My only experience of Jhonen Vasquez was up until today limited to Season One of Invader Zim, which while entertaining and bearing a theme song that haunts my psyche continually, did not actually have much of an affect on my general thought process. Johnny is different. This 90s comic manages to clearly convey a variety of psychological concepts which are still abused and ill-assigned today, as well as providing a darling insight into the mind of an artist.
For those of you too lazy or noble to download & read the first seven issues of Johnny's story, this post will not make much sense. Sorry.
For those of you who have several hours to spend, get torrenting before reading further, because this baby's loaded with spoilers.
I also should mention that there are several continuity errors below, because I haven't done much to refine these musings past their original state as reading notes.
Overview:
The sub-reality that is Johnny's world exists as a means of expression without consequence, as explained by Vasquez in his introduction.
Its creator, Jhonen Vasquez, has created a world which closely mimics [Central/Our] Earth, but is an inexact replica in that this 'Earth' is centred around the conservation of the life and liberty of a serial killer named 'Johnny'. The world is pretty much exists as his playground, where he can murder with impunity.
The true crime of the creation is that this becomes the only thing he can do; it is the default response to anything he is presented with, because the majority of the time the attitudes and behaviourisms of the people in this world reflect Johnny's ideology of humanity as emotional predators who openly engage in acts of sadism and who are hypocritical by nature.
There are, however, a number of instances where Johnny encounters people who do not behave in this way. Horrifically his response of murder continues to be the same. It is his function, tied to him as the protagonist and officiator of Vasquez will.
The Characters:
Johnny:
Johnny serves as an baseline in an emotional trinity, pivoting between mania and dementia frequently. Johnny is in most cases a slave to these forces, acknowledging that he may be insane and that despite his free-action he is unhappy.
At heart, Johnny appears to have lived a slightly dismal but otherwise ordinary life until
he fell subject to manic depression. The early story is ambiguous as to whether these were 'his' emotions or rather the emotions of his 'creator', Vasquez. Later on the latter proves to be correct, as his emotional focal points reintegrate with the Wall-Entity (A being from beyond Johnny's world possessing ultimate subjective control over his reality).
Despite Johnny's temporary death halfway through the series, he continues to exist in the afterlife and experiences both Heaven and Hell, and remains a vessel for Vasquez' destructive emotions. During this time he discovers that he is a point of galactic confluence where all the residual misery and despair in a particular 'cell' of the mortal world collide and remain stored away until death, at which point these emotions are 'flushed'. As a 'Waste-Lock', Johnny is doomed to grow increasingly introverted and isolated from those around him.
This can be interpreted as a chain reaction: That Vasquez himself is a Waste-lock for his particular cell of the universe, and that Johnny is a Waste-lock for the universe that is Vasquez. Without Vasquez' interference in Johnny's world, it can be assumed that by reverse action his cartoon Noodle Boy would become his own Waste-lock. As things stand, Johnny's reality begins to feel the backwash of the emotional waste within him, and the only part of his world with any purity is his Noodle Boy comic.
Ideology ~
In an attempt to find reason in his world, Johnny makes the motivations of each of his murders clear. At different times he uses it as a mode of revenge, a way to appease 'The Wall', and as a way to preserve the few happy moments he experiences before they can sour.
Death is his default method of purification, but the reader quickly come to realise that Johnny is aware of the corruption present in the act of murder and that he wishes to free himself from it. This is where his suicidal tendencies spread from, because he knows his murders are a logical conclusion, but he does not want to live in a world where murder is a logical conclusion.
Johnny identifies that there are two separate beings classifiable as human; the common type who mascarade in human form and act through cruelty and evil, and another rare species who are genuine and good. Johnny lacks the means to tell the difference between the two, and so he settles for slaughtering both.
Johnny does not believe that his victims have any right to complain about their situation, as it is their own actions that made him into who he is. They are, therefore, the cause of their own death.
For whatever reason, Johnny generally considers suicide by firearm. This is a notably different approach to the one he takes with his victims, because with them he tortures them first as a means of hollowing out their minds and purifying them spiritually. The implication is that Johnny wants physical escape, but not an actual end to consciousness.
Johnny avoids sex and physical contact with human beings (other than the obvious) as a method of transcending the physical world and separating himself from the base cruelties of humanity. In a way this could be seen as a means of personal expression within the limitations of his actions: the Doughboys (mania and dementia) and the Wall demand that he tortures his victims and murders them (once again, mental death, then physical death) but do not insist upon 'how' he should kill them. By adopting a restrained method, Johnny reveals his will to be separate from mortal chaos.
--
The Wall
If Johnny is the cornerstone of Vasquez' world, then The Wall can be seen as the cornerstone of Johnny's. He is driven to periodically 'feed' it with a fresh coat of blood to prevent his reality from falling apart. This is the point where Vasquez and Johnny truly become separate characters rather than the same character acting in different realities. Johnny is a slave to the wall just as he is a slave to Vasquez, and despite what he personally desires he must feed Vasquez periodically to keep his own world feasible as an expression of its creator's bloodlust. Should he ever stop, the whole purpose of his world would collapse and his reality crumble into nothingness.
Halfway through the series, this actually happens; Johnny is shot in the head and is incapable of feeding The Wall, so a tentacled avatar of Vasquez' wrath breaks out from beyond it and performs murders of its own. As Johnny dies, so too does his world die and Vasquez throws up a series of new ones to give his emotions a continuous mode of expression.
When Johnny is reawakened, it is unclear if the Wall still exists or if it has taken on another form. Its absence could be interpreted as a closer union between Johnny and Jhonen, where they begin acting out of the same desires and urges.
Mania and Dementia:
Two Styrofoam dolls speak to Johnny whenever he feels any particularly strong emotion. These are classified under two spectral points: mania and dementia.
The proper names of these 'doughboys' are Eff and Fu2k, but at times it can become difficult to differentiate between the two.
I found it much easier to tell them apart from their eyes (mania = Whiteness; Dementia = Swirl) and their shirts (Eff = Fu2k; Fu2k = Z?)
FU2K:
Fu2k voices any thoughts of dementia/depression that Johnny has, driving him to
commit acts of murder or to obsess over suicide. He continually berates Johnny for how weak he is, and claims he does not have the strength to end himself.
~ It is later revealed that Fu2k hoped that by keeping Johnny alive, he would eventually consume his whole character and gain control of his body. This plan failed with Johnny's accidental suicide.
Z?:
Z? is a force of mania; being love, happiness, or intense desire. Like FU2K, Z? sees the solution to Johnny's emotions in murder as an act of preservation at the height of the emotion. He also acts through Johnny by encouraging him to seek out negative elements of humanity and revenge himself upon them.
Z? stayed loyal to the Wall-Entity that is Vasquez, and kept pressing upon Johnny's mind in an effort to kill him. Once the comic (Vasques' source of emotional release) died, the manic and depressive forces he placed in the comic book began to 'reintegrate' into him.
~ It is later revealed that the Doughboys are not wholly a part of Johnny's mind, but
are rather an external force of evil playing upon it and driving him to perpetuate
the misery in his world. At some point they became 'self-aware', and in doing so,
separated from Johnny.
The presence of these two polar attributes in the comic are indicative of Vasquez intention to separate himself from any strong emotion or the actions that accompany them. With the comic as his Waste-lock, he dissociated himself from his bipolarity and gave it a means of feeding itself. The doughboys reacted to this forced imprisonment by fighting over Johnny, and by trying to escape Vasquez' control. At the point when they succeeded in damaging their prison enough to escape back into Vasquez' world, he was forced to rein them in and reconstruct what he had lost.
It is possible that the Doughboys were recycled back into the comic as the guiding factors behind Johnny's afterlife, with Mania representative of a Heaven where an injection of desire resulted in a head-exploding competition, and a Demented Hell where paranoia, materialism and dissatisfaction led only to an empty shell of feigned life. Like The Wall, they have become an actual part of the comic book world rather than characters acting within it.
The Nailed Rabbit:
The rabbit is a token of one of Johnny's earlier kills, and if anything represents his childhood or past at a point before the Doughboys started talking to him.
The Rabbit speaks from a place of sanity, pleading to Johnny to listen to neither of his demons and remain neutral. He is a vessel for internal dialogue, and is the most connected to Johnny as an individual. Johnny views him as a friend and companion – his only one.
Big Boy & Mr. Samsa:
After his resurrection, a new manifestation appears to Johnny as the embodiment of sensational excess (addiction), and he quarrels with it, demanding to live his new life free from external forces. He ponders over the glory of a beetle, Mr. Samsa (named after the unfortunate in Kafka's Metamorphosis), who he sees as a creature with only the most basic desires. From this we can see that Johnny is now yearning for his own metamorphosis from a human being into something more elemental and focused. He sees insectile beings as the fulfillment of this spartan existence, quoting 'The Fly' to one of his victims.
Happy Noodle Boy:
Happy Noodle Boy is a comic character created by Johnny as the only alternate means
of expressing himself. Given that his response to any emotion is murder, it could
even be said that his cartoon is his only true mode of expression.
The Noodle Boy is notably different from Johnny in that he doesn't kill anyone,
and simply yells whatever he feels from atop a soapbox. Johnny's attraction to the
character is probably due to the fact that people will listen to Stick Boy and react
to what he says. In many cases, this leads to Noodle Boy becoming the victim of another's violent intentions or to him being reprimanded by the police. Those things that Johnny can't have, Noodle Boy does.
At the same time, Johnny sees Noodle Boy as the devolution of his creative instinct
in favour of his destructive urges, having once been a painter who had other modes of expression than murder.
'Noodle Boy' was a nickname given to Johnny in school. The character may even be
seen as an alternative course to the one Johnny took.
Squee (Todd):
Squee is Johnny's neighbour, an isolated child who Johnny has decided to take on
as a protege. Squee is obviously traumatised by the attention and violence Johnny
exposed him to.
At the end of the series, Johnny reveals to Squee that he hopes Squee will be able to get past the terrible things he has lived through and become a good person rather than a murderer.
Devi:
Devi is a girl who works at a bookstore who Johnny dated and tried to 'purify' at the height of their relationship. She injured him and escaped, and was too afraid to go outside as she believed he was stalking her and she was been unable to get the police to act in her defense.
Devi is revealed to be the only one capable of actually hurting Johnny, and inadvertently kills him by calling his phone and triggering a killing machine he set up to prove how disconnected he was from the world.
After his resurrection Johnny apologises to her and says that he will annihilate all memory he has of her so that she can go back to living her life. She replies that only she can actually free herself from him, and that his apology is inconsequential.
In light of all this, Devi can be seen as a being within Johnny's world with an ability to resist or change its shape, much like Vasquez himself. If she has a counterpart on [Central] Earth, it may be her interaction with Vasquez that triggers responses within Johnny's world.
Anne Gwish:
At the point in Issue 5 when Vasques begins to reunite with his exiled emotions, his suppressive conciousness throws up a new avatar to react to the Doughboys. He introduces her as a Type A (cle) 20th Century Goth. The idea quickly fails and attention returns to Johnny. Anne sticks around as a side-comic designed to poke fun at Goth culture, and at Vasquez himself.
Jhonen Vasquez:
The artist appears intermittently in the comic to serve varied functions. He first appears in Issue 4 when Johnny retaliates against him by striking the wall with a hammer, and a sequence of gasping frames tie Vasquez to the world he has used to incarcerate his emotions.
Later in Issue 6 he contrasts his life with Johnny's before decaying into a wacky run of comedic exploits, but it is clear that his intention is to display the control, dullness and order that exist in his life as opposed to the unthinking reaction in Johnny's (what he does versus what he wants to do).
Wobbly Headed Bob:
Bob is another short cartoon strip that features in the series. Bob is a being who suffers from near-suicidal depression due to his understanding of the universe, and sees it as his duty to share his nihilistic views with the ordinary citizens he comes across. Bob reveals that nothing in the universe is special or amazing, and that life is exceedingly dull and empty. He reflects that he would like to be blissfully ignorant himself, but cannot.
Summary:
Simplified, JTHM is the story of an artist who placed all his emotions in his artwork to try and remove them from his life, only to discover that his art and his emotions rejected this design and warred against him in an effort to be free of his influences. There is a continuous struggle between the artist's attempts to control his creation and his creation's desire to be free. The story begins with a large number of chaotic elements which slowly unify and stabilise. The series has an open ending, and it is difficult to tell what actual changes have occurred within the artwork or if it is any more likely to hold together than when it began.
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