Jhonen Vasquez

Jhonen C. Vasquez (born September 1, 1974) is an American cartoonist, animator, writer, producer, and director.

He is best known for creating the Johnny the Homicidal Maniac comic book series (alongside its spin-offs Squee!, I Feel Sick, and Fillerbunny) and the Nickelodeon animated series Invader Zim.

Jhonen C. Vasquez was born in San Jose, California, on September 1, 1974.

He is of Mexican and Venezuelan descent.

He grew up in East San Jose and attended Mt. Pleasant High School, where he spent much of his class time drawing in sketchbooks and took part in a contest to design a new look for his school's mascot.

He earned no prizes; however, on the back of a preliminary drawing for the contest, he drew his first sketch of who would later become the title character of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.

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

He said:

"It wasn't until I 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 themthe 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."

Vasquez's high school student newspaper published a number of his comic strips featuring Johnny C, titled Johnny the Little Homicidal Maniac.

He also created Happy Noodle Boy while attending Mt. Pleasant.

Carpe Noctem magazine published early one-page strips featuring Johnny in the early 1990s.

After graduating in 1992, he became a film student at De Anza College in Cupertino, California.

Despite having little formal artistic training, he soon dropped out of De Anza to pursue a career as a professional cartoonist.

He met Roman Dirge and Rosearik Rikki Simons at Alternative Press Expo in 1995; Dirge later became a writer on Vasquez's series Invader Zim, while Simons joined the show's coloring team and voiced Zim's erratic robot sidekick GIR.

Simons also worked with Vasquez on the coloring seen in his two-issue comic I Feel Sick.

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 named 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.

He 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 September 1996, Vasquez announced in his introductory text to the sixth issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac that the comic book had been successful enough for him to quit his day job and focus on his art.

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.

At Comic-Con 2005, Vasquez mentioned that his next comic was a love story.

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.

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, but 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.

It sold extremely well and all three issues have been collected into a hardcover trade paperback.