Mary Jane
Character reference art generated with AI.
Aliases: Katie Bloom Status: Recurring
Mary Jane enters the book by reputation before she enters in person: Homeboy’s cure for Chino’s heartbreak in Uncle Rob’s Time Portal is “Fuck it! Let’s call Mary Jane! She’s got hot-ass friends. Maybe one will let you smash.” A phone call later, she turns up in person with a small entourage of friends. What follows tangles her up with Homeboy Alpha, a duplicate Homeboy who’s arrived from another timeline via the story’s title portal. By The Last Blunt she’s already an established friend of the apartment. Homeboy introduces her to Chino mid-makeout session, oblivious that they’ve met before, and Mary Jane just laughs it off: “Hi, Chino, we’ve met.” When Homeboy tries to get her surname out of her that same night, she starts to answer (“Actually, Jane is my middle name, my last name is…”) before Chino cuts the scene short. The reveal lands two stories later regardless: the framed degrees on her apartment wall spell out Mary Jane Hartley, a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and two master’s degrees, in Electrical and Chemical Engineering. “Three Engineering Degrees,” by her own count, and not one of them prepares her for a cursed joint turning her friend into a woman. “Cursed joints aren’t a thing. In fact, curses aren’t a thing,” is her first reaction to the news, right before she agrees to deal with it anyway.
That competence is what the crew actually leans on her for. She’s the one with an apartment orderly enough to serve as command center when Homeboy turns into Homegirl, the one who runs Homegirl through a crash course on womanhood and a full makeover, and the one who invents the “Homeboy’s cousin” cover story on the spot to get Homegirl into a party without a scene. Her own relationship with Homeboy predates the transformation and runs alongside it rather than through it: they’re already tangled up together by The Last Blunt, she reminds him near the end of The Cursed Joint of Bayankala that “it’s not like we haven’t done it before,” and by the start of Mrs. Dealer and the Edibles Factory Homeboy confirms to Chino, on the sidewalk outside the dispensary, that he and Mary Jane are “officially fuck buddies” now, as Homeboy’s own dossier lays out. She’s also the one who drives when nobody else has a car, ferrying Homeboy to and from work more than once across the volume.
The Adventures: Volume 01
Her own titular story, Mary Jane’s Four Dimensional Adventure, is the one time the volume’s chaos happens directly to her rather than around her: she lets herself into Chino’s apartment looking for the guys, finds the ornate stash box empty, and smokes an unfamiliar blue-wrapped joint Uncle Rob left behind (one meant for the Fourth and Fifth Dimension) and starts phasing out of physical reality mid-hit, leaving her clothes behind on the couch. What follows is four to five months of her disembodied voice narrating the birth and death of the universe on loop from one fixed point in Chino’s living room, watched over by Chino, Homeboy, Chris, and eventually Uncle Rob, until she manages to reach far enough into the room to nudge a pair of Monopoly dice and, eventually, drag herself back. She surfaces wrapped in Chris’s jogging hoodie, composed enough to smirk and deflect with a quip (“You don’t know the half of it”), though the void produced at least one crying jag along the way. It’s Chris, Mary Jane’s friend from The Cursed Joint of Bayankala (where his party is the setting for Homegirl meeting him for the first time under the “Juanita” alias), who ends up looped into most of that ordeal alongside Chino and Homeboy.
She’s present for most of the volume’s back half without carrying its plots: she brings Lucy into Chino’s apartment using a key Homeboy handed over in Lucy’s Box, climbs into Lucy’s lap for a kiss in front of the room, and later helps drag, drive, and bury the volume’s one interrogation-and-body-disposal job alongside the rest of the crew. In Count Dragula she and Chino spend most of the story canvassing the neighborhood together looking for a missing Homeboy, and it’s her recognition of the old Tri-Lamb house that gets them to the right door. She has a job of her own that occasionally keeps her out of the action. She misses the underground fight tournament in Big Trouble in Chinatown entirely because she’s stuck at work, and opens El Cucuy and the Nightmares by reminding Chino and Homeboy they’re due at work themselves, before turning up to the after-party dancing with Homeboy once the shift is over. She does not appear at all in Uncle Rob and the Aliens, Nature Sucks, There Can Be Only One, or Night School.
The Adventures: Volume 02
- Date Night: Homeboy’s double-date partner; declares they are “fuck buddies” and runs interference all night. Grows creeped out by Sarah Yazzie (“That’s not the Sarah I know”) and stays with Chino afterward to make sure he is okay.
- El Duende: Brings King Taco for Loki, pushes the stroller to Uncle Rob’s mansion, and begs Loki to un-curse Dog-Rob. Spots Loki leaving with Chuy.
- Uncle Rob and the Edibles Factory: Brings King Taco lunches to the boys at the dispensary while the factory war rages behind the back door.
- Uncle Hank and the Naked Pod People: Goes undercover as Killian’s arm candy, karate-chops the gun from Mr. Bitches’ hand, holds him at gunpoint, and fires into the ceiling to freeze the room.
- The Joint of Azathoth: Believes the body-swap immediately (“I’ve seen some crazy shit”), co-organizes the orgy with Sarah, and mentions her spicy film “Katie Bloom: RSVP Yes to Everything.”
- Tequila Homegirl: Comforts Homegirl after the change (“I like girls too”), texts frantic tequila warnings, and advises Homegirl to change back for Chris’s sake.
- Of Rednecks and Vampires: Asks over comms where Homeboy is; gets taken to the edibles factory sidelines with Sarah by Mrs. Dealer.
- The Return of Dos Santos: Calls Homeboy in a panic about “that crazy fucker with white eyes and no dick”; gets buried alive with Sarah in the Ominous Forest.
- Lucy Ex Machina: Plays peacemaker in the cell, whispers to Homeboy that he did sleep with Sarah during the orgy, and watches Lucy wreck the sexbots.
- The Emperor of the Universe: Her stage name “Katie Bloom” gets her lured to the strip club with a $2,000 offer; collared alongside Sarah. Spots that the explosive collars are cheap jewelry and walks out.
Reference Art
Character reference art generated with AI.
Military Chronicles
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Space Adventures
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