JEFF THE LAND SHARK

Ask anyone who Jeff is named after and they’ll draw a blank — because the answer is a kitten. When Gwenpool adopted a baby land shark in West Coast Avengers #7 (January 2019), she named him Jeff after a kitten she had adopted earlier in the same series and been forced to give up. It was meant to be a running gag: Gwen would keep adopting infant animals, name every single one Jeff, and lose them. The shark simply refused to be lost.

Jeff wasn’t even supposed to be a character. Land sharks first appeared in West Coast Avengers #1 (October 2018) — a herd of four-legged sharks engineered by M.O.D.O.K. Superior, then rebranded as B.R.O.D.O.K., and turned loose on Santa Monica as living weapons. But one shark in artist Stefano Caselli’s herd caught writer Kelly Thompson’s eye, and Thompson — drawing on that shark and her own pet cats — built a pet out of a background monster. Jeff got a cameo in #6 and his inherited name in #7, drawn by Daniele Di Nicuolo.

The hand-me-down name outlived the book. When West Coast Avengers ended, Thompson carried Jeff into her Deadpool run — Gwenpool handed him over in-story, reasoning that a shark in somebody else’s ongoing title was a shark who would survive. Then came It’s Jeff!, the wordless Infinity Comic by Thompson and Gurihiru: nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic in 2022, it won Best Humor Publication in 2024. The disposable monster from a page-one herd scene now headlines his own print series — still answering to a kitten’s name.