Yeah.. I know a whole bunch of goth/raver girls even in their late 30s who are really into this show. I mean, like what you like I don't care, but I saw an episode with a girl not too long ago and it was kind of like a drawn out Pinky and The Brain episode and the style was so late-90s/early-'00s that it seemed pretty outdated and stupid to me.

And that's not because of the "it's a kid's show" thing. I knew about Johnny The Homicidal Maniac well before and I think the adult following MLP has gotten is justified by the source material. There's just not that much going for it. It's kind of like really being into The Oblongs or something.

JTHM and Invader Zim were the Buffy the Vampire Slayer of the late 90s/ early 00s goth/industrial scene. It was also pretty much the only thing on TV at that point which pandered directly to goths and rivetheads. Of course graver girls in their 30s would be into it!

Zim was pretty dark and messed up, for any show let alone a kid's show. The writing was quite good, the art style was highly expressive, and the spastic acting really appealed to teenagers. Most of all, JV was skilled at straddling the line between creepy and cute; this, I think, was one of the things which really got girls on board with it. In a way Zim was like an inverse MLP: it was a show aimed at adolescent boys, which nonetheless managed to garner a large following of adults - including adult women.

Which episode did you two watch? Do you remember?

I think it was the first episode. I dunno I spent the rest of the date getting her into a corset for a goth night (and she was really skinny) and thinking "this isn't much of a date.." Cool girl though but I haven't seen her since.

Oh yeah I had this really vivid dream last night that I was accepted to Yale Divinity school and I was immediately inducted into Skull and Bones. It turns out that you were the person who got me in! But the special ring (which was just a wedding ring with a skull and crossbones on it) was too tight so I spent the rest of the dream in a taxi cab driving around New Haven looking for a ring resizing place!

Ummm, dude... that wasn't a dream.

TV's Frank was the head writer for a lot of episodes of Invader Zim.

Apparently it was conceived as a tenth anniversary thing, and only ran for two years.

Jhonen did a lot more than just Zim, too. There was also Nny, Squee, the Devi miniseries, and that Fillerbunny crap which was basically Happy Noodle Boy minus the irony.

He's also writing new Zim comics which I believe have already begun.

Same here. I haven't read it in years so I'm not sure how well it's held up, but teenage EH was all about JTHM.

That was a magical time for me going down to the Comics for Collectors in Ithaca and grabbing JV Collections and preacher volumes as well as I Feel Sick

Speaking of Preacher, what do you think about the upcoming AMC series? From the guys that brought you Pineapple Express and The Interview!!?!?

I know Rikki Simons (voice of GIR) and Aaron Alexovich (character designer for the show), and I've met Jhonen a few times. All of them are incredibly aware that their fanbase sucks. Jhonen seems to live in a constant fear of being stabbed by a Johnny-wannabe at all times. He knows they exist, they're out there, and his work has struck a chord with a certain flavor of mental illness.

Still, great people, don't be tempted to paint them with the Juggalo brush. They're all very talented, very literate and cognoscent people.

Rikki Simons was there too but there was a line of unfathomably awful people waiting to see him so since I was the only person talking to Horowitz, I just hung out with him for a bit and skipped the other line.

>> Still, great people, don't be tempted to paint them with the Juggalo brush. They're all very talented, very literate and cognoscent people.

Thank you! A lot of people hate Jhonen and Co. solely on the strength of their fanbase. That's a shame, because they're all pretty great people, and while Jhonen himself suffers from both an elevated count of hipster midi-chlorians, and congenital Negging syndrome (which you can see bubbling to the fore in this video), he's is a shrewd writer and fairly astute social critic.

There was, for example, a storyline in JTHM where a Johnny-wannabe shows up at the titular maniac's door and starts gushing about how "cool" and "awesome" Nny is for killing people - at which point Nny launches into a rant about how he's NOT a hero, but rather a detestable, amoral murderer, and how this fanboy would have to be a complete idiot to think otherwise. The whole thing quickly turned into an polemic directed against Jhonen's own fans. Then Johnny killed some people.

It was really quite deep.

There's a few fandoms I have distanced myself from over the years because of the shitter fans, but I will always unapologetically be a fan of Vasquez' work. I was reading his stuff back when it was new and part of the Slave Labor Graphics imprint. I owned the first edition trade of JTHM before it was even a "thing." I thought Invader Zim was great...absolute pitch perfect translation of JVs work to the screen and no amount of his shithead fans has ever really ruined it for me. Like he says in this video, a lot of the shows fans are "watching it wrong" and just really don't get it as much as they like to pretend they get it.

Well, the comic book just now coming out is written/illustrated by the original team (Jhonen is not doing the actual artwork, Alexovich is). Originally the third season of the show was going to leave Earth altogether and become a parody of Space Opera (the Resisty were going to be bigger characters). It's going to be a continuation of the plot arc Jhonen wanted to do and I'm honestly excited for it. I'm glad Nickelodeon got that property out of their clenched butthole.

I remember the heyday of SLG - I was a regular on the message board for Spookyland (Roman Dirge's site) while comics were still coming out regularly and it was pretty active for a while, with occasionally Vasquez and Dan Vado making appearances to argue about stuff. I think Vasquez's site was in a constant state of "coming soon" that never materialized, or what message board that did exist was overrun by hot topic lolrandom. Spookyland and poe-red were my two internet hangouts, and it was fun to talk with people and see the explosion in popularity play out in real time.

He did a similar "anti-fan" thing in I Feel Sick (which was, in my opinion, probably his best post-JTHM work but it never really went anywhere except that limited series).

What's Slave Labor up to these days, anyway? I was an avid reader of their stuff in my teens, suddenly struck me that I haven't thought about them in years.

They're surviving a rough patch, so far... http://www.gofundme.com/aqqq40

all I remember about this show is I hung out with people that were obsessed with it in college, and all of those people turned out to be vapid, self-obsessed morons. Go figure.

It's those white framed glasses. They enhance the douche factor.

He IS a PUA! As I mentioned during the earlier discussion about his "anti-fandom", Jhonen is a master of negging, which, combined with the fact that most of his female fans are extremely insecure to begin with, works wonders for his game.

Compare and contrast this with Joss. Joss, like Jhonen, is very popular with women of our generation. However, you rarely, if ever, hear women say that they consider Joss to be an object of sexual desire! I submit that this state of affairs is largely due to the the differences in their respective approaches: Joss is "the nice guy". He is the Friendzone Creative, a slightly ugly, non-threatening, possibly homosexual manfriend for lonely girls to pal around with. Jhonen, by contrast, is a very slick, slightly predatory, bad boy. He looks good, in a tastefully disheveled sort of way, and at all times he remains cool and detached in his interactions with fans. THEY must pursue HIM, and this dynamic is why ravenous fangirls, who'd never give poor Joss the time of day, dream of tying Jhonen down and brutally raping him.

Evil, I don't know of you have ever looked at Jhonen 's twitter, but if you have you would see that he hits on women there. Especially if they're younger and have a pixie cut.

wait this isn't a pua thing?