Johnny the Homicidal Maniac #1
This review was fast lane commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire.
Before he became a major current within the western animation ecosystem with 2001's "Invader Zim," Jhonen Vasquez was an alternative cartoonist. Within that space, his best known work was probably "Johnny the Homicidal Maniac." An ultra-grotesque, ultra-edgy, ultra-random-eks-dee comic about Johnny "Nny" C., who is a homicidal maniac.
Yes, that cover is representative of the art style.
No, it's not just Johnny who is drawn like that.
Apparently, Johnny C was created when Vasquez was in middle or high school. Sort of a juvenile author avatar who he drew little revenge fantasies about. Eventually he started drawing him doing dark humor stuff that wasn't purely self-indulgent, and even got it published in the school newspaper before going on to commercial publication in his young adulthood.
The comic takes place in a...imagine an even mix of Franz Kafka and early Matt Groening...sort of world where everyone is either mean and stupid, just plain stupid, or an innocent child trying to make it in a world of these grotesquely-drawn moronic brutes. Johnny C is the most obvious serial killer in the world, performing shocking murders, mutilations, tortures, and other depraved shit on a constant basis, without ever seeming to arouse suspicion. He lives in a creepy, delipidated murder shack that inexplicably sits in the middle of a white picket fence suburb, where he preys on the residents with equally inexplicable impunity.
The strange sound the doorbell makes is the muffled screaming of the captive victim who gets electrocuted every time someone pushes the button.
In terms of personality, Johnny is...all over the place, really. I'd say his default personality most of the time is basically a rare male version of the Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl archetype, only with less cutesiness and more gore and torture. Having "quirky" conversations with the rotting corpses in his basement (and living room, and kitchen, and...), deciding to murder anyone who uses the word "whacky" in his presence, deciding that a kid's teddy bear is being rude to him and murdering the teddy bear (while leaving the kid himself shocked but unharmed), etc.
Honestly, the fact that he shortens "Johnny" to "Nny" probably tells you most of what there is to know about him, aside from the serial killing. And you already know that from the title anyway, so.
The comic might get more story-driven in later issues, but JTHM #1 is just a collection of shorts. Including some random stories that don't actually include Johnny at all and might not even be set in the same world as him, despite having the same dark view of suburban Americana and the same eye-bleeding artstyle.
Am I saying that JTHM is trash? Yes. Absolutely. I think it's own creator would agree with that assessment. However, it's trash that occasionally - not always, not even often, but occasionally - has some real wit within it. And not in the "monkeys with typewriters" sense. You can tell that the author is an intelligent person who has meaningful things to say, but it's only rarely that he's applying those things to the work.
The strongest short in this book is probably the first one, introducing Johnny to the reader and also serving as a surprisingly effective and poignant horror story despite the silliness and edge. The aforementioned little boy with the stuffed toy is the child of neglectful, apathetic parents. They've just moved into the neighbourhood, and the parents just get annoyed with their son when he tells them about strange noises outside the house at night. And then, somehow, don't wake up when the window shatters at night, or when Johnny C. stumbles into their bathroom to disinfect a wound he got from his latest victim.
He has a friendly, if very unsettling and tension-inducing, conversation with the boy...and then decides his stuffed doll - the child's one source of security and comfort in a house where his parents constantly ignore and dismiss him - is insulting him and stabs it repeatedly. Before leaving through the shattered window again, Johnny tells the boy that they're going to be neighbours henceforth, so they'll surely get to know each other better in the near future.
The child is left wide awake in bed beneath his broken window, clutching his stabbed-up doll, while his parents' irritable voices from across the house tell him to stop making so much noise and go to sleep already.
It's a type of horror story that I've seen many times already. There have been successful movie and book franchises that are basically rooted in this concept. I won't say that JTHM is the strongest example of it that I've ever seen. But still, it manages to do it effectively in a very small amount of space, while also managing to work as inane dark comedy as well as horror.
I also think there's an important bit of nuance in the kid still being able to clutch his teddy for comfort even though it's been stabbed. Showing that it's important that he did survive this experience, both physically and emotionally, and that he will be doing whatever he can to survive in a dangerous world where his ostensible guardians can't be relied on.
The other best short in this issue is...well, it actually predates American Psycho, so it couldn't be inspired by it, but there's definitely a lot of commonality. It has a family values activist doing a door-to-door survey about people's opinions on the string of gruesome murders and mutilations that have been plaguing their community and whether they think violent TV programs and video games might be responsible. He haplessly strides up to Johnny's murdershack after going through his lineup of apathetic-to-the-point-of-stupor whitebread neighbors, and gets a warm welcome.
The activist initially thinks he's going to die, but then Johnny calms down and participates in the survey, and the man almost instantly gets disarmed by Johnny's charm and erudition. That is to say, Johnny spouts some absolutely vapid, highschool-philosopher tier nonsense about violence being inseparable from the human condition, which the surveyor finds to be profound and mind-expanding. He decides that the erratic man whose crumbling, bloodstained, corpse-smelling house he's in must be a rare intellectual free thinker amidst a sea of suburban mediocrity, and that such an insightful and sensitive young man couldn't possibly be a threat to him or anyone else.
Then Johnny has another erratic, unpredictable fit of rage and stabs him to death before throwing his body out the door onto the street in broad daylight. He remains unsuspected after this incident.
Like I said, those were the strongest two shorts in this issue. The others are much more forgettable. But still, you can see how the creator has potential that just needed more time and practice to mature, which they eventually did. Really makes me think of the "Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man" collection, albeit with a much less appealing art style.
Also sprinkled throughout the collection are pages of another comic called "Happy Noodle Boy." A completely inane, completely pointless amalgamation of stick figure nonsense, allegedly authored in-universe by Johnny C. We actually see Johnny working on a HNB strip in one of his own stories, in which he claims that this comic is his magnum opus and is highly successful among "the homeless insane." Whether there is any truth to that statement of Johnny's is left up to the reader's judgement.
Apparently, there was an annoying acquaintance of Vasquez's in high school who kept asking him to draw comics for her, and he created Happy Noodle Boy as a form of malicious compliance. I don't know if the HNB strips printed here are actually the same ones he drew for his annoying classmate years previously, but I choose to believe that they are.
So, that's the first issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Mostly just dumb ugly fun at best and dumb ugly boredom at worst, but with a bit of elevating wit and social commentary sprinkled throughout. You can definitely see how this person went on to make Invader Zim after learning to dial down about 40% on the ugliness and 70% on the edge.
