3 out of 5

Vasquez hates the goth thing.  He makes fun of it enough, but he can’t escape it – his books are always going to be sold at Hot Topic, and the black-clad crew are forever going to dig him just by association.  It’s not an alignment he’s unguilty of, either, as everything he’s worked on can be slotted with the “everything suck” mentality of the scene, and his designs tend to favor the cute and garish blend that’s generally favored by the same.  That he’s also worked with scenesters Mindless Self Indulgence – well.  But there’s a reason Johnny and Squee! are still on my shelf (at least, eh, pending a re-read in the recent past) and that I enjoyed Invader Zim and that I’ll continue to check out writings with which Vasquez dabbles, and that’s that he tends to expand the scope of a lot of his Slave Labor Graphics mates by bringing in this kind of awareness of humanity to balance out all the humanity shitting-on.  Similar writers approach this with straight out sarcasm, showing that they “get” that the joke is that they’re human too, but it generally doesn’t approach the same kind of acceptance and exploration that’s touched on in Vasquez’s work.  His random humor – mostly in Filler Bunny – also tends to get a bump over the norm (many of that norm he has influenced, mind you) in the way that it draws attention to its own randomness in a “why is this happening?” sense that extends that awareness concept to encompass the author…  Blah blah blah, so they’re not just someone spouting dogma or messages at you, but true attempts to express something going on in the creator’s brain.

Or so I think.

And this is also not to say that everything’s perfect.

Certainly, with his pen-hand seemingly exhausted, as Jhonen has turned to having other artists draw some scribbles to match his words in a couple of infrequently released books, it seems that he’s experimenting with a proper way to express himself or his ideas.  “Everything” is sort of empty, unfortunately, feeling like it started as a gag – let’s write a kid’s book – and then figuring out the punch line for the gag (which is the title).  The presentation is cute in its rectangularly-bound mini-comic way, and it bears the high stock and color production of SLG, but some of it just doesn’t work.  Printing all of the “e’s” backwards doesn’t amount to anything except for making it hard to read at points, and “Crab Scrambly’s” artwork works for all of the bloody bits, but is too pen-scratchy to make the juxtaposition of happy land and our main character look really juxtaposed – it still looks sort of evil and scratchy.

The “story” is about a character named IT who sits in a room smashing kittens, then finds a door in the room, which leads him to this perfect and ideal land with smiling creatures that confuses him… until he realizes that “everything can be beaten” and he can smash non-kitten things.  Womp.  The style of writing floats on the verge of funny – typical Jhonen humor of cartoon logic smashed against real logic – but along with the pointless backwards ‘e’ comes a pointless narrative style that keeps making meta jokes about the story and the reader.  It almost works, but it’s either not timed correctly with the images or it’s just a little too upfront with explanations about the subtext of what’s going on to feel right.

And there are a couple of extra beats (pages) to the book that really make it just feel like an extended joke.  But the ending is a win, and is more reminiscent of the dead-stop humor found in Johnny.

Jhonen collectors will of course already have this.  As a random find for those who like the art style or Slave Labor stuff, I must say this is fairly generic, for better or worse.  If you’re exploring the Jhonen catalogue, “Jellyfist” is a more fun example of the writer exploring his style.