Jerry Cornelius is a fictional character created by English author Michael Moorcock. The character is an urban adventurer and an incarnation of the author's Eternal Champion concept. Cornelius is a hipster of ambiguous and occasionally polymorphous gender. Many of the same characters feature in each of several Cornelius books, though the individual books have little connection with one another, having a more metafictional than causal relationship. Notting Hill in London features prominently in the stories.
The series draws plot elements from Moorcock's Elric series, as well as the Commedia dell'Arte. Moorcock hints in many places that Cornelius may be an aspect of the Eternal Champion.
Characters from the Cornelius novels show up in much of Moorcock's other fiction: The Dancers at the End of Time series has a character called Jherek Carnelian who is the son of Lord Jagged of Canaria, and there are several hints in the series that Lord Jagged may be a guise of Jerry Cornelius; the Cornelius-series character Una Persson also appears in the "Dancers" series and the Oswald Bastable books, and may also be the character Oona in the later Elric books; Colonel Pyat has his own non-SF series of books by Moorcock, beginning with Byzantium Endures.
In these four novels Jerry undergoes transformations, dies, is reborn, spends one entire novel as a shivering wreck, and eventually discovers his true natures. Moorcock strenuously objects to his character being depicted as a 'secret agent'. There are almost no elements of the spy genre in the Cornelius stories. These were sessions for planned albums based on two Moorcock novels: Glorianna and The Entropy Tango. Moorcock encouraged other authors and artists to create works about Jerry Cornelius, in an early open source shared world attempt at open brand sharing.
The Nature of the Catastrophe , a collection of Jerry Cornelius stories and comic strips which had appeared in New Worlds with art by Mal Dean by various hands, was published in The story " In comics , various writers have used elements of the character, including Bryan Talbot 's character Luther Arkwright.
