Johnny is then resurrected, with all his hair burned off except for two "horns", and finds himself back in his house, but with all of his voices gone save for a talking "Bub's Burger Boy" named Reverend Meat.
In spite of all that has happened to him, and in spite of his role as a "flusher", Johnny resolves to become emotionless like an insect, to not be bound by anything save for what bare essentials he needs to stay alive. One day, a copycat killer named "Jimmy" pays Johnny a visit and confesses to several murders, including one rape incident mentioned earlier to Johnny by Tess, which enrages Johnny so much that he eviscerates Jimmy with hooks and crushes his head with a sledgehammer.
Afterwards, Johnny tries to phone Devi with a prerecorded message, but she delivers a diatribe against him. Johnny then argues with Reverend Meat, who urges him to give in to his emotions and needs, be they physical of otherwise, though the disembodied voice of Nailbunny tells Johnny to resist. Johnny kills a beggar requesting money for beer by shooting an arrow into his back with a "kick me" sign attached.
Johnny visits Squee and tells the boy that he will soon leave for a vacation, but as he does, Squee's father walks in and begins to calmly tell Squee about his horrible life and how he is not wanted. Johnny then smashes the back of Squee's father's head with a toy robot in order to get him to stop talking, then bids Squee adieu. The series ends with Johnny sitting on a cliff overlooking the city, writing in his diary, with the hopes that he will be "as cold as the moonlight" that touches the diary's pages.
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac features several filler strips, which, for the most part, have nothing to do with the main storyline. There is also a comic within a comic in the form of "Happy Noodle Boy", written and drawn by Johnny himself.
In a few issues, there are "Public Service Announcement" strips that parody television Public service announcements on topics such as teen pregnancy and substance abuse. Anne Gwish is a young goth woman that has her own strip in the later part of the series. Her name is a pun on the word "anguish. The strips featuring her are largely a satire on the goth subculture. Wobbly-Headed Bob lives in a separate fictional universe from the main storyline, one inhabited by funny animals who, with the exception of Bob, live in a state of innocence and bliss.
In contrast, Bob is a megalomaniac who believes himself to be the most intelligent person in the world, and the only one who understands the true nature of reality, which he sees in entirely pessimistic terms. His extreme negativity leaves him isolated and depressed. He overwhelms anyone he meets with his despair and often causes them to either commit suicide or flee from him in horror. In one "Meanwhile In another, two ancient gods of war possess a pair of grade school crossing guards to reenact an epic battle.
In one of the more infamous "Meanwhile In an act of self-insertion , Jhonen Vasquez himself appears in other "Meanwhile The strips titled "True Tales of Human Drama" tell stories about things such as a baby exploding, a plane crashing into a bus full of boy scouts, and a man blowing something out of his nose so horrible that a priest commands him to jump off a building.
Vasquez sees alternative comics critics as ignoring his work because of its wider audience. On 5 April , Wizard placed the third issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac at number in their rundown of the greatest comics since the magazine started in July Over the years, Slave Labor Graphics has sold Johnny the Homicidal Maniac merchandise such as clothing, posters, and toys.
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Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. History Talk 0. This article is about the comic book series. For its central character, see Johnny C. Revolution Science Fiction. Retrieved Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut. ISBN Youth Radio. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac 1. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac 2. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac 3.
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac 4. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac 5. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac 6. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac 7. Everything Can Be Beaten. SLG Publishing website. Hypocritical characters dressed in all the latest fashions snub people who are slaves to public opinion. One of the worst offenders, a recurring character named Anne Gwish, embodies the modern Goth poser who shuns everyone while despairing that no one talks to her. Johnny's world is filled with these people and they all need killing.
Even people who don't deserve death might end up falling to Johnny. In one of my favorite stories, "Goblins," a man who was chosen at random is strapped to a truly terrible machine, and faces his impending death with enviable conviction. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac reads like an extended teenage revenge fantasy, if a highly philosophical and entertaining one.
Eventually you figure out that, as Vasquez himself says, "He's not a loser, he's simply lost. Squee is a pitiful child, with parents who resent his very existence and a school that is constantly trying to crush the spirit out of him. Squee lives a life of unending terror as he's beset by nightmares, aliens, his cannibalistic grandfather, openly hateful parents, and a world that never seems to make sense.
It is his young burden to have to live in a world created by Jhonen Vasquez. Somehow, though, little Squee manages. Manages to get himself locked into an insane asylum, yes, but manages nonetheless. The second half of the book features Vasquez's filler strips - one or two-page stories of pain, heartbreak and horror.
Poor Wobbly-Headed Bob tries to convince the rest of the world to accept that he's smarter than they are, and can't understand why they want to kill him. True Tales of Human Drama are just that - dramatic, probably human and god I hope they're not true.
Happy Noodle Boy is a free-form anarchistic story, allegedly drawn by Johnny himself, and I can never manage to finish one. My favorite filler strips are the Meanwhile Another depicts a first date gone horribly, horribly awry as a case of gastrointestinal distress engenders one of the best attempts to save face I've ever seen.
A horrible, lying vampire, the revenge of the pinatas, and a case of childhood attachment issues gone horribly wrong, these are some of my favorite works in the whole series.
The work of Jhonen Vasquez certainly isn't for everyone. Even his famous animated program, Invader Zim , is a little weirder than most people are willing to accept for a children's show. It rewards patient reading and careful attention to the artwork.
Which, I might add, is distinctive and disturbing and wonderful. Vasquez has created a style that's cartoonish and yet horrible, in which childlike glee can be rendered next to heart-stopping horror, and we can perfectly believe that they exist in the same world.
It's strange, horrible and funny all at the same time. If you're interested in something out of the ordinary, I can definitely recommend this. Jade Nail. I came across this strangely charming comic through knowledge of Jhonen's newer works from my icon, if you're familiar with it, you'll probably of guessed that certain works to be the cult-hit cartoon, Invader ZIM.
I was not certain about this comic, while not squeamish or put off by hefty amounts of gore Bloody Mess perk on Fallout 3 , a comic solely about a homicidal maniac didn't strike me as particularly thorough material.
However, I managed to find a scan of the first part online and eventually quite liked some of the characters, even the titular 'protagonist' Johnny and also fell in love with the humour and messages hidden in the pages.
I intended to buy the hardback director's cut online, but after that not happening for two weeks, I popped into my local comic store and just so happened to see the paperback, and almost had a heart attack.
I bought it, and never regretted it. The story does exist, and is exceptionally dark and really adds dimension to Johnny, we even sympathize with him even though we've seen him do some God-awful things to people - because he's funny, mainly.
This comic is literally laced with sarcasm, so I'm not sure what an American would think of this other than take it way too personally. At times the writing can be obtuse and full of itself. Vasquez himself openly admits it is, which is why he's not fond of it too much. The artwork is sassy and unique -the only other black and white American comic I can think of is Sin City- with strong character. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it improves massively in the later chapters.
The art really helps the reader understand the characters, especially Johnny since the vibe of the artwork compliments the levels of insanity he faces with a suffers from during the length of the story and beyond! A typically Jhonen Vasquez work, the ending is somewhat bitter sweet, yet very satisfying, and the plot speeds up quickly during part 3 and soon everything is happening in a closer time period instead of previous parts which could have been taking days or even weeks after the previous chapters.
I'd definitely recommend the Director's Cut for authour notes; Jhonen gives his fans a plethora of sarcastic remarks and some brilliant little jokes hidden in the panels that really just add to the experience and had me laughing out loud at times somebody put shit in my pants! The philosophical implications are very deeply thought out, but don't take this comic as the source of your daily moral, as some parts of the philosophy can be quite messed up.
But that's purely for the benefit of other people reading this, as there's rather little that actually disturbs me in the realm of fiction and, while this complete collection of Vasquez's infamous comic is certainly gorey and twisted, I find quite a lot within its pages to enjoy and value. Johnny is a boy, or perhaps young man, who feels an overwhelming urge to kidnap, torture, and murder any citizen of the city he lives in that insults him, harms him, or just simply irks him in some small manner.
It is clear that Johnny is not a boy in control of his conscience, as evidenced by the various inanimate objects in his living quarters that become not only animate but snarkily intellectual, acting, it seems, as the conflicting shards of Johnny's torn mind.
There are a few reasons I only gave this book four stars. While I very highly enjoy Vasquez's hilarious satirical swipes at the deadening commercialism that fills our cities and the vapid youth culture that drives Johnny into his rage, and I very much like his style of drawing, this book still comes in a bit short of the finish line for being called a collector's edition.
Johnny originally was published as most comics are, in small, seperate issues of twenty-four pages or less, and those issues of JTHM contained a variety of sub-strips, not all of which are present here in this book. Vasquez draws his characters with long, spindly limbs and jaggedly detailed expressions and clothing, which I love, but there's a common struggle that artists drawing in black and white face, and that is the task of making the foreground stand out from the background, and of making objects distinguishable from one another.
Without color, a beautifully rendered drawing can still appear to be quite the chaotic mess. Mike Mignola, who has given us Hellboy, is the absolute master of doing this and nevermind that all of his work is colored; without color, his work with form and shadow would still be brilliant and the farthest thing from confusing and is thus also the rule by which all others are judged, for better or worse. Vasquez draws some fantastic scenes, but I often had to let my eyes linger on a panel longer than should have been needed to make out what was what and who was who.
Aside from those small issues, this is a wonderful volume with which to indulge your appreciation for the hilariously obscene and vulgar. John Burns. I am consistently unimpressed with Graphic novels as a body of work, as well as with the people who read them and think they are actually remotely good.
This was such a crap, indulgent, lazily written book. It's basically the fevered musings of a very immature, pretentious, petty man with a short attention span who is only interested in expressing how much he hates the outside world because all people ever do is pick on each other for the way they look.
What an immensely stupid world-view. It seriously reads like the work of a teenager with ADD. God forbid he should strive to write something with any sort of coherent plot structure. Awful, stupid garbage. I'm especially annoyed at all you Graphic Novel Afficiandos who were dumb enough to give this a high rating and trick me into buying it. EDIT: Several people over the years have left comments telling me that I should read such and such a GN, that some of them are really good, that I can't just slag off an entire genre etc.
Just to be clear, it wasn't my intention to say that all graphic novels are bad. A tiny proportion of them are actually really good. I actually enjoy graphic novels as a medium. I just think that we have to admit that the general standard of writing for highly rated graphic novels like this one is pretty abominable when compared to the average highly-rated, grown-up novel. Jake Thomas. What I love about the book is that it's not the gore that scares me, it's the thought behind it.
Johnny's existential crises come hard, fast and psychotic, as well as at the cost of many many lives. The book works because it's not simply a splatter book with the killer we all know and love. Johnny is a complex, thoughtful, aware and self-loathing character and some of the ideas and images in the book, from the blood wall to the trip to the afterlife to the snicker-worthily named Die-Ary entries give a strange depth of feeling in the book.
There's something primal and otherworldly at work here, and although you can feel touches of Johnen's inspirations here and there, this is a personal work unlike just about anything else out there. The art is fantastic as well, fitting ever-so-perfectly into the skewed perspective of the protagonist. Have there been more horrifying creatures fashioned into ink and paper funnies than The Doughboys? A stranger imagining of Heaven? A portrayal of God that is at equal lengths horrifying, hilarious and enigmatic?
And it's funny. Oh lord, is it funny. Heaven help me, Happy Noodle Boy will never cease to make me laugh. Probably because I, like the rest of the Johnniacs, am more than a little screwy. Dennis Mcfarland. I actually became aware of this book by a girl in one of our old youth groups.
She was a huge fan of the series, and recommended them to me. I went online and found the compilation and ordered it. This is not a novel, it is more like a graphically illustrated comic book, BUT the writing is solid. Vasquez has a profound statement at the beginning about the "monster" locked inside of all of us.
The reason why we "rubber-neck" at car accident scenes and sometimes fantasize about hurting people that hurt us I have struggled with anger issues in the past and always referred to those episodes as "letting the monster out", so naturally I immediately was drawn in by this story.
Johnny the main character is plagued by a monster that lives behind the wall of his house. He has to keep the wall covered in fresh blood to keep the monster at bay. Other "colorful" characters are added along the way Happy Noodle Boy, Mr. Eff, Nail Bunny that add some weight and comic relief to the inner struggle Johnny faces. The book was entertaining, but not for the faint of heart VERY graphic! Blood, twisted humor and a look down on society. I absolutely love this book!
Johnny C. He lives in a house filled with torture rooms and a wall with a need for blood, with 2 psychotic doughboys and a floating rabbit head for company. The closest thing he has to a friend is his neighbor, a small boy named Squee, and he writes a comic called Happy Noodle Boy. It's bloody and destructive, but parts of it still ring true. Vasquez offers insight into the little part of all of us that just wants to go out and MURDER everyone that's done you wrong.
The art is great, the story is great, and you read it again and again after it's over. I read the first 4 issues of the JTHM comic books when I was a teenager, so decided I'd pick up the complete set to revisit and finish the series. Just as I had remembered, it was disturbing, dark and all a little bit wrong.
Illustrations are brilliantly detailed, and in places the stories are quite funny grotesque violence if funny right? I especially liked some of the public service announcements. Here's a gem: "Kids. Drug's won't help things. They'll only turn you into a hideous little freak troll-baby with exploding eyeballs". Words to live by right there. As a 17 year old, I wouldn't have hesitated in giving this 5 stars.
Unfortunately it seems that over the last 15 years, I've grown up a bit. Only a little bit though. Now to hide this from the kids I read this cover to cover at work on a particularly long shift. It's pretty charming, but it gets a little old. A little heavy on the Hot Topic-type philosophy. How are you supposed to rate comic books? You can't compare different style of illustration, and short strip comics often don't have a linear plot so you can't go for the story alone either.
Should originality make up for extra stars? Or the format and overall quality and deliverance? JTHM is probably the only comic collection I've bothered to read more than once. It is so incredibly detailed that almost every single frame contains some other 'clues' and satirical comments by the intruding author that are hidden like Wally.
It's an absurd puzzle that requires a magnifying glass and reading it not only up-side down but cross eyed and around. I had about 30 minutes the first time I borrowed it from a friend due to its immense popularity in high school. But now it seems Vasquez is more known for Invader Zimm rather than his earlier work including this and Squee which are arguably much more genuine and uncompromising.
I have a theory about Nny's actual 'homicidal tendency'. He can be compared to the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho in which both characters not only lack basic empathy, but both live under the stimulation of ultra-violence as a coping mechanism. Nny's universe is shocking restricted, and its boundary is emphasised by Vasquez constant reminder that he is a creation of the author himself Vasquez does love to play with his 'god-complex', that is if you are familiar with his blog Question Sleep.
Nny both creates hell and lives in it - have you noticed how you're hardly exposed to scenarios where Nny cleans up the corpses or capture his victims? Vasquez always opens the story with a confrontation between Nny and someone, or a manifestation of his alter-ego the polarised pig dolls of Fuck and Z?
Is he lonely? But more importantly, why is he lonely? Ultimately, he is a tool trapped in a Nietzschean universe. You may call it nihilistic, but Nny never had a chance to alter his fate. From the very beginning Nny encounters Squee with seemingly pointless randomness, his existence is equally absurd. He isn't physically alive, and his killings are a portal for him to reach into this world, to connect with normality.
It is possible that Nny is the one person his universe has expelled. His intelligence didn't exclude him from the realisation that he has neither the ability nor Vasquez's mercy to ever reach an end.
Jhonen C. Vasquez is the creator of Invader Zim. Jhonen Vasquez was born and 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 Little Homicidal Maniac. According to Vasquez, "So many years ago, [my little romantical friend in high school] was the unwitting reason Happy Noodle Boy was created. 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". 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. Quoted by Jhonen's Older Brother: "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. Though he had little formal artistic training, he soon dropped out of De Anza to pursue a career as a professional cartoonist.
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. Vasquez was soon picked up by Slave Labor Graphics, which is still his current publisher. By September , 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.
Box , San Jose, CA Letters only, no packages, please. The email address he made available to his fans has been put to rest, presumably so he could get some rest himself. 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 D and Sickness.
His storylines tend to follow the basic black comedy formula. Smiley faces are often found in his artwork, trying to evoke an ironic sense of happiness in a world of chaos and darkness.
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 JTHM: A large monster is shown bursting through a wall, arms and hands flailing, tentacles sweeping through the air.
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