Johnny The Homicidal Maniac and how Jhonen Vasquez touches a very important lesson about mental health.
In the Johnny The Homicidal Maniac Director’s cut there’s a forward written by Rob Schrab that goes as follows;
“Jhonen Vasquez has touched something important here. There’s a little monster inside all of us, a little wolf-faced monkey that needs to be satiated. As people, we mustn’t ignore that monster. If we do, we cheat ourselves. We deny an emotion, a feeling.”
I’d like to talk about and analyze what that is explaining and what it means.
Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, Squee, and I Feel Sick are all obvious vent comics about various stages of life. All main characters even beyond the JTHM verse ( Ex; Invader Zim ) are all faucets of Jhonen Vasquez, as stated by the man himself. This makes reading these stories very intimate and interesting, it’s like looking into someone’s past, someone’s struggles and it’s all very relatable. Johnny The Homicidal Maniac has provided Vasquez with an outlet, a playground to stomp in and shout and yell and scream and stab as much as he wants without ever hurting another human being. And that’s very important.
The subjects in the JTHM series are very psychologically heavy and are amazing depictions of real life struggles of mental illness. Sure, there’s no wall monster or bending of reality, or any supernatural element to the struggles that people face when they are mentally ill but the dialogue, how Johnny sees and reacts to the world around them is very real. One quote springs to mind, one that has resonated with me and I’m sure a lot of people.
“Oh....I wish someone would just shut me off and fix me”
This is an important line, this is where Johnny became a character that seemed broken, lost, depressed; many things that we can see in ourselves as well. We see johnny’s struggles, his anger, his desire to end his life, his pain, everything.
Weather or not Vasquez has mental health issues himself is not something I want to touch on because that seems personal but I’m so glad that he’s allowed to share his sandbox, so to speak, with us, and I think through Johnny we can learn a lot about venting through artistic expression.
I find it powerful that all these faucets of Vasquez; his teen years, his childhood, his struggles with art and the struggles of working for a big corporation; it’s all there and not in real life tragedies but in art. Art is powerful and if you use it the right way it can very much keep you sane. So many people like to make fun of or cringe at vent art but at least whoever makes it isn’t out there hurting others.
God knows how many people, not seeing any other way to cope, end up hurting themselves or others, sometimes to the extreme. Vasquez teaches us that it’s okay to feel this way; just don’t actually kill anyone. That its okay to feel angry, or sad; grab a pen or a pencil or what have you and create something from all that pain!
Johnny The Homicidal Maniac may seem like an edgy comic made by a teenager and that very well might be what it is; but at least we have that and not anything that infamously made headlines.
Going back to that forward, i’d like to close this little ted talk/ramble with the closing paragraph.
“Some may call this irresponsible advice. They kid themselves that their monster doesn’t exist. And when a person lies to themselves, there is less chance for spiritual growth. More than likely, their monster will step out of the dream world and into the real world. That’s how a society gets messy. Lots of neglected, hungry monsters. Johnny The Homicidal Maniac gives our monster something to chew on. It’s pain-food that wears its teeth down. Johnny represents Jhonen Vasquez’s monster. Vasquez, and his fans, are all stronger because of him.”
