JOHNNY THE HOMICIDAL MANIAC:
This is absolutely one of my favorite graphic novels ever. The comic tells the tale of Johnny C., or "Nny" as he sometimes is referred to in the comic. Johnny is a psychopathic "homicidal maniac" who sadistically kills "innocent" people who even slightly annoy him or insult him. An interesting example of this is when he is enjoying a taco at a restaurant and an older woman calls him "wacky," which causes him to murder everyone in the restaurant.
The story continues to show that Johnny is being controlled by supernatural forces, as it seems that he must continue killing people and draining their blood or a monster will tear through a dimensional hole in his wall. When depression and self hatred eventually amount to his suicide, the wall monster tears through the wall and destroys the universe.
When Nny arrives in Heaven, he meets God who appears as a morbidly obese, lazy man who doesn't answer any of Nny's questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything. After becoming infuriated with God a woman named Damned Elise tells him that he doesn't belong there, sending him to Hell. He then meets with the Devil, or Senor Diablo. Senor Diablo allows Nny to view what the souls of the damned are doomed to eternally. Instead of eternal torture at the hands of demons, or fire and brimstone, the souls of the damned created their own hell by focusing on material things and other trivial matters.
I think that this idea of hell is an interesting one. It seems to harken to the true meaning of a lot of religions views on material possessions. This idea that we torture ourselves with all our negativity and focus on trivial, material possessions and unimportant aspects of life is an interesting way of expressing eternal damnation. Johnny eventually decides to give up all the emotion of his life as a reaction to this and all the other things in his life. One of those other things in his life is a girl named Devi, who was one of the only of Nny's intended victims to survive. She is also the subject of Jhonen Vasquez's later work called "I Feel Sick."
I FEEL SICK:
"I Feel Sick" is an interesting story about Devi, a survivor of Johnny's homicidal tendencies.
While I'm uncertain as to the extent of her antisocial and reclusive personality before her short relationship with Nny, after he attempted to kill her she shut herself out of the world even further. The fact that Nny continued to call afterwords made her uneasier for a long time.
When Devi's story starts, we learn that she is frustrated with being unable to paint her own personal work, as she is employed at a science fiction publishing company as a book illustrator. This causes much distress as the publisher is constantly changing the idea for the book cover and making her work harder for her.
Her personal painting, called "sickness," has begun to take a life of its own and begin talking to her, much like Nny's Psycho-Doughboys. Its driving her insane slowly, trying to take over her life and how she creates her work. Devi, however, is a stronger character than Nny is, and when Sickness try's to control Devi, she takes back control.
I Feel Sick is by far my favorite of Jhonen Vasquez. It speaks to me on a personal level since, as an artist, I've had to deal with my fair share of unsatisfied clients who keep wanting changes to work. I, too, neglect personal work over the prospect of getting paid.
This work is most clearly a metaphor for Jhonen's time at Nickelodeon creating Invader Zim. He often writes in his blog about the negativity of the experience and how hard it was creating the show with a network who wanted to change it. However, he has stated that in the future he would be open to creating more episodes.
