Doom doom doom...
Jul 31
When I was a younger man I used to listen to angry music and wear lots of black clothing; if you found a photograph from that period (which hadn't already been cleansed by fire) your eye might be drawn to a pair of unflatteringly long Doctor Martins, and possibly some cheap silver jewelry. It's a time I look back on with no small measure of embarrassment, however there were some wonderful things discovered during my time as an intense young stereotype.
One of them was angry electronic music by bands like Skinny Puppy and Einstürzende Neubauten. Another was a comic called Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, written and drawn by Jhonen Vasquez. It was smart, bleak, full of bitter irony, and made delicious fun of the niche I’d embraced so thoroughly in a fit of adolescent yearning to be cool. In time I grew up and left that attachment and god-awful clothes behind (this was well before all these fucking emo’s sprang up. I swear it’s something in the water, I mean look at their pants!), forgetting all about Jhonen.
And then the television types at Nickelodeon said they’d like to help him put Invader Zim in front of real people, a totally inappropriate show for the children’s network as evidenced by its cancellation a year later. In this unusual case that bastard child quickly earned a metric fucktonne of awards, and so despite the grumblings from the Nick about the violence and the gloom, Jhonens’ little cartoon grew into a mainstream cultural reference, potentially spoiling childhood for millions of children.
And now Season 1 is available on iTunes, yes even in this cultural backwater called Australia. Go take a look.
