“Whatcha reading?”I look up from my comic book and say with a grin, “ ‘Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.’ Ever seen Invader Zim on Nickelodeon? It's the same guy, Jhonen.”
Depending upon who’s asked the question, the reaction to this unusual response varies. Some people give me a look of near disgust; others seem intrigued. Either way my response remains the same: I explain that the comic is not as mindless as it may sound, it is in fact very funny, and is surprisingly intelligent. Are graphic implications of murder and mayhem included? Certainly. However, Jhonen Vasquez, the creator of Johnny makes it clear that this is not the point.
‘Johnny the Homicidal Maniac,’ (JTHM for short), is a work of art, well distanced from the reader, safe between two leaves of its thin comic book cover. From this distance the reader can laugh at situations that would not normally elicit such a response. Safely, then, Johnny can be considered an individual with whom the reader may identify. The reader sympathizes with this character who shares with her such basic and painful realities such as alienation, guilt, the possibility of one’s own insanity, and death. This identity allows Johnny to establish himself as a protagonist within the context of an inherently cruel and merciless society.
‘Johnny the Homicidal Maniac’ is a serial comic with a plot line covering seven issues. The collection consulted in this paper is JTHM, the director’s cut, first published June 1997 by Jhonen Vasquez and Slave Labor Graphics. It contains the primary storyline and omits a few unrelated “mini comics” that were included in the original issues. As such, The Director’s Cut can be treated as a piece of visual literature complete with character development, a cohesive plot, and symbolism that applies to our world. The novel begins with Johnny’s various his killing rampages and ends in his discovering what is inside of him that makes him act as he does. Tortured by his own mind’s animations, Johnny kills himself, angels and demons take him on a tour through heaven and hell, and discovers that neither place suits him. With this new knowledge, Johnny returns to earth more alienated and confused than ever, but with increased insight into the workings of his world. Sprinkled throughout this development are his interactions with Squee, his young little neighbor; these rendezvous show his constant kindness toward children and a seemingly twisted kind of justice.
Vasquez’s style is intriguing in that it not only provides a round view of the world, but he also inserts comments directly to the reader: “More melodramatic prose, aaargh!” “Kids—don’t be scared, he don’t bite!” “With only a touch of self-mockery.” These comments not only add an offbeat kind of humour to the graphic novel, but are a constant reminder to the reader that this world they are viewing is not real, and Johnny’s actions should not be taken as realistic methods with which to deal with our reality. Furthermore, in his self-interview closing the book, Vasquez states that he could never imagine killing anybody, and confirms that he is “not trying to invade minds and communicate anything more than a story, and maybe some amusement” . This furthers the man’s intentions and makes it quite clear that JTHM is intended to be a humourous, artistic and entertaining work.
JTHM remains an entertaining work primarily because of the distance placed between the reader and Johnny’s world. The comic book medium offers a very unrealistic representation of a gruesome image. The pages are uncoloured, images are somewhat disjointed, and it is easy for the reader to recognize the fiction of this work. So while a picture of a person being shot is repulsive on film, such an image in a comic book is not nearly as disturbing. The violence is not the focus with these issues; almost all of the time, Johnny’s captives are in the background, usually black silhouettes and nothing more. Here the “distance” is even more literal, and Vasquez’s choice to represent the victims in this manner stresses the idea that the focus is not on these macabre tortures, but rather the self- realization of Johnny in the foreground.
The primary device Vasquez employs in the name of humour is irony. His neighbor Squee offers a glimpse of this. Johnny meets Squee, his neighbor, the first day that Squee’s family moves into the neighborhood. Though he frightens the boy, Johnny is always gentle and protective toward him. “Sweet dreams,” he says after reminding Squee of the torture he performs just next door. In one particularly memorable scene Johnny drills away at a man with the eventual intention of killing him. The reader sees only Johnny’s face and not the victim as he drills for ten frames. At the end of the set he comments, “This is taking a little longer than I thought. I’m going to make us some sandwiches . . . do you want cheese on yours?” Here, the humor is clearly the contrast between Johnny’s brutal treatment of his “guest” and his hospitality and decency. Vasquez makes full use his audience as a source of humour. Perhaps the title, or maybe the type of humour of JTHM draws a very specific audience. The Gothic subculture that was beginning to grow about the time that the first issue of “Johnny the Homicidal Maniac,” has since remained faithful readers of the comic. Vasquez plays around with the
various aspects of the subculture and in doing so pokes fun at his primary audience. In a mini-comic unrelated to Johnny’s story, Anne Gwish, (Anguish, get it?) goes to a Goth club where she “can be appreciated for [her] originality.” The humour here is the illustration; Anne stands in a sea of heavily made up Goths all wearing black and a silver ankh around their necks. Throughout this work Vasquez pokes fun at this romanticizing of the gothic subculture, allowing the reader to laugh at herself, but through the safety of representation, where possibly the representation doesn’t refer to that particular reader, but perhaps some other Goth girl.
Johnny himself, however, is by far the most complex and intriguing character in the work. The difference between Johnny and Anne lies in that the reader’s identification with Anne Gwish provides amusement alone while her identification with Johnny offers insight. Like many of his readers, Johnny is a very lonely person. He finds his mind animating various items in the house. These objects create a means by which Vasquez can animate Johnny’s inner turmoil; remember that this is, after all, a comic book. Without images the comic book would quickly become dull, and it would indicate a poor use of the medium. These objects include two Styrofoam doughboys, Psycho Doughboy and Mr. Fuck, (or Mr. Eff), who urge him in the direction of suicide and the continued torture of others. On the other side, a dead bunny head with a nail in it urges Johnny to calm down and even suggests giving up his eccentric “lifestyle.” Through Johnny’s interactions with these characters we see our own confused and tortured minds debating on how to react to situations and people, though on a much smaller scale. This empathy goes a long way with creating Johnny as a “nice guy,” and someone who deserves to be loved and understood. Religion, society and our rationale all act as similar agents that push us toward life or death, sanity or dementia, free will or submission. Vasquez has captured this social norm and illustrated it most brilliantly.
The doughboy-nail bunny team also illustrates a basic human emotion: guilt. On one hand he has the doughboys acting as the urge inside all humans to continue with their vice. On the other is nailbunny, who, like conscience, represents the internal desire to be a good person and do away with one’s own evil. Although most of us do not have the guilt of homicide, all people are forced to deal with guilt created by society when its values conflict with our own.
To further this theme of guilt, Vasquez employs the concept of a monster that needs to be fed. Behind the wall in one of the basement levels is a horrendous monster. Johnny does not know what this beast might be, but he does know that so long as the wall is wet with blood, always of others, it will not come out. As such, Johnny is the slave to the beast behind the wall that he has never even seen. The wall is meant to represent his guilt. As long as he is killing other people (keeping the blood fresh), he cannot stop to consider the evil nature of his actions. Should he pause to consider these, the guilt would set in and almost undoubtedly cause his own insanity. Here it is plain that the wall-beast represents Johnny’s own insanity. As long as the beast is behind the wall, Johnny is a rational creature, and therefore not yet insane. In this sense, the wall-beast is an extension of the insane urgings of the doughboys while nailbunny has no counterpart and is a weak voice in the midst of the harsh voices of the doughboys and wall-beast.
Johnny gives into these louder, harsher voices and commits suicide. Once he has killed himself, however, the beast behind the wall comes out. The beast does not harm Johnny, because he, the slave, is dead and not a candidate for insanity. Johnny’s death and the monster’s release are a collective symbol. This symbol can be interpreted any number of ways, but the most driving interpretation is Johnny’s submission to insanity. The wall and doughboys seek to eliminate Johnny’s desire to live. The desire to die is a common indication of insanity, and all of these things—death, insanity and the wishes of the wall-beast—are equated in the storyline. All the opposites are indicated by the nailbunny. As in the mind of a person subject to intense guilt and alienation, the resistance to death and insanity becomes weak and obscured by the overridingly extreme feelings toward these concepts. Johnny’s life represents free will against the beasts, while his death represents insanity. His death indicates the corruption of sanity, leaving Johnny a crazed madman.
What follows Johnny’s death correlates with our own fears of this inevitable force. “Dear Diary,” he writes, “I seem to be dead.” Most people wish they could view the topic this simply, but it is difficult. Likewise, Johnny gets more in-depth with the situation. He is first sent to heaven, where of course he does not belong. There he sees people just sitting, completely content with their world. Still confused as ever, even in the absence of the doughboys, the monster behind the wall and nail bunny, both Johnny and the reader realizes that he will not fit in here.
The next stop on the tour of the netherworld is Hell. Satan explains that Hell is almost exactly like earth. People are discontented and therefore try to better themselves, forever transient as most people are in life. Since Johnny does not belong in either Heaven or Hell, it is plain that he is not an evil person, nor is he necessarily a good person. He is a balanced force of the two, a human in the most realistic form. Unlike the comic book, evil and goodness are not black and white. They are intrinsically blended and twisted into one another, and the result is a complete human, Johnny. Overall, death seems not to confirm but rather confuse our little protagonist. Rather than finding a place where he will fit in with others like him, presumably Hell, Johnny is told that he must return to earth because there is no place for him. As he writes in his diary after his return to earth, “I’ve been to Heaven and Hell and I still don’t know if there is a God or a Devil. Still, it’s something to write about.” This is simply a continuation of the ongoing theme of alienation in this work.
So not because of but rather in spite of his homicidal tendencies, Johnny remains the extremely believable protagonist. Everyone at one point or another has been the victim of teasing. The issue is not that he is slightly insane, or insane at all; Johnny is little more than a grotesquely over-accentuated person living within the context of the world. Most of us have no way to relieve the strain of social torture. Johnny instead overreacts. He gives his antagonists too much of what is coming to them. However, he is rational in that he does not kill or torture indiscriminately. Each victim “earns” his position through his poor treatment of Johnny.
As such, the story of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is substantial because every person can relate to the situations that Johnny encounters as he faces society. His alienation from the rest of the world is the same as the alienation that every person feels to some degree. Johnny embraces our own insecurity with respect to others. Instead of just trying to cope with it personally, Johnny lashes out to a graphic extreme, to the point of murder. He feels justified in his actions because of the pain that these people had wished to inflict upon him, in the form of social torture.
Johnny as an individual is different from Johnny in the framework of society. Vasquez is very literal about this idea. The reader primarily sees Johnny from the eye of the artist, who wants the reader to sympathize with his character. This perspective is of a smoothly drawn Johnny, proportionate, and cute. The artist’s main perspective is a positive one. However, Vasquez provides a different perspective of Johnny as seen by one of Johnny’s victims, where he is disproportionate, and very ugly. Vasquez
thoughtfully labels the scene “seen in amazing asshole-vision.” This throws an interesting twist into the idea of representation. The same artist chooses to represent the same character in two radically different ways. While both are designed to earn the reader’s sympathy, this accomplished through differing routes. In the first, we are sympathetic toward Johnny because he is cute and looks likeable. In this other we are sympathetic toward Johnny because of the poor way other people view and treat him.
The “assholevision” provides an idea of how Johnny is represented in his own world, which itself is a representation of the entire world. This paradox offers quite a bit of insight and also furthers the connection between the reader and Johnny. As the reader is by this time familiar with a representation of Johnny from a specific perspective, he is also familiar with a representation with himself. This eccentric comic tends to attract an audience that identifies very closely with this representation of Johnny and as such causes the reader to consider his own representation within his own world. Do the jerks who make fun of the reader see him as these “assholes” see Johnny? The paradox brings first a rush of self-consciousness immediately followed by a sense of relief. Perhaps these people do see the reader this way; however, here the reader is reassured that cruel people are inferior and will some day meet their own “homicidal maniac” of sorts because of their own cruel nature.
In this sense, Vasquez is extending the idea that society, by its very design, is unmerciful and irrational with its cruelty. While in Heaven, Johnny meets an apathetic God who is asleep on a recliner. What little the deity will say to him is of no help. This idea of an uncaring god is a statement of the world at large. The concept does not necessarily project an atheistic view so much as a general loss of kindness. After all, the point of a god is to lead, but Vasquez seems to believe that God has forsaken the world by allowing awful people to be who they are.
Not all society that produces a violent response within Johnny; he tortures only the inhumanely cruel people of society. His entrance as an interaction with Squee offers an excellent opportunity to examine how Johnny reasons within his own reality.
Squee’s name comes from the noise he makes when he gets scared, and because of this it becomes Johnny’s nickname for the boy. Squee is the unwanted product of two unloving parents. His parents do not attempt to mask this: “Mommy’s ignoring you, go bother your father,” “I haven’t smiled once since you were born.” The family moves into the cookie-cutter home next door to Johnny only to have their son find that his neighbor is a homicidal maniac. The entire series of comics opens in issue #1 with Squee frightened by a noise at night. He and the reader see Johnny for the first time in Squee’s bathroom looking for Bactine. Johnny explains, “some of this blood is mine.” Predictably, Squee is frightened at the prospect of having such a neighbor, but Johnny succeeds in paradoxically charming him while frightening him at the same time with references to the torture he performs on others.
Johnny visits and protects Squee throughout the series. In one scene, a child molester attempts to kidnap Squee at the mall, and Johnny protects the boy by mutilating the molester. In several other scenes, he drops by to borrow a band-aid or say ‘hi.’ But in all these scenes, Johnny never once attempts to harm Squee, simply because he recognizes that Squee is too young to be as cruel and unkind as the rest of the world is toward Johnny.
In the final issue, Johnny leaves his old life to begin anew, perhaps to find his place in this world. First, however, he stops to warn Squee that people in the world are not nice and that he ought to protect himself. Johnny is not warning the boy of people like himself. He is actually making the boy aware of the awful reality of social torture. Just because a person is not physically harming one does not mean that they are not harming at all. Johnny informs Squee that his parents are only two of a terrible society of people.
Despite a physical attack on Squee’s father, this last scene really expresses Johnny’s sensitivity for the child. He never harms him, he never tries to hurt him, and furthermore he even goes lengths to protect him. This protection is of two separate forms: one is of physical abuse, as with a child molester from whom he rescues Squee, and this last scene exemplifies the other. Johnny recognizes Squee’s potential to become who he has. Being incredibly disappointed with his own outcome, he attempts to protect Squee from that future. He says, “Watch out for yourself . . . it’s easy to be affected by your fears, your hatred. I don’t want to see that happen to you.” Obviously Johnny is sensitive to other people who share his own plight. Johnny’s sensitivity contrasts sharply with his torture, but it creates this very round and believable character who would be so much more acceptable to society if society were not as cruel and judgmental as it really is.
When it is all put together, JTHM is a piece of art in a most complete form. Obviously it is visual, but what many people fail to recognize is that along with other comic books, Johnny can be treated as a piece of literature as well. This two-fold aesthetic is created for the same purposes as all art: to interpret the world and bring the reader/viewer to a higher understanding of situations in their lives. Here, there are many levels of interpretation. The reader may derive an understanding of the goth subculture, the world at large, or simply the motivations of individuals within this world. Anne Gwish and the other anonymous Goths in the work show the reader the ironies and inconsistencies of the goth frame of mind. Johnny himself shows the reader his own inner fears and thoughts from a kindly objective point of view where the reader can be comforted that their guilt and social torture is not their own fault. Johnny’s interactions with the outside world reminds the reader that society is cruel and uncaring toward one person’s plight. Like any art, JTHM leads the observer to a more complete understanding of their world through its entertainment and insight.
