Jess (Maxwell the Cat)

The Story of Jess (Maxwell the Cat)

Maxwell the Cat, the spinning 3D cat you see everywhere online, is based on a real cat named Jess. She was a black-and-white tuxedo cat owned by Imgur user Voidhawk42. On November 20, 2017, Voidhawk posted a photo of Jess sitting on a piece of paper labelled “Please Do Not Bend.” She was, of course, bending it. The post was titled “Cat does not care for the laws of man.”

The photo circulated quietly through Facebook and Twitter reposts for years. In early 2020, Voidhawk shared that Jess had a blocked intestine. Sadly, it turned out to be cancer. Jess passed away shortly after. Voidhawk later described her as a cat with a “take no crap” attitude who had been important to his wife’s mental health recovery.

Two years after her death, on October 12, 2022, a Steam user uploaded a low-poly 3D model of Jess to the Garry’s Mod Workshop. A week later, another user named Scott Rim made the model into a carryable item called “Maxwell the carryable cat.” That is where the name Maxwell comes from. On November 4, a GIF of the model spinning was posted to Twitter and went massively viral.

The spinning Maxwell format exploded across TikTok, YouTube, and gaming communities. The 3D cat spins slowly to various songs in an endlessly adaptable format. Voidhawk eventually found out about the meme and called it “charming” that Jess lived on across the internet. She had been misidentified online as Dingus the Cat and Uni the Cat, but her real name was always Jess.