Jhonen Vasquez

Jhonen Vasquez
Vasquez in 2007
Born	September 1, 1974 (1974-09-01) (age 37) San Jose, California, United States
Nationality	American
Other names	Chancre Scolex Mr. Scolex
Ethnicity	Latino American
Alma mater	De Anza College
Occupation	Cartoonist, music video director, comic book writer
Years active	1993-present
Notable works	Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Squee!, I Feel Sick, Invader Zim
Influenced by	David Cronenberg, Chester Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, H. R. Giger, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch
Awards	See below
Website
questionsleep.com

Jhonen Vasquez (born September 1, 1974), also known as Chancre Scolex or simply Mr. Scolex, is an American comic book writer, cartoonist and music video director. He is famous for creating the comic book series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its spin-offs Squee! and I Feel Sick, all published under Slave Labor Graphics label.

He also created the short-lived animated series Invader Zim, which aired on Nickelodeon.

Early life

Jhonen Vasquez was raised in East San Jose. He attended Mount Pleasant High School, where he often spent much of his class time drawing in sketchbooks. Taking part in a contest to design a new look for his school's mascot, the Cardinal, he submitted an entry that the judges rejected. On the back of a preliminary drawing for the contest, he drew his first sketch of the character who would later become Johnny C.. His high school's student newspaper published a number of his comic strips titled Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Vasquez created Happy Noodle Boy while attending Mount Pleasant. According to Vasquez, "[S]o 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".^[1]

While Vasquez read his older brother's superhero comics as a child, he first became interested in the medium through the original independent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman.

It wasn't until he started collecting "Ninja Turtles" comics that something switched over in my head. To me, there was something just so different about those books that I did start to obsess over them — the way the books felt dirtier in my hands, the filthy artwork and hero characters that never seemed healed over from their last battles. There was a sense of person just behind the printed page that I had never felt before, a thinner separation from production to my hands and eyes that just fired hooks out into me... It felt unsafe, ya know? It's like, the book itself was less removed from the initial moment a creator is excited about having just come up with some great idea to when they finally finish a thing, nice and polished and just a little dulled from before the thing was just another book. To me, anyhow. It's just what I interpreted the experience like, and I'm sure to a lot of people it was just a book about big mutant turtles.^[2]

After graduating in 1992, Vasquez went on to become a film student at De Anza College in Cupertino. Though he had little formal artistic training, he soon dropped out of De Anza to pursue a career as a professional cartoonist. He met Roman Dirge, Rosearik Rikki Simons and his wife 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. Rikki Simons also worked with Vasquez on the coloring seen in his two-issue comic I Feel Sick.

By September 1996, Vasquez announced in his introductory text to the sixth issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac he had reached sufficient success in his artistic career to be able to quit his day-job and devote himself full-time to his art.

Comics

His comic works often feature an outside narrative in the form of notes and comments left in the corners of his strips. This can be found in the vast majority of Vasquez's comics, such as in issue #5 of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: a large monster is shown bursting through a wall, arms and hands flailing, tentacles sweeping through the air. It is a scene that surely conveys a sense of violence and danger, yet in the corner of the panel, a small box contains the text "Kids - Don't be scared! He don't bite!" These small touches help with emotional connection to Vasquez's work, and are likely one of the factors in his cult following.

Carpe Noctem magazine published early one-page strips featuring Johnny in the early 1990s. In 1995, Slave Labor Graphics began publishing a series of Johnny comics after Vasquez submitted samples of his artwork to them. Vasquez's first comic, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, ran for seven issues and was collected as a hardcover and a trade paperback book, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut. The cover features the logo "Z?", meaning "question sleep", which appears frequently throughout Vasquez's work and relates to his characters' insomnia and his own hypnophobia. The series follows Johnny as he searches for meaning in his life, a quest that frequently leads to the violent deaths of those around him as well as, briefly, his own. A photograph of one of Vasquez's friends, 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 notorious "Meanwhile" filler piece in the second issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.

Vasquez's next project was The Bad Art Collection, a 16-page one-shot comic. Vasquez stated that he did the book's art while he was in high school to discourage classmates from asking him to draw for them.

In 1997, Vasquez gave Squee, a supporting character from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, 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 Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, as well as comics of Vasquez's "real life" and Wobbly-Headed Bob.

Vasquez's next project was I Feel Sick, colored by Rikki Simons. I Feel Sick follows a tortured artist named Devi (another character introduced in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac) as she tries to maintain her sanity in an insane vision of society, despite conversing with Sickness, one of her own paintings.

Slave Labor has published three Fillerbunny mini-comics, the third having been released in March 2005. The mini-comic was a spin-off of a filler comic designed to replace a vacant page usually reserved for advertising space in the Squee! comics. Vasquez said at the 2007 New York Comic Con that the original Fillerbunny comics would be done in a single night and he would rush through and do 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 he feels it is of much higher quality than the first two.

At Comic-Con 2005, Vasquez mentioned that his next comic was a love story. Since this, however, he attended an event in early 2007 and stated he was not working on his "own" comics — he was collaborating on two comics in the style of Everything Can Be Beaten, acting only as author. The first, titled Jellyfist, was intended for release on July 25, 2007. However, the initial print run of Jellyfist was incredibly poor, and so it was re-released in October 2007.

In 2009, Vasquez collaborated with other alternative artists in Marvel Comics' Strange Tales, issue 2 of 3, with a story about MODOK.^[3] It sold extremely well and all three issues have been collected into a hardcover trade paperback. The next year he returned for Marvel's Strange Tales II, issue 1 of 3, with a story about Wolverine.^[4]

Television

Main article: Invader Zim

After the success of Squee!, the children's cable network Nickelodeon approached Vasquez about producing an animated television series. The series, Invader Zim, which airs on Nicktoons currently, focused on the daily life of Zim, a naïve alien from the planet Irk who tries to conquer Earth — however, his attempts are constantly thwarted in a humorous manner by Dib, a young paranormal investigator and the only one (along with his sister Gaz) who knows with certainty Zim is an alien (although no one believes him), or by his own naïveté.

The first episode aired on March 30, 2001. The series would last for two seasons, until it was abruptly cancelled by Nickelodeon, saying that the main causes of the show's cancellation were low ratings, over-budget production and lack of interest in continuation of the series.^[5] The last episode prior to the show's cancellation, "The Most Horrible X-Mas Ever" (a Christmas special), aired on December 10, 2002. Episodes for a possible third season, as well as a show's finale, then remained unproduced or unfinished.

Vasquez provided the voices for Zim's computer and Minimoose, as well as many other additional voices, being credited under the name Mr. Scolex.

Other works

Vasquez collaborated with Crab Scrambly to produce the storybook Everything Can Be Beaten, published by Slave Labor in 2002. Vasquez, credited as Chancre Scolex, wrote the story and 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". The storybook inspired Urban Squall in 2008 to create the puzzle browser game Bloody Fun Day.^[6]

Vasquez did the entire artwork for the deluxe edition of the new Mindless Self Indulgence album If as well as the digital single, "Mastermind". He also directed the music videos for Mindless Self Indulgence's "Shut Me Up"^[7] and the Left Rights' "White".^[8]

He has also indicated that he shows his artwork in galleries from time to time.^[9]

He also did an art rendition of BioShock 2 called "The Sisters".^[10] He was quoted saying the following about the rendition:

Who says kids are good for nothing other than emergency food in disaster conditions? I don't, because at this point my badass nieces helped out quite a bit for reference. I dragged them, much like Big Sister there, out for a quick photo session and we had a damn fine time in freezing winds posing like the little, demonic wee ones that they are. Being my niece, the youngest had no problem finding that place in her heart that allowed her to simulate the howling face of a child being dragged down a nightmare alley by an unspeakable horror. Throw in a tall, monstrous friend of mine to stand in for Big Sister and you have four people with chattering teeth and trying to steal my jacket. After that, the line-art came pretty easily enough, save for an adjustment period of finding the balance between a more realistic style and not losing the strange cartoonishness.

Style

Many of the characters in Vasquez's cartoons are highly geometric and thin, nearly to the point of being stick figures. The protagonists in his comics are typically insane characters who live in dysfunctional societies, and whose manias are able to speak through other objects (as with Johnny and the Doughboys, or Devi and Sickness). His storylines tend to follow the basic black comedy formula. His art style is very edgy and eccentric and Happy faces are often found in his artwork, trying to evoke an ironic sense of happiness in a world of chaos and darkness.

Vasquez's writing often conveys misanthropic and pessimistic themes, 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, bees, chihuahuas, monkeys, tacos, pigs, cheese, morbid obesity and "dookie". Vasquez also frequently sneaks cameo appearances of characters such as Happy Noodle Boy and Johnny C., as well as himself, into unrelated works. His influences include David Cronenberg, Chester Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, H. R. Giger, Terry Gilliam, and David Lynch.^{[citation needed]}

Several of Vasquez's works have featured gothic characters or depictions of the goth subculture for the purpose of satire. In an interview on the show The Screen Savers, Vasquez responded to host Kevin Pereira's comment that fans considered him "a goth king", saying disdainfully: "King, yeah, but goth... I mean, that's just arrogant."

Awards and nominations

• Squee! was nominated for 1998 Eisner Awards for Best New Series and Best Humor Publication.^[11]
• I Feel Sick won an International Horror Guild Award in 2000 for Best Illustrated Narrative.^[12]
• Invader Zim won an Emmy, an Annie, and the award for Best Title Sequence at the 2001 World Animation Celebration awards. It also garnered seven other nominations.^[13]
• Vasquez and his work were honored in the National Design Triennial: Inside Design Now, a 2003 exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.^[14]

Selected bibliography

• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (1995–1997)
• The Bad Art Collection (1996)
• Squee! (1997–1998)
• I Feel Sick (1999–2000)
• Fillerbunny (2000–2005)
• Everything Can Be Beaten (2002 — with Crab Scrambly)
• Jellyfist (2007 — with Jennifer Goldberg)

Filmography

Title	Position	Airdates
Invader Zim	Creator, Head Writer, Original Character Designer, Voice Actor	March 30, 2001 – December 10, 2002 June 10, 2006 – August 19, 2006
Mindless Self Indulgence's "Shut Me Up" music video	Director	Not Applicable
The Left Rights's "White" music video	Director	Not Applicable

References

1. ^ Johnny The Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut trade paperback (SLG Publishing, 1997) ISBN 0943151163
2. ^ Jhonen Vasquez On M.O.D.O.K. & Marvel An October 8, 2009 interview for Comic Book Resources
3. ^ Strange Tales
4. ^ Strange Tales II
5. ^ Tierney, Adam (2004-09-01). "An Interview with Jhonen Vasquez and Rikki Simons". IGN. http://dvd.ign.com/articles/543/543764p1.html. 
6. ^ Pellerano, Andrew (2009-03-13). "Bloody Fun Day". YAY! it's Andrew!. http://yayitsandrew.com/2009/03/13/bloody-fun-day/. Retrieved 2009-03-20. 
7. ^ Mindless Self Indulgence - "Shut Me Up"
8. ^ msivideo (19 November 2010). "The Left Rights - WHITE". YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VqJGRHuKUE. Retrieved 9 Jan 2011. 
9. ^ Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Issue #6
10. ^ BioShock 2's
11. ^ 1998 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Nominees
12. ^ "The Mammoh Book of Best New Horror" by Stephen Jones, Carroll and Graf, 2002
13. ^ "Invader ZIM" (2001) Awards
14. ^ [1] "National Design Triennial"

External links

• Official website
• Jhonen Vasquez on Twitter
• Jhonen Vasquez at the Internet Movie Database
• An Interview on SuicideGirls.com
• Revolution Science Fiction (October 26, 2001): "Death and Morons: The Jhonen Vasquez Story" (online-chat transcript)
• Jhonen Vasquez Spotlight (2007 New York Comic Con speech Podcast. 54:12m) Downloadable mp3
• Interrogation Special with Zoetica Ebb (August 22, 2007)

Persondata
Name	Vasquez, Jhonen
Alternative names	Mr. Scolex, Chancre Scolex
Short description	American cartoonist and music video director
Date of birth	September 1, 1974
Place of birth	San Jose, California, United States
Date of death
Place of death