Squee’s Wonderful Big Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors by Jhonen Vasquez

Squee’s Wonderful Big Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors is a book I have been searching for for a long time. Although, to be honest, I have been searching for any comic collection by Jhonen Vasquez for a long time, and this just happened to be the first title I actually managed to find in print, (having just recently been reprinted for the twenty-fifth time since 1998 in what I imagine to be yet another relatively small run). Ever since first seeing Invader Zim five or six years ago and seeing this man’s name attached to the creator tag, I’ve known that I want to experience more of his insanity, and preferably unconstrained by television executives and the censuring that had to go on to make Zim a show for younger viewers. Discovering he was a cartoonist, I set out to track down his run of creator-owned comics Johnny the Homicidal Maniac or Squee!. Tracking either of them down proved unsuccessful until just recently, with a reprint of Squee! being released. So, was it worth the years of occasional searching?

Generally, yes, this collection was exactly what I hoped it to be. Pure lunacy, darkness, and anti-establishment jibes permeate the book. You can imagine the person who stayed up to the early hours of the morning inking pages was just ever so slightly on the edge of insanity. He has a genius that wobbles on the brink of madness; dwelling on the kind of thoughts that angry, lonely, fringe-relishing teenagers will instantly connect with, which probably explains why a portion of his fan base is made up of these types. Searching Jhonen Vasquez or any of his creations on the internet and you will discover fan pages and DeviantArt profiles that will make you cringe. And yet, that is part of what makes his work appealing to me. Knowing that the mostly normal can enjoy the misadventures that befall Squee (or Todd as he is actually named), Wobbly Headed Bob, and Happy Noodle Boy and at the same time there is a kid curled up under the covers in his parent’s basement practically worshipping each page. What I’m saying here is that the book can be read for what it is -darkly brilliant humor with some twisted delights- or for what some want it to be -a manifesto for the wretched and alienated- and it will completely depend on your age and outlook with neither way being incorrect.

The only thing I haven’t fully touched on is what this Squee! collection contains. The keystone to the whole thing is of course the main Squee! stories, staring Todd, a young, unloved child who is frequently visited by aliens wishing to use him as a specimen. Todd is relatable in that most of what he fears are the same things that many kids fear (the dark, monsters) except in Todd’s case, there is reason for this fear. There really are monsters, and aliens, and the antichrist wants to be his friend. The Todd stories are a great read and the artwork is fantastic. The inking accentuates the lurking horror and insanity of the stories, and Vasquez’s asides -written on the fringes of panels, in either self-praise or mockery of the artwork- makes the reader feel connected to the creator on some level.

The second half of the book is the collected “meanwhiles” that Vasquez created to fill the rest of each original issues of Squee! and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. In his words he wrote them “for the purpose of quieting the cackling in my head” and keeping him sane while working on the title stories. These “meanwhiles” are where the Happy Noodle Boy and Wobbly Headed Bob stories come from (along with a gamut of one-off characters). Some of them are pure brilliance and had me laughing manically, and others fell flat. Interestingly, I felt that the one-off comics were the best of the bunch, full of great ideas and twisted humor whereas the serial ones felt like they were one trick ponies that just were not allowed to die. Of the two serials, Wobbly Headed Bob was better, and had it been one comic I would have had a mild chuckle and moved on. Instead, by the time I reached the final one, I was tired of the dribbly-goop being spouted by the character about everything in the world being, essentially, a pile of suck and I was sorely tempted to just close the book and give up. The Happy Noodle Boy stories, had they been any good, would have made me want to claw my eyes out, but fortunately were just mediocre enough that I just didn’t feel like caring. In all honesty, I can totally see a much younger version of me thinking these stories were brilliant and totally understood life. Where I am now, they read as the ravings of a miserable pre-teen. Their only saving grace is that I am fairly certain they were either written as parody, or as filler to entertain the younger, outsider teens that were reading the book.

Overall though, this was a fun collection, and fans of Invader Zim would find much to like. The title story was great fun to read, and most of the secondary stories (beyond the two mentioned above) were fast and entertaining.