Reitz, Jennifer Diane
Entry updated 14 September 2026. Tagged: Artist, Author, Comics.
(1959- ) US cartoonist and Videogame known for her webcomics Unicorn Jelly and Pastel Defender Heliotrope. Her works explore an infinite Multiverse and the adaptability of humanity within them; she channels her experiences as a transgender woman in stories about oppressed protagonists who experience physical transformations to escape abusive environments. She worked in the game industry in the 1980s, pitching an ambitious Commodore 64/Amiga game titled Multiverse that was never completed. Under the company name Accursed Toys, she released Boppin' (1991), a block-puzzle game set in a multiverse comprised of fictional worlds and arcade games.
After the turn of the millennium, Reitz began her first and most beloved webcomic Unicorn Jelly (2000-2003; graph 2007), about the young witch Lupiko Kazemahou and her elevated slime Uni. She adopts Chou Yaru, a young girl infected by a crystalline creature turning her into a symbiotic cooperation between human and the crystalloid. The webcomic is set in Tryslmaistan, a "fractal cosmos" with entirely original physical laws resulting in massive tetrahedral world-plates, crystalline lifeforms, a unique weather phenomenon, and a universal downwards gravity. Because the delicate balance of this universe was disrupted by a War hundreds of thousands of years prior, the world-plate is threatened by a wall of destruction consuming it. A traditionalist conspiracy suppresses knowledge of this "Stormfall" Disaster and any change in the status-quo, planning a migration by Airship to escape the impending apocalypse as has been done hundreds of times before. Unicorn Jelly has themes of parenthood, personal and societal growth, and queer love. It has a unique art style of black-and-white screentone-shading drawn in the DOS program DPaint2. and uses Hypertext to expand on its world-building through encyclopedic entries.
Unicorn Jelly was followed by Pastel Defender Heliotrope (2004-2008; graph 2008), starring Heliotrope Security Aoi, an "animated neoplastic doll" (see Golem), who derives her power from an artefact stolen from a ruined Alien universe. The story expands upon the multiverse introduced in Unicorn Jelly. Reitz simultaneously published the side-story To Save Her (2005-2009; graph 2009), about the jelly Kay-Wai using a Time Travel Spaceship to save her alternate universe self from being sacrificed by Chou in Unicorn Jelly's universe, which would doom humanity in Tryslmaistan to the Stormfall. In 2009 Reitz published The Ishtar Crisis (graph 2009), a Hard SF tale about a protagonist rebelling against a Terraforming mega-corporation. Since then, she has written several novels and novellas under the title The Conversion Bureau, imagining a Near Future in which the earth is absorbed by the alien universe of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and a significant side-story to the AI Singularity novella My Little Pony: Friendship is Optimal by Iceman. Most of Jennifer Diane Reitz' stories involve their protagonists escaping worlds threatened by obliteration, often having to undergo physical transformations in the process. Her works typically end positively with the protagonists having ascended beyond what society thought possible. [MS]
Jennifer Diane Reitz
born USA: 1959
works
- Unicorn Jelly (place not known: Lulu, 2007) [graph: pb/Jennifer Diane Reitz]
- Pastel Defender Heliotrope (place not known: Lulu, 2008) [graph: hb/Jennifer Diane Reitz]
- To Save Her (place not known: Lulu, 2009) [graph: pb/Jennifer Diane Reitz]
- To Save Her Coloring and Activity Book (place not known: Lulu, 2009) [graph: spinoff from the above: pb/Jennifer Diane Reitz]
- The Ishtar Crisis (place not known: Lulu, 2009) [graph: hb/Jennifer Diane Reitz]
links
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