD character. I think the most obscure influence/reference is having the character Lex, who considers himself a charmer, always introduce himself by saying “Greetings!” That’s a reference to eldest son Joey in the late 1980s BBC comedy series, Bread. That one was probably only noticed by other British people my age who grew up relating greatly to a show about a working class family with an absent father who constantly worried about money. The television I watched as a kid also led to me choosing Apollo Coffee as the name of the Starbucks stand-in, Starbuck and Apollo being a reference to the original Battlestar Galactica (the reboot had not yet come along!). “Damn Fine Hostile Takeover” is obviously extremely far from a serious piece of political polemic, but I do remember consciously wanting to introduce at least a small flavor of agitprop, compared to “Name’s Not Down” which is mostly just a power fantasy about beating up needlessly aggressive doormen to get into a club. The early political “analysis” I had at the time, which didn’t go much beyond big corporate chains being bad and small local independent coffee shops being good, was obviously influenced by stuff like Naomi Klein’s No Logo. And a sort of bastardized pop culture version of that, that had showed up in things like Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy. Oh, and a misunderstood El-P lyric. Speaking of Morrison, as befits a character created on Barbelith, that approach of “shove in references to everything you’re inspired by, watching, reading, or listening to at the particular moment you’re writing the comic” was very much inspired by Morrison in general and The Invisibles in particular. Although the Morrison comic I was most trying to emulate, at least in “Name’s Not Down” was Kill Your Boyfriend. But also, the whole reason I set those comics in a thinly fictionalized version of Brighton is because at the time, I was living in London and knew a bunch of people in Brighton (again, many of them through Barbelith, or adjacent to people I’d met via that place). They all seemed very impressive and cool to me at the time: people who put on club nights (It Came From The Sea), wrote about music (Careless Talk Costs Lives / Plan B), or on whom I just had a really big crush. I would take the train down to Brighton many weekends and it loomed large in my imagination. Although there’s no evidence of this on Google, I did not invent calling it “Right-On”: that’s another thing I stole or borrowed and can’t remember from whom or where.

How detailed were the scripts/how much freedom was there on the art end of things? Did you start from a synopsis, or a script, or a storyboard? Are there any notable ways in which the finished works differed from the original outline?

N: I can’t refer to them because I lost my copies in a hard drive calamity a couple of years later, but I remember being struck by how full of gusto and enthusiasm Joe’s scripts were. They really got me fired up to draw. The stage directions had the same infectious energy as the dialogue. I get some quite perfunctory scripts in my line of work — and that’s fine — but I do appreciate the ones that go above and beyond. I think I’m right in recalling the scripts as being very precise..? Joe had a very clear idea of the pacing, and how the story and gags would flow from panel to panel. The dialogue was all there from the start. I remember reading through and immediately getting a clear mental picture of how it was all going to look. It was very tightly scripted but not in a way that felt restrictive, it was very free and easy to illustrate. And it gave me plenty of leeway to come up with hordes of characters/creatures in those big ensemble panels.

J: I no longer have the scripts so I’m going from memory, but: I wrote pretty detailed scripts but I definitely had panels or entire pages where I encouraged Nelson Evergreen to cut loose and add whatever details and weird characters sprang to his mind. This is as good a place as any to state that I got phenomenally lucky when Nelson agreed to collaborate. Of all the artists who were kicking around Barbelith at the time and who were at all interested in the project, he was perhaps the most talented and I certainly can’t imagine anyone else who would have drawn those comics as well, or that they would have been received as warmly had they been drawn by anyone else.

A mysterious bald man makes conspicuous cameos in both of your long-form Jenny comics. What's the significance of this character? Some of us in the Jenny Everywhere Discord suggested he might have been meant to be Grant Morrison themself, owing to the focus of the forum on which Jenny originally appeared; short of that, we have no idea…

N: I *think* he was my addition, but again, without having the scripts to hand, my memory may be playing tricks on me. I mean, he *looks* like the sort of thing I’d have thrown in! I’ve always enjoyed the sight of one lone person looking utterly severe/unimpressed in the midst of general merriment, and I’m guessing I improvised MBM in one panel, he made me laugh, so I put him in another, and then another. Dave, the keyboard player in my band at the time, had that exact t-shirt, with the “Guides” logo, which he wore all the bloody time, and that must have seemed to me like the perfect outfit. So yeah, just a silly little running visual thing I threw in off the cuff to amuse myself really. Looking back at if from a distance, he *does* look quite significant, doesn’t he? Sorry! I feel like a right troll.

You've stated in the past that you included the Jenny Nowhere cliffhanger in Damn Fine Hostile Takeover without a conscious plan for what that story might be about — but did you ever have any plans for further Jenny stories that didn't materialise? If so, what were they about? And if you had to write the Nowhere story, what might it be like?

J: The only idea I remember from “The Two Jennys” was that Jenny Nowhere would have made her base of operations the Right-On version of the ruined West Pier (the real world version of which in Brighton is now even more skeletal and not practical for even the most doomer supervillain to use as a hideout). I think it would have culminated in a Quadrophenia-style beach brawl between each Jenny’s followers (Nowhere’s gang all being various black-clad kinds of goths, punks, and techno-nihilists, in contrast to Everywhere’s more brightly colored subcultures). But it’s been long enough now that I can confess that at various points I was working on two or three other ideas for follow-up stories. One was entitled “Dance-Off 2004” (the year kept changing as it got delayed) and the concept speaks for itself. Then there was “You Say Derby! We Say Die!” which was not a reference to the town in the Midlands but rather to my interest in roller derby which peaked circa 2007-2009 or so (and was named after the band You Say Party). But the last time I was kicking an idea around, it was 2012 and I was already thinking about something with a very different tone that was based around the idea of the Jenny Everywhere “gang” reuniting after going their separate ways. Lex now runs a pub and is married (to Lois from the coffee shop) with two kids. Bradley made a fortune designing extremely blasphemous videogames. Clea is an academic in San Francisco. Everyone quit smoking. Those three aforementioned sequels that never got made would appear as flashback panels, a montage of sorts, unfinished comics repurposed as “lost/secret adventures.” The tone for this was once again stolen from a Grant Morrison comic, namely the “zzzzenith.com” one-off sequel to Zenith. Less a sequel, more a bittersweet look back at an era.

If you've kept up with more recent Jenny projects to one degree or another, what are your thoughts on them?

N: I haven’t, but they’re on the ‘to do’ list.

If you had limitless time and budget for it, what would be your “dream” Jenny project?

N: Limitless time and budget…? Oooooh. Multiverse versions of the Right-On gang. Sci-fi stuff, cosmic stuff. Stuff that’s wild to draw. The same snappy feel and flow of the originals, but with extra helpings of the rainy melancholy Joe brought in at the close of Damn Fine Hostile Takeover.

Do you think you'll ever return to the character? How differently would you approach it if you did?

N: Time permitting, absolutely. It was fun.

J: Well, the gap in time since I last toyed with the idea of a nostalgic sequel comic is now longer than the original time period between the first comics and that one. And those years mean that I both feel more distance from my version of the character, and the supporting cast I gave her, but also more unqualified affection. I joked about embarrassment earlier but it’s actually been long enough now that I’ve passed through and out of the period where I found anything about it embarrassing. What I was writing reflects who I was at the time and also maybe a little of where the zeitgeist was: the violence is cartoony, there’s no consequences to it, and there’s what I would call a Bush-era assumption that going out and partying is in itself halfway to being some kind of act of resistance. For me those comics are a memento from a very specific time in my life, and if I wrote something about that particular Jenny Everywhere now, it would definitely be an older, wiser version. As a sober 45 year-old living in Chicago, Illinois, looking back at something I wrote when I was a heavy-drinking Londoner in his early 20s, it’s even more bittersweet and melancholy. Jenny and the gang were supposed to be reminiscent of various friends of my own. Over the course of 20 years, you inevitably lose touch with people. You move far away physically (I relocated to a different continent!), you drift apart. And sometimes you fall out with people, and sometimes people die, both of which have happened to me. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Nila Gupta (rest in power) here, who was a big inspiration for my version of Jenny and for my general idea of a gang of cool anti-corporate people running amok in Right-On. Losing people who used to be part of your life is individually tragic but it’s also the kind of experience you’re a lot more likely to have by the time you’re 45 than when you’re 23. If this answer sounds like it’s turning into a bummer, it shouldn’t entirely, because the flipside to that is you do develop some perspective, some better priorities, some sense of what you’re supposed to be doing with your life.

N: Oh Nila… ❤️ I had no idea your Jenny was inspired by them. That's beautiful.

And that's all, folks! They'll be reading this over, so I want to thank Joe and Neil/Nelson again, both for helping to create a character who still means so much to so many of us, niche though she may be… and for taking the time to bring us these insightful, entertaining, and often moving glimpses into the mental world from which Jenny — at least their Jenny — first sprung.

Happy Jenniversary, and thanks for everything!

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