Jennifer Blood

Jenny is a housewife. Her husband is a college professor and an avid birdwatcher, her children are unremarkable, and her neighborhood is a suburb like many others across the continental United States.

Every night, however, Jenny puts her husband and children to sleep with drugged hot chocolate, puts on a black wig and a black coverall, arms herself from a well-maintained arsenal she has hidden in the tool shed, and goes out to kill every mobster she can find.

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 and Al Ewing with a rotating cast of artists, and is intended as a black comedy.


 * 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.
 * Covers Always Lie: If you went by the covers of each issue, 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.
 * 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 heroine, but she's fetched up somewhere between Batman and The Punisher.
 * 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: Its a Garth Ennis comics. It isn't really surprising.
 * 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.
 * Mood Dissonance: Ennis's initial six-issue run on the book is essentially an action story with occasional humor. Al Ewing, on the other hand, is writing what reads a lot like a really violent Carl Hiaasen novel, with multiple coexisting plotlines and an eccentric cast of characters.
 * 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, Varla's idea of a clean hit is chopping a guy in half through a hotel room door, then setting the hotel on fire.
 * Refuge in Vulgarity: Al Ewing is more fond of toilet humor than Garth Ennis ever was.
 * Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Jenny's entire motivation in a nutshell.
 * Spin-Off: The Ninjettes have, for whatever reason, received their own limited series, which covers their training and background. This is presumably at least partially meant to lend characterization and background to Skyler's father Oshiro, who's currently one of the major antagonists of Ewing's run, and to set up Kelly's unwilling mentor Varla for a future role in the main book.
 * Villain Protagonist: It's difficult to argue that Jenny is not, at bare minimum, a sociopath. Even the husband and children she's so fond of don't seem to play a huge role in her internal monologue, although it may simply be that she's not capable of being very demonstrative towards loved ones. Alternatively, since the first series covers her attempts to settle scores with her enemies over the course of an entire week, she could just be intentionally narrowing her focus heavily on the 'mission' so as to get it done without screwing up.
 * She does say her family makes everything worthwhile and clearly loves them... at times. Her emotional blackmail of her son and how disparaging she can be towards them are different issues. It's less that Jenny is a sociopath and more that she is an utterly terrible human being.