Jhonen Vasquez - Early Life

Early Life

Jhonen Vasquez was raised in East San Jose and attended Mt. Pleasant High School, where he often spent much of his class time drawing in sketchbooks. Taking part in a contest to design a new look for his school's mascot, the Cardinal, he submitted an entry that the judges rejected. On the back of a preliminary drawing for the contest, he drew his first sketch of the character who would later become Johnny C. His high school's student newspaper published a number of his comic strips titled Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.

Vasquez created Happy Noodle Boy while attending Mt. Pleasant. According to Vasquez, "So many years ago, my little romantical friend in high school was the unwitting reason Happy Noodle Boy was created. She always asked me for comics, but I couldn't draw as fast as she requested. Thus, I tried to create the worst abomination of a comic that I could, so as to make her not want comics anymore. That abomination, my friends, was Happy Noodle Boy". Vasquez read his older brother's superhero comics as a child, but first became interested in the medium through the original independent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman.

It wasn't until he started collecting "Ninja Turtles" comics that something switched over in my head. To me, there was something just so different about those books that I did start to obsess over them – the way the books felt dirtier in my hands, the filthy artwork and hero characters that never seemed healed over from their last battles. There was a sense of person just behind the printed page that I had never felt before, a thinner separation from production to my hands and eyes that just fired hooks out into me... It felt unsafe, ya know? It's like, the book itself was less removed from the initial moment a creator is excited about having just come up with some great idea to when they finally finish a thing, nice and polished and just a little dulled from before the thing was just another book. To me, anyhow. It's just what I interpreted the experience like, and I'm sure to a lot of people it was just a book about big mutant turtles.

After graduating in 1992, Vasquez went on to become a film student at De Anza College in Cupertino. Though he had little formal artistic training, he soon dropped out of De Anza to pursue a career as a professional cartoonist. He met Roman Dirge, Rosearik Rikki Simons and his wife Tavisha Simons (née Wolfgarth) at Alternative Press Expo in 1995. Dirge later became a writer on Vasquez's series Invader Zim, while Rikki Simons became a member of the show's coloring team and the voice of the show's crazed robot GIR. Simons also worked with Vasquez on the coloring seen in his two-issue comic I Feel Sick. By September 1996, Vasquez announced in his introductory text to the sixth issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac that he had reached sufficient success in his artistic career to be able to quit his day job and devote himself to his art.