8:48 - 2004-04-24
JV Interview of DOOM!
Listening to: "Iwoya" by Angelique Kidjo and Dave Matthews.
(Yeah, you gotta try some o' dis. It's a good song.)
Don't worry, I know you're excited (unless you forgot, or you think I did, you dastards!). I'll get to the Jhonen Interview, but allow me to be succinct.
There's just something about feling better, I guess. When I've felt well and sond and happy, interesting things have conviently happened.
Yesterday, we had a junk food party in choir in honor of something called St. Swiggins' Day. Supposedly the patron saint of Swedin, he is said (by one person) to have driven all the mice out of Swedin. I assume they came back, because the Swedes still use cats today, but anyway, there was dip and chips in a bunch of bizarre flavors, and cookies, and drinks. At the end, one guy smuggled half a liter of Vanilla Coke out of the room under his shirt, and I laughed because he was really short.
Then during lunch I suddenly was asked to help a woman put thetop on her Jeep. She said she wasn't serious when I started following her out into the parking lot, but she needed me anyway, and in the end we got about 90% of the top on. Considering that it was an American-made car, I'm surprised we did that well.
She had a good reason for putting the top on, too, it rained on and off yesterday, and after we got home from shopping it poured.
Yeah, my aunt picked me up from school, where I spent an unhealthy amount of time talking to Chantelle and listening to her corny jokes. None of them were too lame though, surprisingly. Chantelle is like a character straight out of a Slave Labor comic. And for that reason, she can be a little scary, but she is always entertaining.
Aunt Deana and I then went forth to our task of getting clothes that fit. We only do this once a year, thankfully. I found a Last Unicorn shirt though! It so pwetty ^_^ And these elemental shirts with an extra kooky font on the front that says either "Fire", "Water", "Air", and "Earth" based on your western zodiac sign (ie: Capricorn, etc). The one that encompassed my sign was Earth though, and I decided that since I find myself detesting nearly everything Earthly more often than not, I should probably avoid creating such an irony, especially since I doubt anyone would get it enough to be entertained.
there wa some other stuff, like arm-warmies, and a tiki shirt, but you want your interview goodness ^_^
Lemme find on that's not as wide-spread, that you haven't read, I hope:
Oh yeah, and I censor these things. I hope that isn't a problem. But it's pretty obvious what I changed, so you can imagine the curse words back in there if you miss them that much.
This isn't such arare interview, but it has my favorite quote in it ^_^
Psychodrama Cafe
Take a load off! Sit you a spell! We just painted the joint, so don't mind the smell. For those of yah'll who've been under a rock for awhile, let me tell you a bit about Jhonen C. Vasquez's "Johnny The Homicidal Maniac". It's one of the most original titles on the rack right now, and spices its violence with some of the most wonderfully twisted senses of humor I've seen in a long time. Jhonen takes the readers into the heart of madness itself (in a humorous way) and goofs on everything from goth-folk to census takers to convenience store clerks. This series has taken a break at issue #6 and Jhonen is starting a new miniseries starring Johnny's (or Nny, as his friends call him) little friend who lives next door, "SQUEE!" It looks to be a great read and I highly recommend it as well as "JTHM", which Slave Labor Graphics is keeping continually in print (as they do with ALL their titles). Let's grab a cup and a slice with Jhonen Vasquez...
IN THE PSYCHODRAMA CAFE!
Interview Conducted by Bradly E. Peterson - Wednesday, March 05, 1997
Jhonen: So, who's going to see this thing?
Bradly: Oh, just the folks who drop by the cafe... Oop! There they are now. Hey yah'll! Glad you could stop by. I'm just here havin' a cup an' a slice with Jhonen Vasquez! Welcome to the Cafe, man.
Jhonen: First off, don't call me "MAN". It makes me feel funny. Makes me think of...men.
Mavis: Ya know... It makes me thank 'a men too.
Bradly: Uh, Mavis... Everything makes you think of men...
Mavis: Oh, yew heshup now! So, yew draw that "Johnny the homo-cidal feller"?
Jhonen: You are grotesque, Mavis. It is difficult to look directly at you.
Bradly: Dude! (Shock!)
Mavis: It's the headlamps... They do that, darlin'. I kinda figgered you went for them skinny, sulky, anorexic, lookin' like Trent Reznor's leftovers kinda gals anyways.
Bradly: Mavis! (Yet again... Shock!)
Mavis: Oh yew heshup now! What'll you have, hon? Coffee, tea... Ice-Sucky?
Jhonen: Hmmm... I'm not much for coffee, so I'll just have some lemonade, aaaaaand a bagel with cream cheese... maybe a strawberry shake, and some fries... some of those little cheese filled things, aaaaaand a vegi-burger... and, and just to offset the, thus far, vegetarian order, just bring me a HUGE piece of PORK! UNCOOKED and on a stick. Mmmmmmmmm... Hello.
Mavis: Uh... Yew want grits with that?
Jhonen: Do not be vulgar. Grits would be a bit much don't you think. I am on a diet.
Mavis: Yew ain’t from around here, are ya?
Bradly: Never mind... Lemme get another cuppa joe, and a fajita combo.
Mavis: All right, then! I'll brang yah'll yer drinks in a minute.
Bradly: So, uh... You alright, dude?
Jhonen: Yes...yes, I am. Why? Do I look, somehow, wrong? Why are you looking at me like that? COME ON, what's wrong with me? It's my hair isn't it? I tried these new clippers and they just ate at my flesh, shaving off more skin than hair.
Bradly: Nah... It's on yer head, and that's what counts innit?
Jhonen: Perhaps. But say you preferred baldness to having hair, to having some hideous abomination of hair. I mean, what if your hair just STUNK like [crud], and you couldn't stop it from stinking? WHAT THEN!!!! STINKHEAD!!!!
Bradly: Well, I guess you could shampoo it... Or shave it off maybe. No, You tried that...
Mavis: Here's yer lemonade, hon. And here's you a fresh cup. The rest'll be here in a bit.
Bradly: Thanks. Uh... What were we talking about?
Jhonen: Getting back to my raw head...
Bradly: Oh yeah... Good coffee. Lessee... Shaved head, scraped skin off... Did you wash it?
Jhonen: Trying to wash my hair after that was a nightmare, with the shampoo just finding all the raw skin to burn. I hate that word... "SHAMPOO".
Bradly: Yeah... Sham... Pooh... Sounds like another word for fake dookie, don't it? [Heckuva] thing to put on yer head.
Jhonen: There ARE people out there who enjoy such things, you know. I think there are even POOH-clubs.
Bradly: Heh... I've always said that if you can think of something that disgusts or sickens you, you'll probably find about a dozen other folks that'll pay cash for it. Heh... Speaking of folks, I'm curious... Are any of the folks in the book based on folks you know?
Jhonen: Not quite. They exist more like lichens than as just some singular entity. Various aspects of various people funneled into one body under one name. I don't know many people who are interesting enough on their own. If I wrote straight from life , it'd be a much more boring book. It's like making a Frankenstein's monster in that I take pieces of personality from different sources, and them into one ugly little person. There's never a lack of source material.
Bradly: That's for sure! I used to wonder if we'd ever run out of stupid people, but it seems like they're breeding like rabbits. Tell me, what sort of stupidity annoys you the most?
Jhonen: One persons's stupidity is another person's passion, so it can get tricky thinking about what IS stupid. I'd have a difficult time naming things that I, personally, would throw out of existence like some big bag of trash filled with trash that smells all trashy. Aside from the HUGE, sadly human things like racism, blind worship of violence, and bellbottoms, the list gets more difficult to fill out, as EVERYTHING out there has someone to love it. I don't love all types of music, but I don't HATE any types. So IGNORANCE of what others feel is what bothers me the most. And the sad part about that is that, whether we want to or not, we always hurt someone sooner or later.
Bradly: Sadly yes... That's very true. We tend to carp on others about the things we hate most about ourselves. Tell me, what do you hate most about yourself and which things do you most love?
Jhonen: Me? Are you implying that there could possibly be anything wrong with ME!! HAH!!! I laugh at such nonsense! I laugh and make foodstuff fly out of my nose in a display of mockery at the thought. Though I suppose I could hate the fact that contentment seems like such a distant dream for me. It can get a bit sad thinking of how much worry there is. As for what I like best, that would have to be my form of escaping that sort of thing for awhile. My imagination is more real to me than most people. It's the band-aid that keeps reality from rubbing up against the open wound that is life.
Bradly: If you could draw & write any comic book for one issue, and you could do whatever you wanted with it and it would see print guaranteed, which would you choose?
Jhonen: Hard to say, really. It'd be so easy to say some big SUPERHERO book like Superman, or Batman, but then I'd be missing out on all of those little Disney books that would be so ripe for subversion. I'd probably have to go with one of those hero books though, just to have characters' breast implants exploding.
Bradly: Yeah... Alan Moore's doing Supreme for Rob Liefeld. Have you seen it?
Jhonen: No. That doesn't sound like the sort of thing I would ever get around to seeing. I'm not even sure I know what SUPREME is. Is he that enormous muscle guy? Hee! Did you catch my joke? THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF ENORMOUS MUSCLE GUYS!!!
Bradly: Pretty much, yeah. Basically, he's doing "Superman" the original enormous muscle guy under an alias. Heh... I about fell out of my chair when I saw a vibrator with the words "Long John Supremo" written on it in the background in the fifties "Mad Magazine" parody portion. Heh... Anyway, you, much like Tarantino, take a situation we’ve seen hundreds of times and take it in a whole new direction. Is this what you consciously go after or does it just sort of jump onto the page as you draw it?
Jhonen: I don't think it would be as much fun for me if it were a conscious effort. I only give myself a very general storyline, and it's not until I get to actually doing the pages that the details come out. I just know that if I set out some rigid plan early on I would only get to changing it so much when I sat down to draw. The character of Johnny is rather unbalanced, and I find there is no better way to do the books than to be just as unstable when working on them.
Bradly: Is there anything you do to get to that state? Sponduics? Comestibles? Tunes?
Jhonen: No. It's just my natural working frame of mind. Sometimes I take a lot of Tic-Tacs, but that's just because I like having minty breath while I draw.
Bradly: Good deal. I keep running into folks that tell me have to get messed up in order to work, making me figure that their work must be more the dope than themselves. So what the [heck] happened to that dude in issue 5, man? [Heck], what happened to the rest of the [dang] world, for that matter?
Jhonen: He was severed at the waist. This resulted in death, I'm sure. The rest of the world was rebooted from a backup disk, though Dillon's existence was deleted so that he would be gone forever. Most everything else, however, is back to normal. I just bought some new socks.
Bradly: So, is the thing in the wall gone now or is it just resting?
Jhonen: Things in walls are NEVER gone. It was supposed to be this containment place for human emotional sewage. It accrued some sort of awareness and wanted to escape to do what came naturally to it, to spread. I don't see this sort of creature as ever GOING AWAY. I also think it smells like feet.
Bradly: Well, things that won't go the [heck] away tend to smell like feet. Y’know, like relatives. Heh... Anyway, now that Johnny's gone off to find himself.. or lose himself or whatever, what sort of stuff will we see in the Squee! Mini-series?
Jhonen: We'll see all the same things we all saw when we were little kids: ALIEN ABDUCTIONS, PEOPLE BEING MAULED BY DOGS, ZOMBIE CLASSMATES!!! This book will be much more autobiographical than my other published work, as I was the most phobic little creature alive, and Squee gets to suffer my venting of all that terror. The overall feel of the book is veering more towards a goofy insanity like in the MEANWHILE stories, rather than the more psychological hell that JTHM was.
Mavis: Here’s yah’lls order! Yah’ll give a holler, if’n ya need anythang, darlin! (Winks)
Jhonen: (Suddenly gets worried look.) EXCUSE ME! I MUST USE THE BATHROOM!
After a few minutes, I went to check on him only to find the window broken out and no trace of Jhonen! [Dang] it. I hate when that happens. Anyway, yah’ll pick up the "SQUEE!" mini-series from Slave Labor Graphics when it hits the store shelves beginning in April of 1997. Why? It’ll be a good read, funny, unusual and Jhonen’s gonna need the money ‘cause I’m billing him for the [dang] window and medical bills from Mavis forcefeeding me the "Big Gunns" (Mavis’ own family recipe cheese-filled Jalapeno’s) he ordered. It was a frightful, and traumatic experience.
