Jhonen Vasquez
| Jhonen Vasquez | |
|---|---|
Vasquez in 2007
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| Born |
September 1, 1974 San Jose, California, United States |
| Other names | Chancre Scolex Mr. Scolex |
| Occupation | Comic book writer, cartoonist, music video director |
| Years active | 1993–present |
| Website | www |
Jhonen C. Vasquez (born September 1, 1974) is an American comic book writer, cartoonist and music video director. He is best known for creating the comic book Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, with its spin-off comics Squee! and I Feel Sick, and the Nickelodeon animated series Invader Zim.
Vasquez was raised in East San Jose, California. He attended Mt. Pleasant High School, where he often 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, the Cardinal. Though at this stage he earned no prizes, on the back of a preliminary drawing for the contest, he drew his first sketch of the character who would later become Johnny C.
His high school's student newspaper published a number of his comic strips featuring this character, titled Johnny the Little Homicidal Maniac. Vasquez also created Happy Noodle Boy while attending Mt. Pleasant. Vasquez read his older brother's superhero comics as a child, but first became interested in the medium through the original independent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman.
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 them – the 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.
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