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Jhonen Vasquez

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Jhonen Vasquez (born September 1, 1974), also known by his pseudonyms Mr. Scolex and Chancre Scolex, is a cartoonist living in San Jose, California. He is the creator of a number of alternative comics published by Slave Labor Graphics including Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Squee!, as well as the creator of the animated television series Invader Zim. Many of his works have developed cult followings.

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Style

Vasquez's cartoons have a distinctive visual style. Though highly geometric, his character representation shows some influence from manga and anime. His characters are thin to the point of almost being stick figures.

Vasquez's writing often conveys misanthropic and pessimistic themes, though these darker elements are often used for the purposes of parody and satire. Similar styles and mannerisms can be found in many of his characters as well as running gags and common themes, including repeated references to moose, meat, chihuahuas, monkeys, tacos, piggies, morbid obesity, dookie, and fursuits.

Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, and David Cronenberg have influenced his work.

Biography

Early life

Jhonen Vasquez was born and raised in San Jose. He attended Mount Pleasant High School, where he often spent much of his class time doodling in sketchbooks. Taking part in a contest to design a new look for his school's mascot, the Cardinal, he submitted an entry which was rejected. On the back of a preliminary drawing for the contest, he drew his first sketch of the character who would later become Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. He published a number of strips entitled Johnny the Little Homicidal Maniac with his high school's newspaper. The logos of the bands Nine Inch Nails and Public Image Ltd. appear in the backgrounds of these primitive Johnny strips.

Vasquez also created Happy Noodle Boy while attending Mount Pleasant. According to Vasquez, "So many years ago, [my little romantical friend in high school] was the unwitting reason Happy Noodle Boy was created. [She] always asked me for comics. But I couldn't draw as fast as she requested. Thus, I tried to create the worst abomination of a comic that I could, so as to make her not want comics anymore. That abomination, my friends, was Happy Noodle Boy."

After graduating in 1992, Vasquez went on to become a film student at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Though he had little formal artistic training, he soon dropped out of De Anza to pursue a career as a professional cartoonist.

Career in alternative comics

Carpe Noctem magazine published early one-page strips featuring Johnny in the early 1990s. Slave Labor Graphics began publishing a series of Johnny comics in 1995, after Vasquez submitted samples of his artwork to them. Vasquez's first comic, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, ran for seven issues. Collected as a trade paperback under the name Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut, a hardcover edition is also available. Both paperback and hardcover editions have "Z?" on the cover. This logo, which stands for "question sleep", appears frequently throughout Vasquez's work, and relates to insomnia, from which both Johnny and Vasquez have suffered. The series follows Johnny as he searches for meaning in his life, a quest that rather frequently leads to the violent deaths of those around him.

A photograph of one of Vasquez's friends, Miss Leah England, serves as the middle of a portrait collection on the cover for the second issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. England also gave Vasquez the inspiration for a filler strip about a child who was dangerously afraid of losing sight of his mother, as well as the infamous "Somebody put shit in my pants" Meanwhile in the second issue of JTHM.

When Vasquez ended the series after seven issues, he left fans with a promise to someday continue with it. Whether this promise will be fulfilled remains to be seen.

Vasquez's next project was The Bad Art Collection, a 16-page one-shot collection of intentionally terrible drawings. Jhonen said that he did the book's art while he was in high school to discourage classmates from constantly asking him to draw for them.

Vasquez met Roman Dirge, Rikki Simons, and Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons at Alternative Press Expo in 1995. Dirge later became a writer on Vasquez's Invader Zim, while Rikki Simons became the voice of the show's crazed robot GIR, as well as a member of the show's coloring team.

Satan confessing his identity to his wife, from Squee!
Enlarge
Satan confessing his identity to his wife, from Squee!

In 1997, Vasquez gave Squee, a supporting character from JTHM, his own four-issue series. It chronicles Squee's encounters with aliens, Satan's son, and eventually Satan himself.  The trade version (which features a cover image of Squee with the words "Buy me or I'll die!") contains, in addition to the actual Squee comics, the Meanwhiles that were left out of the Director's Cut of JTHM, as well as comics of Jhonen's "real life" (with slight exaggerations as to the size of the moon and Señor Diablo's height) and Wobbly Headed Bob.


Vasquez's next project was I Feel Sick. It was originally intended to be a single issue, but was later broken in half due to it being longer than Jhonen anticipated. I Feel Sick follows a tortured artist named Devi (another character introduced in JTHM) as she tries to maintain her sanity in Vasquez's typical insane vision of society, despite conversing with Sickness, one of her own paintings. I Feel Sick features colors by Rikki Simons, who was later the lead color artist and voice of GIR on Invader Zim.


Slave Labor has published three Fillerbunny minicomics, the third having been released in March 2005. The minicomic was a spin-off of a filler comic designed to replace a vacant page usually reserved for advertising space in the Squee comics.  Jhonen said that he would procrastinate drawing the cartoon until only hours before the deadline and then rush through and did whatever he could in a small amount of time. The third issue, however, broke this mold - according to the introduction, it took over nine months to complete and is of a much higher quality than the first two.


Vasquez collaborated with artist Brad Canby to produce the storybook "Everything Can Be Beaten", published by Slave Labor in .  Vasquez, credited as Chancre Scolex, wrote the story, and Brad Canby, credited as Crab Scrambly, illustrated it.  "Everything Can Be Beaten" is about a strange person who lives in a room in which he can do nothing but beat kittens.  However, an adventure into the outside world changes his perspective, and he discovers that "everything can be beaten."



Career in television

After the success of Squee!, the children's cable network Nickelodeon approached Vasquez about producing an animated television series for them. During its relatively short run, Invader Zim garnered a cult following among teenage audiences. The show was cancelled after little more than a year; only 27 half-hour episodes were made; most of them split into two 11-minute episodes but several were full half-hour long episodes. In fact, when the series was cancelled, it became apparent that Nickelodeon was trying to phase it out. They did this by airing other animated shorts in it's place, leaving only one 11-minute episode to air. Eventually, the show was pulled off Nickelodeon altogether. Episodes in the second season never aired in the United States, but they did air in other countries. On May 11, 2004, two years after the cancellation of the series, after many requests from fans, Volume 1 of an official Invader Zim DVD collection was released by AnimeWorks, a branch of Media Blasters, featuring the first nine episodes plus audio commentary by Vasquez and various cast and crew, including Richard Steven Horvitz, Rikki Simons, Melissa Fahn, Wally Wingert, Andy Berman, Kevin Manthei, and others. Volume 2 was released on August 31, 2004, the third volume was released October 12, 2004, and a box set was released on April 12, 2005. The box set contained a "Special Features" DVD that had a set of audio-only episodes that never made it to Nickelodeon (with the exception of the Christmas special).


Invader Zim has since been translated into several other languages for foreign broadcast. 
Reruns of Invader Zim currently air on Nicktoons Network, a second network created by Nickelodeon dedicated entirely to their older programs. It is also currently broadcast on MTV's 'Sickamation' block, and is available for download in .mp4 format through iTunes.


Vasquez also directed the music video for "Shut Me Up" by Mindless Self Indulgence, one of his favorite bands.



Future works

In 2002, Vasquez announced plans for a new comic series entitled Saturday Morning Nightmare, but has since released no further news about it. He may have secretly cancelled the project.  Vasquez announced during a panel in July 2005 at the San Diego Comic Convention that he was indeed working on a new comic series. Asking the crowd of fans not to laugh, he told them it was about love. He gave no title for this series.



Awards and nominations

Squee! was nominated for several Eisner Awards, the comic book industry's equivalent of the Academy Awards.


I Feel Sick won an International Horror Guild Award in 2000 for Best Illustrated Narrative.



Criticism of goth

It is difficult to tell if Vasquez dislikes the goth subculture (a notable satirical character is Anne Gwish, who is featured in JTHM), but some of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac's victims happen to be pretentious goths. He is most likely commenting on a subculture he has sometimes been a part of.  In fact, in the first Anne Gwish comic he remarks that the comic was written "with only a touch of self-mockery."


His seemingly annoyed reactions to Kevin Pereira's insinuations that he was goth in the infamous G4 interview seem to point to at least a slight distaste. The best example of this occurs when Pereira calls Vasquez a "Goth King ... everything to the goth community," and Vasquez responds with "King, yes, but goth? That's just arrogant." Whether this is commentary or humor, however, is up to the viewer to decide.



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