ART

THE BUSINESS OF SUBCULTURE

the haphazard genius of Jhonen Vasquez

By Kai Newquist

The artist at work

The story of one artist can easily become a case study of the effects of fame, and how it can affect the trajectory of a career. One such story, often portrayed as a success by his fans and peers, is the career of Jhonen Vasquez. Having created the cult classic comic series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (JTHM), its multiple spinoffs, and the hit TV show Invader Zim, Vasquez is touted as the king of goth entertainment, and is celebrated as a genius by his fans… or would it be more accurate to call them followers? Vasquez’s work has certainly garnered a variety of reactions, and for good reason: his work advanced two separate mediums, and both JTHM and Invader Zim are solid pieces of entertainment. And yet, what else has Vasquez managed to achieve in his 47 years on Earth- and is he still worthy of the lofty title of ‘genius’?

Ever since the cancellation of his hit TV show Invader Zim, Vasquez has made no major contributions to entertainment, besides continuing to return to the same property. Thirteen years after the series’ end, he would become involved in Nickelodeon’s comic revival of the little green alien. Four years after that, the film Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus would be released. No other projects or properties that Vasquez worked on post-Zim ever reached the heights of his original Nickelodeon series. This certainly calls into question how we might look at any artist’s career, and the way in which we might label them. Does one remain a genius years after acquiring that label? Or do those qualities change over time? This question, as simple as it seems, draws into focus exactly how we can come to understand the life and career of an artist like Vasquez.

Vasquez never planned on being an artist. Like most kids, he drew pictures in his notebooks and doodled in the margins of his homework. Through these doodles he developed Johnny the Little Homicidal Maniac, which was published through his high school’s student newspaper. After dropping out of college, this same concept (simplified to Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, or JTHM) was picked up by the underground comics publisher, Slave Labor Graphics, which quickly requested more content for the series. Very bluntly, Vasquez began his artistic career, with a publisher noticing his marketability. Marketability might be a strange term to use for JTHM, with its dark, gorey, anti-establishment themes, but Slave Labor Graphics was smart enough to recognize that the comic catered to a subculture that no other entertainment was at the time: the goths.

A little bit of gore

The series exploded in popularity with the dark and brooding crowd, its balance of gore and literary quotes satiating both the dark fantasies and intellectualism of its target audience–alongside a healthy dash of absurdist (and oftentimes totally random) humor, to balance everything out. This blend of satirizing intellectualism and oddball humor is the direction in which Vasquez would later focus his career. Though often looked back on as a small-time success that eventually became a cult classic, JTHM was a significant first hit for Vasquez. Selling over 16 thousand copies and landing him a PBS talk show interview, the comic was undeniably profitable. Notably, this success came about when Vasquez was barely 21 years old.

While Slave Labor Graphics is an “underground” publisher, that label is a bit of a misnomer. The underground comic industry functions just like any other entertainment industry; it’s a complex profit-motivated system where talent is recruited in order to make the company money. From the inception of his career, and from a very young age, Vasquez was functioning within these systems of production. After his work on JTHM, he would produce two spinoffs. First, SQUEE! would catapult him to great fame; second would be his last major foray into comics, created during Invader Zim’s production: I Feel Sick. This comic would later be considered Vasquez’s best work. What unifies these two works, and separates them from JTHM, is Vasquez’s turn away from gore and toward dark comedy.

In SQUEE! Vasquez explores the adventures of Johnny’s traumatized kid neighbor. This time, however, the absurdist world of JTHM returns in full force as we see everything- from elementary school, public bathrooms, and nature documentaries- through the eyes of Todd, or as most characters call him, Squee. While Johnny could fight back against the injustices of a cruel world in JTHM, Squee acts almost entirely as an observer, and oftentimes victim, of societies’ ills, including capitalism, the public school system, and abusive parents.

Is he getting better?

SQUEE! didn’t completely shy away from Vasquez’s gorey roots, including imagery of alien probings, roadkill, and suicide. The gore is sparser, which can help to hammer home the comic’s messages, though can at other times draw attention away from the rest of the comic. Despite this, the bones of what would soon become Invader Zim are plain as day. Squee’s alien tormentors are obviously prototypes of Zim’s alien race, notably with a pair of tall, idiotic aliens who would eventually become the Almighty Tallest. The school setting in the comic is almost identical, down to the joke of “school” being misspelled on the front entrance (“scool” vs “skool”). Even more glaringly, the character of the teacher in Invader Zim is pulled directly from Squee!. Though some of these links are more direct than others, the point is that it is easy to see the same trends, characters, locations, dramatic setups appearing again and again in Vasquez’s work.

Having been produced alongside the creation of Invader Zim, Vasquez’s first full-color comic would be the public’s first glimpse into the style that would become the calling card of the Nickelodeon series. While Vasquez had dabbled in sci-fi elements with SQUEE!, I Feel Sick took the aesthetics of otherworldly tech and ingrained them into Devi’s iconography. What would become Invader Zim’s title card, alongside many of the props and backgrounds from the show, can first be seen here. Despite this, I Feel Sick is Vasquez’s most realistically grounded work with the plot depicting a young artist’s struggle to maintain her creative individuality. It’s easy to see how Vasquez’s first time working for a large company such as Nickelodeon could influence his choice of story; however, it’s even more interesting to consider I Feel Sick as a product of his almost five years of working in the comics industry. At the end of the comic, Devi confronts Sickness, the supernatural doll born out of Devi’s unconcentrated psyche, in order to regain control of her brain. And yet, instead of killing the doll, Devi chooses instead to take its eyes so that the only thing it can do is to bear witness to her continued creativity. While ending more happily than most Vasquez works, Devi still comments to the effect that she is still a slave to her paintings.

Do we have a signature style?

What’s fascinating is that she wouldn’t have it any other way. I Feel Sick falls into some of the same pitfalls as SQUEE! when it comes to gore, but with less frequency and a higher rate of success. What appears to be the intended message of I Feel Sick is a lot more streamlined and sophisticated than any of Vasquez’s previous work, without losing too much of his signature style. While still rough around the edges, his experiences both as an adult in the world and as a working artist were things he could actionably pull from and criticize for these new stories. He had begun to both literally and figuratively grow up from the angsty twenty-something that had written JTHM, and his career was about to reach new heights.

A successful career in the arts oftentimes has far less to do with the skill of the artist; rather being decided by the ability of that artist to attract producers. Working behind the scenes, their names rarely come up in the discussions of famous artists. However, the story behind Vasquez’s rise to fame is incomplete without the inclusion of his producers. Having never planned on pursuing a career in the arts, let alone creating his own animated show, Vasquez simply took up the opportunities presented to him to build the career that exists today. His rise to fame was so unusual, in fact, that it can be traced back to one producer: Mary Harrington. Harrington had read SQUEE! and was impressed with his "kid relatability" in how he handled writing Squee’s character and stories from a childlike perspective. It’s unclear why Harrington chose Vasquez’s work in particular, what with its unexpectedly dark themes and potentially polarizing imagery, but it’s possible that she was tapping into that same unexpected marketability that Slave Labor Graphics had seen in Vasquez. A growing subculture of alternative teens and young adults, going by labels such as goth, scene, and emo, were rebelling against the establishment in ways the world had never seen with the advent of the World Wide Web. Vasquez’s particular brand of absurd, random humor was exactly what Nickelodeon needed to attract this audience.

Stans for Vasquez

Having their own animated series is the dream of countless artists. For others, working for such a massive company is simply a matter of selling out. However, just like with comics, Vasquez just fell into this new situation. Once Vasquez was contacted with Nick’s request for him to pitch a show to the network (which is almost never how pitches work), he took only one night to conceive of Invader Zim. In fact, Vasquez has been open in interviews about the fact that creating the show was simply a matter of putting together imagery and tropes which he already enjoyed and was comfortable with.

Many of these aspects have been pointed out so far, but there are still more that can be found. The character of Gir, for example, often feels like a filtered version of Happy Noodle Boy from JTHM. Dib, and especially Gaz, clearly draw influence from Vasquez’s goth sensibilities, with Gaz being particularly reminiscent of Devi from I Feel Sick. Satire of America’s failings in capitalism and education are as abundant as ever. Most notably, as Invader Zim was marketed as a kid’s show, Vasquez had clearly taken what he’d learned from SQUEE! and I Feel Sick in regards to pushing the boundaries of gore. Whereas JTHM was never scared to paint its pages in blood, Invader Zim had to be more clever with its storytelling. Zim could gouge out a child’s eyes, as long as it happened offscreen. He could lobotomize Dib, as long as it was through the lens of a video game parody. He could even remove and consume the internal organs of multiple children, as long as the organs were simply teleported out of their bodies and into his own. Network censorship restrictions forced Vasquez, and his team of writers, to be more creative. Somewhere between this creativity and Vasquez’s inherent style, Invader Zim became a success.

The Invader himself

So, what was it about Invader Zim that got it canceled by the network? Fans and critics alike are quick to point to the violent nature of many of the show’s episodes. In particular, the airing of the episode “Dark Harvest”, along with the widespread backlash, is often regarded as the show’s death knell. While its horror elements may have contributed to its eventual cancellation, Invader Zim was canceled nine months after the premier of “Dark Harvest”. Similarly frightening imagery was seen in the series as early as the third episode. In fact, there is very little evidence supporting the idea that there even was such a backlash against any one particular episode of Invader Zim.

Another commonly cited reason for the series’ end is low viewership. This data is hard to track down nowadays, but there were very large online fan communities which celebrated the show during its run, and mourned it after its cancellation. Also of note is Nickelodeon’s continued production and successful selling of merchandise for the show- shirts, hoodies, backpacks, plushies and more- even after its cancellation.

This leaves two stronger theories. The first is the show’s budget. Airing before the hit computer-animated series The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Invader Zim was Nick’s first major foray into 3D animation, and it was expensive. In fact, it’s a well-known piece of trivia that the season one episode “A Room with a Moose” went over-budget due to one shot having accidentally animated some walnuts in 3D instead of 2D. With the various spaceships, mechs, and alien tech that was modeled and animated in 3D, it’s easy to see why the network saw the series as being more expensive than it was worth.

The walnuts that blew the budget

The second theory involves 9/11. Invader Zim premiered on Nick in March of 2001, and six months later, the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers would alter the nation’s culture overnight. Having a show about an alien attempting to take over the world was no longer seen as brand-friendly, and was no longer something Nickelodeon wanted to associate with. Dark humor was out, and irony was dead.

Vasquez had gotten his time in the spotlight, but in the end, what did it all mean? Was his move to the mainstream a step forward in his artistic development? Was it a compromise of the artistic voice he had developed? Or did it demonstrate Vasquez’s deep-seated arrested development in his operations as an artist?

Fans have consistently pestered Vasquez about whether Invader Zim and JTHM would be revived. Some would receive satisfaction with the announcement of the Invader Zim comic, thirteen years after the series’ cancellation. Whether instigated by Nickelodeon or Vasquez himself, this chatter was enough to greenlight Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus; yet another continuation of the same property. Meanwhile, Nny from JTHM has barely had a handful of cameos to satisfy fans of the character. Vasquez has tried to create more original properties in which to continue his career, but unlike the beginning of his career, he now works primarily with partners. His attempt at creating the show Very Important House with writer Jenny Goldberg was something fresh and new for Vasquez and that lack of his signature style may have contributed to its failure. The comic Everything Can Be Beaten, a collaboration between Vasquez and Crab Scrambly, received moderate success, but once again another artist’s style was dominant. While there are certainly Vasquez fans who will stick around for his writing and directing style, there’s no doubt that the Vasquez visual style is his true moneymaker.

A very important house that might signal a change...

In many ways, Vasquez’s career reached its peak at the exact right time. He was able to produce great art because of the decade and cultural landscape in which it was created. But now, Vasquez’s style is dated, still caught in the trends and styles of the early 2000’s. And yet, that datedness has now become Vasquez’s brand. Whether he likes it or not, having been a trailblazer in the mainstream seems to have cemented his image permanently in the ‘nostalgia’ brand. Vasquez has tried to evolve his artistic voice, but he is a smart businessman, and he knows that the artist he was twenty years ago is what’s going to consistently make him money. This businessman, however, has continued to be aware of today’s evolving pop culture trends, and continues to hope that he’ll help create the next big thing.

Vasquez’s artistic development has always been intrinsically linked to the business world, after all. When it was funny to joke about his “arrested development”, he did. Now that his brand is nostalgia, he leans into it. Throughout all this, it becomes difficult to determine where Vasquez’s artistic voice ends, and where his business instincts begin. After all, he never wanted to be a working artist in the first place. As the internet has made sudden and inexplicable success stories like Vasquez’s more and more common, we can look back on what Vasquez has taught us. Is it more important to evolve with the tides of business, preserve who we are inherently as artists, or try to find a balance somewhere in between?

Classic image that kept the Stans coming

©Kai Newquist and the CCA Arts Review