Jayne Prell
This article is dedicated to a very obscure, complicated, and troubled individual, so take heed before reading this article! We are traveling into a very unhappy history with an unsatisfactory ending. With that in mind, let’s discuss Jayne Prell, digital illustrator, enthusiast for old cartoons, and intense horror fan.
Most of what we can learn about Jayne Prell is sourced from accounts of friends, acquaintances, and those affected by her. We have fairly little info related from her own mouth, and her family has been…Well, we didn’t think it would be right to contact her family about her nor do we think the opinions and info they might have on Jayne would be truthful.
Jayne Prell drew from a young age but was never upfront with when she got hooked on the idea of cartoons, however a large body of her memorable work was released following the young woman’s 20th birthday. From her earliest drawings, one could see a heavy focus on rubberhose style cartoons, body horror, and grasping crowds of hands. She would draw in this style for about three years, releasing digital art online periodically and slowly connecting with other artists she met online. The art she made was an expression of her love of horror - abstract horror to be specific - and she felt that cartoons could be used for so much in horror than what they typically were and would often write long rambling threads about her desire for a slasher movie that starred a cartoon, front and center, as the antagonist. She also described herself as loving to cram as many details into her artwork as possible.
Graduating during quarantine and trapped within what she described to friends as a “stifling, awful, suburban home,” she would become increasingly dependent on online communities for attention and human interaction. From what we know of her home life, it was clear that the artist felt trapped in her home, regularly preparing for the inevitability of homelessness or being forced into a group home. She seemed to have a habit of clinging to other artists she admired online, immediately assuming them to be friends and getting extremely possessive and angry when she felt she was being ‘abandoned’.
Around the final years of her artistic career, Jayne would shift her art style into a 50s inspired UPA cartoon aesthetic. She mentioned being burnt out, and perhaps this was an attempt to do something new with her art and find creative enrichment through different art styles. The work she put out during this time was equally surreal and abstract, but with a meaner and more violent edge to it.
Jayne was a very troubled individual, with a habit of lashing out verbally at those around her. Perhaps due to the stresses and despair of her situation, she felt trapped and doomed. Regardless she could be extremely difficult to be around, and after years of building goodwill online, it all exploded in the year of 2023. She began to slough away acquaintances and friends. It was an event I myself was vaguely aware of, but this was mainly through gossip and second hand information from friends. During this time her most violent and bleak art would be made, with her infamous (among those aware of her) character the Slishy Slasher, featuring amongst the most troubling of them (see the character page for more information on this character).
A big part, and controversy, of her new art was that it featured her cartoon killer slaughtering inanimate puppets. It was something that scared off a lot of people, but when questioned about it she had multiple explanations for the art she was drawing. We know she had just moved back into her parents home from grad school, and was being hurt by a very scary individual in that household. According to her, she felt like a puppet in her household, as an autistic person who had let her life be written out for her and forced to play a specific role. The art was stated to be both an expression of self harm, hoping for someone to cut her strings—but in another account she stated it to be a manifestation of her Borderline Personality Disorder, a “killer of relationships.” Both are probably true. Regardless, she would sink deeper away from online spaces until she went missing.
No matter how troubled of a person she might be, she could be deeply unpleasant and had an aversion to responsibility. But some pity is earned I think. As someone who pities her, I think I am obligated to archive her work as an artist, and speculate on what could have been if she’d just worked on herself more.
Months ago, someone sent me a link to her series of artwork surrounding a conceptual book called “The Stars and Blue,” a book that would have explored more of Slishy Slashers history, and perhaps reflect a more tender and remorseful side of Jayne as she worked to give her character a happy ending. I have been working with several art friends in order to restore this book in the form of a collaborative project, in which everyone in the group draws a page described by Jayne in the notes she left behind.