JE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere Act III, part II--note

[Jeanne Morningstar]

I'd intended to explain the history of the different public domain/open 
source characters I'm using here a little more fully in the endnotes, 
but this part of the story might require a little more 
contextualization. So, an explanation for some of the more important 
characters involved in this chapter:

Octobriana was a character created by Petr Sadecky, a Czech comics 
writer/hoaxer who defected to West Germany during the Cold War. He 
repurposed a character he'd come up with called Amazona as Octobriana, 
the embodiment of the ideals of the Russian revolution. n his book 
Octobriana and the Russian Underground, came up with an elaborate 
mythology around her where she was the creation of the dissident 
Communist organization Progressive Political Pornography, or PPP, who 
made underground comics about her.

The story captured the imagination of the 70s counterculture; David 
Bowie mentioned Octobriana and the Russian Underground as one of his 
favorite books and Billy Idol had an Octobriana tattoo. Because she was 
supposed to be the creation of an underground Communist organization, 
she wasn't under copyright and appeared in a number of British comic, 
notably Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Her existence 
was part of the inspiration for creating Jenny Everywhere.

Trashman was an underground comics superhero created by American 
underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez who in a 1968 series of comic 
strips in the influential counterculture alt-weekly the East Village 
Other (which didn't have a proper copyright notice and was thus public 
domain due to copyright law of the time). Trashman was the defender of 
the working classes against a fascist government in a dystopian future, 
who fought for the secret anarcho-Marxist organization the Sixth 
International using their "para-sciences."

The Magician from Mars is a character created by John Giunta and Malcolm 
Kildale who appeared in 1939's Amazing-Man comics, published by Centaur, 
who gave the world a lot of oddball early heroes like the Fantom of the 
Fair, Speed Centaur, the Eye (who is an actual floating eye, and 
inspiration for my LNH20 character Private Eye) and so on. In her 
original origin she was Jane GEM-35, daughter of a human and a Martian 
who was given superpowers by a cathode ray that made her practically 
omnipotent. Her enemies included an extradimensional demon elemental 
which she banished with the power of music and the Hood, a crime lord 
who was secretly her aunt. I threw her in here becuase her name and 
concept kind of evokes 70s glam-rock sci-fi mythology.

People here presumably know who Stardust the Super-Wizard is because of 
Wil Alambre's excellent The Super-Wizard from Space.

Lockjaw the Alligator was a funny-animal character crated by Joe Simon 
and Jack Kirby in 1947's Punch and Judy Comics. I am one of the maybe 10 
people who remembers he existed. I put him in because I wanted there to 
be a Kirby character in this story.

Mary is a character whose early adventures are in the public domain but 
who I won't fully name here because of the long series of lawsuits 
around characters related to her.

Jeanne Morningstar