4 out of 5

Created by: Jhonen Vasquez

covers season 1 and 2

Across the eras and genres of US cartoons – black and white to color, silly animals to sci-fi, demoed towards discerning adults or very undiscerning toddlers – I have my standouts. Obviously I can only have seen a small sampling of all that’s out there, but I do think it’s a significant sampling, and even amongst those standouts – many of which have been massively influential upon my taste and style – I can trace a lineage, or stamp something as particularly representative of its time, or so on. Meaning even the classics (widely or independently acknowledged) have precedents, and definitely antecedents.

But: I really don’t know how to explain Invader Zim to anyone, then or now, except if you’d read Jhonen Vasquez’s comics – yeah, it’s exactly like that, only geared towards kids… of a slightly odder leaning.

“Well,” you say, in that way you do, “isn’t that a lineage?” You’re not incorrect, but never in a million years would I have looked at Johnny the Homicidal Maniac or even Squee! and thought, yeah, animate that! And even if Johnny was representative of a certain type of comic book reader – in the same way Sandman has tended to be – it’s also a pretty standalone experience: I can see some of the outsider comic / cartoon influences that brought about Jhonen’s style, but similar to the above: I wouldn’t have been able to “design” a Jhonen from those pieces, much less a Johnny. Or a Zim.

In short: I’ve never seen a cartoon like Invader Zim. It is a love or hate experience, I imagine, and the former may come in different tolerable doses: it’s a pretty loud show, visually and literally – lots of yelling – and at times I’ve been in a mood to binge episode after episode, and at times I can only do one at a time. It’s loved either way.

The angular, big-headed design of its characters, the absurd proportions of its world, and dreck-of-the-everyday vibe is a nice stew of classic anime, Looney Tunes extremism, Edward Gorey, and Dave Cooper – to name the fewest of the few – and is vaguely of the same absurd DNA that made Ren & Stimpy, and would eventually evolve into Spongebob or Adventure Time. But Jhonen (and Zim) are creatively unleashed in a way only works in this particular cartoon, with the seemingly random humor – bees and mooses are just funny, I guess – operating on a cutting-edge wavelength of weird logicality that those other shows, as fun as they could be, never quite pulled off.

IZ concerns the titular character, a member of the conquesting Zirken race, which has a hierarchy based on… height. Zim is particularly short, and especially eager to prove himself, which tends to make him (or has required him to be) overly-confident in his actions, and not aware of how his world-conquering attempts are actually making things pretty difficult for his fellow Zirkens. So when he’s of age to be given a mission (a planet) for takeover, and a “SIR” robot assistant, the “Almighty Tallest” send him to a backwater planet they don’t care about – Earth – and provide him with a malfunctioning SIR, which refers to itself as GIR. Why? He doesn’t know.

He procures shelter on Earth and disguises himself – contacts; never mind the green skin – and drapes a green dog costume over GIR’s robot body for the most cute and psychotic sidekick of all time. Lastly, he installs himself undercover in the local school (er, “Skool,” according to the sign), and – episode by episode – has all of his plottings foiled either by self-sabotage, GIR’s inability to remember or execute a command, or through the equally clumsy machinations of local conspiracy theorist Dib, who’s also the son of a brilliant scientist, natch, named Professor Membrane.

We made it through a 20-episode season, and I swear this thing was popular as heck, with kids and fellow not-kids of my age all talking about it, and a quick season renewal somehow turned into a super quick cancellation partway into season 2, leading to one episode airing… with 6 more aired a few years later. While the full story there can only be assumed from drips and drabs, I think the wiki page is appropriately suggestive: word-of-mouth probably felt bigger due to selection bias, with the ramp up the first season needed interrupted by September 11th, making a pretty dark and suggestively violent show not what parents wanted their kids watching. Combined with apparent high costs, even if the ratings had initially been promising… it wasn’t the right time or exactly the right channel for the show. I do miss thinking about where it could’ve gone – though we’d eventually have a comic to fill in some of that – as the show built up a fun supporting cast and vague ongoing storylines by its second season – but by the same token, thanks to 20+ episode seasons back in the day, we got a fair amount of material, and so much of it is so, so rewatchable that maybe it ended at the right moment to be able to be so enduring. After all, some of those other classic shows to which I alluded – I don’t watch those start to finish periodically, as I can do with Zim.

Richard Steven Horvitz’s Zim is, of course, the lifeblood of the show – he is just funny to listen to – but depending on who’s writing, Horvitz’s animated (pun probably intended) yelling can sometimes drift from hilariously unhinged towards just being… loud. Similarly, when Eric Trueheart joins the writing crew, his particular brand of random humor doesn’t always land the same way as Vasquez’s or Rob Hummel’s, the other primary writers. Eric’s scripts are often still hilarious, they just lean a bit towards pure nonsense for the sake of it. That these writers are all consitently rotated in, though, keeps the bar very high througout, and just when I’ve gone through a couple eps that feel like they’re somewhat recycling the “Zim’s wild plan fails again” beats, some banger episode of utter creative weirdness will drop, and you’re realize how rich even the “off” episodes are with visual gags and, at least, attempts at doing something different.

Rosearik Rikki Simons’s GIR can sometimes be hard to understand (in the same way Meatwad is), but damn, so quotable and cute and laugh-out-loud silly when comboed with its hyperactive animation. Andy Berman’s Dib is the perfect, bumbling foil, and his sister Gaz – voiced by Melissa Fahn – is always a delightful stick-in-the-mud of sanity. The of-the-time touches of CGI can be a bit distracting, but the overall art design surpasses any negatives: Vasquez’s world of German expressionistic angles and byzantinely constructed machinery and buildings make even the repeated settings offer up an always distinct and unique vibe, refreshing the Tim Burton look in a non-staid way.

I’ll never quit you, Zim. And, as of this writing, twenty years after the fact, you’ve never been bested at what you do.