Jenny's real name is Jessica Blute, and years ago, her father and uncles ruled an entire city by fear, before her uncles turned on and killed her father. She's spent the intervening years in training, and now she's out to return the favor.
Jennifer Blood is a monthly-ish, mature-audiences-only comic from Dynamite Entertainment, written by Garth Ennis, Al Ewing, Mike Carroll, and Steven Grant with a rotating cast of artists, and is intended as a black comedy.
Its original run ended with issue #36 in February 2014. A second volume written by Grant, Born Again, ran for five issues in 2014.
A third volume, a direct sequel written by Fred Van Lente, began in October 2021 and ran for 10 issues. It was followed up by 2023's Battle Diary.
Spin-off miniseries include
- The Ninjettes, a prequel that features some one-off antagonists from the first volume's fourth issue
- First Blood, a story set during the period of time when Jenny was training to make her initial run at her uncles
- a second, unrelated volume of The Ninjettes, where a number of orphans are forced to kill one another as the recruitment process for a shadowy training program
- Guiletta Romeo, a one-shot starring an antagonist from volume 3, which takes much of its plot from Shakespeare's The Tempest
Jenny also appears in the Dynamite crossovers Swords of Sorrow (2015) and Die-namite (2020-2021), both of which are apparently set in their own particular universes.
Tropes encountered in this work include:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Varla seems to have wandered into this story from a cyberpunk novel. She can cleave a man's skull in half with a one-armed swing from her katana.
- Anti-Hero: Jenny is a ruthless killer, but her targets are all psychopathic monsters. As the series goes on, Jenny slowly loses whatever heroic qualities she had in her pursuit of revenge.
- Asian Airhead: the Ninjettes.
- Ax-Crazy: Not at first, but come #18 and #19, and Jenny is going on a bloody killing spree across the continental United States.
- Becoming the Mask: Ennis's initial run is about Jenny's attempts to juggle her idyllic suburban life with her mission of revenge against her uncles. When Al Ewing takes over the book, that juggling act begins to fail almost immediately, as does Jenny's image of herself.
- Chivalrous Pervert: Ray Buwick seems like the last guy you'd want to leave a couple of preteens alone with, but compared to just about every other adult in the book, he's probably the nicest guy of the lot. After the bloodbath in issue #22, he's arguably kinder to Jenny's kids than Jenny is.
- Combat Pragmatist: How does one woman, however well-trained or -funded she might be, manage to kill off entire housefuls of armed gangsters? Any way she can.
- Continuity Snarl: In the original series, Jennifer kills her husband Andrew by stabbing him through the neck; in the sequel series, she instead offhandedly mentions having shot him.
- Covers Always Lie: If you went by some of the covers, you'd think Jenny used sex as a weapon a lot more often than she actually does. In truth, she uses her own boobs as a distraction tactic once in the first issue, but that's about it. In particular, the alternate covers often show her gunfighting while scantily clad, which never happens in the actual book.
- Crazy-Prepared: Jenny's very fond of planting charges ahead of time to secure her escape routes.
- Cycle of Revenge: Jenny finishes her original mission by the end of issue #6. The subsequent plotline involves the fallout from it, which includes the angry father of one of the Ninjettes.
- Dark Action Girl: Jenny's not a particularly likable protagonist, but she's fetched up somewhere between Batman and The Punisher. She's also capable of holding her own against vastly superior forces.
- Downer Ending: Jenny realizes that her children are terrified of her and that continuing on her path means that she'll probably end up killing them and herself, which prompts a tearful breakdown as she lets Ray Buwick take her kids to live with her mother-in-law. Pruitt ends up taking her in where she's sentenced to life in prison. While she’s facing justice for her crimes, she spends every day fighting off inmates who want the high bounty on her head, her children are most likely mentally scarred for life from all the deaths they have had to witness, and many Innocent Bystanders are dead just because they got in her way or got caught in the crossfire of people wanting to kill her.
- Eek, a Mouse!!: When cornered by the musclehead neighbor who seems to think she has the hots for him, Jenny screams that there's a mouse, with a very tiny pink tail, causing all the other houseguests to come running.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Salazar's really one of the nicest drug dealers in the history of fiction.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In the end, the thing that finally convinces Jennifer to stop her rampage despite degenerating into a hyper-violent sociopath by this stage is the realisation that she was a threat to her children's safety, and that they were terrified of their mother because of her rampant insanity.
- Expy: Jenny has a very similar background to a character from the "Widowmaker" arc on Ennis's MAX run on The Punisher, right down to having the same first name.
- Gorn: It's a Garth Ennis comic. It isn't really surprising.
- Heel Realization: Jennifer finally realizes how much of a monster she has become when her terrified children tearfully ask Ray Buwick to protect them from her, with her son even going so far as to demand she be killed, this leads to a My God, What Have I Done? moment.
- Highly-Visible Ninja: The Ninjettes from issue #4 are a trio of bored young upper-class Asian girls trading on the ninja stereotype in order to get their feet in the door as professional assassins. They last about three pages once they actually run into Jenny. Hell, one of the variant covers of their own book is of Jenny standing over their dismembered corpses.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Jennifer's go-to excuses for her more horrific actions are usually some variation of this, most often that she's doing it for her children.
- Imagine Spot: Jennifer imagines what she could do to the new neighbor who wants her to suck his dick, including slamming his head on the barbecue or drowning him in the toilet.
- It Runs in the Family: Pruitt's theory on Jenny is that despite her own stated desires, the craziness that made her uncles monsters is still very much active in her. She may want to be normal, but between her training and her trauma, every attempt she makes to do so is doomed to failure. This theory has been advanced in later issues with the strong suggestion that being a member of the Blute family at all means being at high risk to develop at least one personality disorder.
- Killed Offscreen: The "Jennifer Blood" in volume 3 turns out to be Alice Fellows, with her twin brother Mark occasionally pitching in. The real Jenny Blute is thought to have died years beforehand, although it's yet to be established whether that's actually the case or whether it's due to Jenny faking her death at the end of the 2014 series.
- Mood Dissonance:
- Ennis's initial six-issue run on the book is an action story with occasional humor. Al Ewing, on the other hand, wrote something that reads a lot like a really violent Carl Hiaasen novel, with multiple coexisting plotlines and an eccentric cast of characters. Finally, Mike Carroll's run is a globe-spanning action movie with Jenny as the villain of the piece, dealing with her family's European relatives and on the run from the FBI.
- Varla, Daisy, and Darlene, a trio of disgraced hitwomen introduced in the Ninjettes spin-off, are exactly the kind of Hollywood action heroines that Jenny is a deliberate counterpoint to. Where Jenny is competent, thorough, and professional, and who goes on several multi-paragraph digressions in the first six issues about the difference between Hollywood gunfights and reality, Varla's idea of a clean hit is chopping a guy in half through a hotel room door, then setting the hotel on fire.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Jennifer finally has one during her Heel Realization which kicks off her redemption arc.
- Nominal Hero: Jennifer alternates between this, Anti-Hero and Villain Protagonist at various points throughout the series.
- Protagonist-Centred Morality: Lampshaded and ultimately averted. Jennifer's initial diary entries paint her as an Anti-Hero doing what needs to be done but, after her Heel Realization, she admits that she was just making excuses to kill people and see herself as the heroine of the story.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Jenny's entire motivation in a nutshell.
- She Who Fights Monsters: At first, Jenny only goes after people connected to her uncles. As the series continues, however, she becomes willing to kill anyone who hinders her quest for revenge, regardless of whether they're criminals or innocent bystanders.
- Shout-Out: In one of the comics Jennifer is recuperating in a hospital while a large number of protestors have gathered outside. Two of them bear a striking resemblance to Fathers Ted Crilly and Dougal McGuire carrying signs saying "Careful now" and "Down with this sort of thing".
- Slowly Slipping Into Evil: Despite her ruthlessness while going out for revenge against her uncles, Jenny initially still seems like she's got her worst instincts in check. Afterwards, however, Jenny rapidly deteriorates as time goes on into a sociopathic, Ax-Crazy killer that goes on a cross-country murder spree, ultimately no better than her enemies.
- Spin-Off: The Ninjettes received their own limited series, which covers their training and background. This was presumably at least partially meant to lend characterization and background to Skyler's father Oshiro, who became one of the major antagonists of Ewing's run, and sets up Kelly's unwilling mentor Varla for her appearances later in the main book.
- Stepford Smiler: Jenny.
- Villain Protagonist: Jenny devolves over the course of the book from a particularly vicious brand of anti-heroine to an outright sociopath, culminating in #18 and #19 when she goes on a rampage through her neighborhood and then across the United States, holding up gas stations for money and leaving no survivors.
