JTHM

         Review of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut. The novel is written by Jhonen Vasques, and published by Slave Labor Graphics, July 1997. The novel is in black and white, 168 pages. The work is done largely in ink, with a fairly typical page set-up. Lettering is mostly in a semi hand-drawn fashion, as well as all the sound effects. The novel alternates between being text driven and visually driven with large blocks of text on one page, then a large single image panel on the next.
         The theme of the novel is largely exposing the dark and generally useless nature of humanity. This is reflected largely thought the main character, Nny, as well as his victims actions and words. Nny mostly kills those who attempt to cause him pain though verbal abuse, largely as a comment that they are sadistic and cruel, but the methods he uses often involve full scale torture devices. While this is a paradox, the author is still, somehow, able to create a connection between Nny and the audience, largely through a combination of humor and convincing the audience through long speeches that they deserved it. It's actually fairly incredible that he manages to make his readers cheer for a mass murderer who tortures his victims to death and paints a wall with their blood. However, given that most of his readers are between the age of 13 or 15 (or never grew out of that phase), it's not anywhere near as surprising.
        The story takes place mostly in the town where Nny lives, or his basement. At first, the story is a large number of unrelated vignettes show-casing his murders, and explaining to the reader that he has to kill to keep a wall in his freakishly large basement (like, over 5 full houses worth of space) painted with fresh coats of blood or else a demon will come out and kill everyone. The stories begins to develop more of a connection, however, as the novel progresses and turns into two entities competing for control over Nny as his conscience. The first is the "Dough Boys," who want Nny to kill himself and thus release the demon. The second is a floating severed head of a rabbit who refuses to give up on him. Towards the end of the book, Nny ends up killing himself accidentally, and goes to both heaven, where he is told he does not belong, and hell, where he is again told he does not belong because in this universe, hell is for stupid people. Meanwhile, the story follows one of the women kept in his basement's story as she goes through the process of escaping, though eventually dies anyway as the demon gets released from the wall. From there, Nny is resurrected, and his outlook on life changes slightly, but he continues killing, though only for himself. The book ends with him telling his small scared neighbor he has been harassing throughout the book that he is going away for a while, and that he should look out for himself while Nny isn't there to protect him.
      Oddly enough, despite the novels dark illustration and content, the novel attempts to keep a light atmosphere as Nny kills people with sporks, forces someone to test the contents of his refrigerator for freshness, and kills people in generally silly ways. The sound effects and authors comments are normally things like "don't sue me, I'm funny" in reference to him including Taco Bell in his series, and "SNAP, CRACKLE... I bet you're thinking POP" as a sound effect to someones head being torn open. The page where Nny skips merrily out of a building to the swelling chorus of classical music as it explodes form the massive sticks of dynamite he threw in it probably best exemplifies this dichotomy of death and absolute silliness.
      So, after re-reading one of my absolute favorite pieces from 8th grade, I can see why the authors hates this work so much. Going through it when older, I can see how absolutely immature the long three page rants on life contained within the book are, which completely takes away from it. I had figured this would happen a little, but that it wouldn't be enough to stop me form enjoying the series altogether. However, it largely was, and if you are older than about 14 or 15, this book is likely to be too graphic and generally filled with opinions and viewpoints that are fairly wrong, that most of it will be unfunny, and generally meaningless. However, there are still a few scenes that are hilarious if one likes dark humor, largely the ones in which Nny is just killing people instead of discussing his life views with them, and so if you're able to put up with listening to a depressed youngin whine every once and a while, you should enjoy the book.