#jthm dillon

[st4hlwerk]

[vivernia]

[urfavesarequadranted]

Tess and Dillon (From JtHM) as kismesis pls

Tess and Dillon from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac are kismeses!

[metrovaliz]

My au??? human centipede au

I drew it as a joke and it just happened to come to my mind

[stomiidae]

Chapters: 10/17 Fandom: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Edgar Vargas/Jimmy "Mmy", Jimmy "Mmy"/Edgar Vargas Characters: Edgar Vargas, Jimmy "Mmy", Devi D., Tenna (JtHM), Tess R., Johnny "Nny" C. Additional Tags: Emotional Manipulation, Mass Murder, Suicide, Drug Dealing, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Unreliable Narrator, Illustrated, Multiverse, Angst Series: Part 3 of End Times Summary:

So the world at large hadn't burned the night his father had predicted it would. That didn’t mean that the End wasn’t coming.

[misterxsamsa]

Analyzing the whole Jhonen thing, denying that part of it is set on Johnny, got me thinking.

Jhonen is not fooling anyone. Of course he put a lot of himself into his work, both in Johnny and the other characters (Like Devi in IFS). I don't think he had a traumatic past or anything similar, but, perhaps, had opinions to put down on a piece of paper. And over time, he just didn't see himself reflected in Johnny like he did in the beginning. At least, that's the conclusion I came to. On the one hand, I would also feel ashamed that my 19 year old version is still being read by thousands of people, who feel identified with a “part of me”. The work is no longer mine, it's not personal, it is open to everyone to identify with. Jhonen never talked about how important it is for him to draw, but come on, JtHM and IFS the main focus of the protagonists is that they lost their creativity. That's a bit of a big deal for someone who draws full time. Not only that, he cosplayed Johnny, he has the original doughboys (And I think a reverend meat? if it's not just an edited image). I can see the mixed feelings, between feeling embarrassed at your work, but it's yours, you're not going to let just anyone call it a “joke.” Making a comic just for “the laughs”, but you put a lot of yourself anyway, and not just in book and movie choices, that's not just “jokes.” I don't think this way, Jv probably doesn't either, but it's an answer I can come to. I wouldn't consider it a *extremely* personal work, but a look at 19-year-old Jhonen.

This makes me think what actual comics would be like, or in some case a movie, or series (Pls Jv i swear). He's changed a lot, surely his hurmor will prevail as always, but I'm intrigued as to what his vision of his characters would be, now 40 yo, beyond a poster of Johnny full of blood (and his rp twitter account. ).

Sorry, I may be VERY wrong. I'm not cool enough to get into Jhonen's creative brain, but try to analyze it as someone familiar with this “creating something” thing.

I used to get worried about the possibilities involving a sequel to the original comics, largely because I feel capturing the spirit of the source material perfectly is impossible. He's not 19 anymore, and thus wouldn't write Johnny with the same priorities and intentions. However, enough years have passed where I think I'd be open to something different. There's so much left unresolved by Issue #7 that a new perspective on the characters, and concepts therin might be an advantage to any sequel media. Jhonen probably understands the nuanced flaws to Johnny's character better than when he was originally writing them, so I'd imagine that hindsight would give him a much more interesting way of approaching them. That's not even mentioning characters like Tess, Dillon, or Tenna who are fountains of untapped potential. Now, I fear that if Jhonen tried to scientifically recreate the percise energy and mindset behind the original comic run, it'd just fall into some bizzare narrative uncanny valley where it's not quite right.

I'm not Jhonen, so I couldn't say definitively what direction he'd go in with Johnny, but I think a lot of his wax-poeticizing would be eradicated from his character. I know Jhonen's expressed that should he rewrite the comics, in some form, he'd want to focus on Johnny being a slave to a Lovecraftian beast more than his angst. That worries me a bit, because I actually think Johnny as a portrayal of mental illness, and his interpersonal problems, are extremely compelling. However, I fear that comprises a lot of what makes Jhonen somewhat sheepish about him as a character nowadays. That, and Jhonen's said himself that he tends not to prioritize the same things about Johnny, and his source material, that a lot of its fans do. In that specific example, he was talking about the "Where the fuck is the Bactine?!" line that got cut in a re-write he did at some point or another. Still, at least we can all agree that the Lovecraftian consumption part of Johnny's character's progression deserved way more attention than what it got for how intruiging it was.

[lazerlustt]

[maplepastry]

Finally submitting my JTHM fanart on here and the first one up is this jerk lmao

[incorrectjthmquotes]

Nny: I have horse-like reflexes!

Dillon: Don't you mean "cat-like"?

Nny: *Kicks Dillon in the jaw*

[vivernia]

(I know that in canon Nny would have killed him)

[unicornmanure]

JtHM Body Count

I was curious as to just how many people Nny’s killed so I went through my director’s cut and counted.

Confirmed kills:  ≥ 109

Implied kills:  ≥ 30-105

This is just the body count from the main JtHM series and strips. Counting all other canon sources such as Nny’s Twitter, that number is much, much higher.

Bonuses

Other captives:  ≥ 52 that he didn’t get around to killing himself but who presumably still died from the events in issue 5

Released: 1 (weenie taste tester)

Escaped: 1 (Devi)

Breakdown (spoilers)

Killed “on screen” or whose murders were mentioned in text: Survey Guy, 9 Taco hell patrons, Edgar (💔), Ugly On the Inside, ≥ 3 “others” he “immortalized the moment” with, Self-Appointed Beverage Dictator, ≥ 26-39 Cafe le Prick patrons, Shit In Pants, pedophile, girl in head clamp torture device, flower vendor, old woman, ice cream man, hell’s chauffeur, Jimmy, “Kick Me” sign guy

Presumably killed but not shown: “cat on crack” person, beheaded husband stuffed full of human skulls, guy attached to the circuit breaker, mall girl drained of blood, 10 “friends who came over,” ≥ 10-18 Things That Make Noise, party clown, 16 chained up captives, 4 Cafe le Prick patrons, guy in head clamp torture device, 5-80 cheerleaders, ≥ 1 person he dug a grave for, Krik’s 2 friends, salad tongs victim, power drill victim, ≥ 2 of hell’s chauffeur’s friends, whoever’s blood was all over him while buying a Brainfreezy

Confirmed/implied kills from strips prior to the series: ≥7

Captives still in the house when the wall monster escaped: ≥49 cocooned people, Dillon, Krik, Tess

Why yes, yes I am a massive nerd, thank you.

[metrovaliz]

I had to tinker a bit over this translation of my own mini-comic

[1995-1997]

Movies mentioned in JTHM

That other post I wrote has got me thinking about JTHM and movies and I started thinking about all the ones that actually get called out by name in it. I was hoping I would have actually seen more of them so I could talk about what parallels (if any) are actually being drawn here but I’ve only seen about three of these lol. But if anyone’s interested here’s just a list of all the movie references I caught in JTHM:

Aliens (1986) or possibly Alien (1979) (looks more like the logo for Aliens tho) - poster on Johnny’s wall

Edward Scissorhands (1990) - another poster on Johnny’s wall in the same panel

Brazil (1985) is the movie Johnny and Devi saw on their date

Nny “met” Tess and Dillon at a showing of Kafka (1991)

And in the very next panel Dillon mentions The Crow (1994)

Which also gets parodied in this poster on Anne Gwish’s wall

As well as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

And of course, Nny quotes The Fly (1986) (which is actually a remake of a movie from 1958, but I’m pretty sure the line he quotes is only in the 1986 one).

Feel free to add on if I missed anything!!

[silkoodles]

Bought a fountain pen and i think i messed up by buying one with ink cartridges instead of a normal one i can just dip. This is me trying it out anyway. 

Redrew a panel from I Feel Sick and one from JTHM. Anyone remember Dillon? lol yeah me neither.

[glam-and-gloom-blog]

JtHM Sims: Part 5

Wedding bells are chiming! Flowers are blooming! Sims are still using the toilet without taking their pants off. Basically the same ole stuff that happens every day. Will our Sims’ wedding go off without a hitch? Or will it be the disaster to reign over all disastrous weddings? Click to find out!

You can sort of see Tenna in her off-white wedding gown. Man, that mixologist has got SKILLS.

Griping about being hungry. Be an adult, Tess.

And Johnny’s taking a nap in the courtyard! So immature.

Devi looks awesome in her outfit, at any rate.

Jimmy, looking handsome in his tux and guyliner

Awwwwww!

Edgar, why are you snarling at the bar? Don’t you have somewhere to be?

Married! :D

Not sure why Dillon looks so upset here. Maybe he gets emotional during weddings. Maybe’s he’s hungry. Maybe that lady’s atrocious fedora is draining him of his will to live. Who knows?

Edgar, you idiot! Can’t believe he missed the ceremony lmao

Our two lovebirds partake of some wedding cake. Nothing says “romance” like being able to see toilets through the wall.

Devi does her best Édith Piaf impression in between bites of wedding food.

And Krik is upstairs, bathing. Couldn’t wait until you got home, could ya?

I had a hard time deciding what kind of formal wear Johnny should own. I’m pretty bad at assembling outfits, but I think this suits him okay.

Edgar was so psyched to be at a wedding that he got down on the floor and started doing pushups. This isn’t gym class, doofus!

Devi’s all tuckered out from, y’know, standing around and eating food.

I can see why Tenna would be exhausted. She and Jimmy did plan and execute a fabulous wedding, after all.

Edgar and Johnny chatting in their bathroom back home. Why do my Sims do this?

And now Tess has joined them. You guys DO realize that’s what the living room is for, right?

“HEY, STELLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAA!”

You know what would make a great name for a cooking show? “Grillin’ With Dillon.”

GET IT GIRL

This picture sucks, but if you look closely you can see that Dillon has just walked in on our newlyweds having WooHoo. How embarrassing!

“Time to get the hell outta Dodge!”

I’ll bet Tess is asking Tenna how good the WooHoo was.

“It was THIS big.”

“Omg no way”

Tess does an impression of a little old lady? I don’t know.

Tess is just really cute okay

Johnny and Devi seem totally unfazed by all the rotting veggie dogs WILL SOMEONE CLEAN THIS DAMN MESS UP

Johnny tried to flirt with Devi, but his romance skills are so abysmal that he SCARED HER OUT OF HER BATHING SUIT AND BACK INTO HER EVERYDAY CLOTHES and just repelled her in general. Good going, studmuffin!

“So, Tenna, have you...?”

“Not while I’m eating a hotdog! Sheesh!”

It may just be that the color quality of the image is off, but I have a feeling these dweebs are eating extremely spoiled hotdogs. You guys are dumb as hell.

NO COMMENT

Now that they're married they gravitate towards each other and talk a lot and do sweet things without my having to intervene and UGH it's too cute. This stupid game is making me ship them so hard. The pairing doesn't make a lick of sense, but they look adorable together in Sim form. At least I think so. :)

Meanwhile the sink is busted and Tess is giving the camera her best stink eye. I had pictures of her calling up the plumber while looking frazzled but I think I accidentally deleted them. :(

If I were you I’d put down those VERY MOLDY, VERY OLD-LOOKING HOTDOGS PRONTO

Jimmy just got up to leave for work, leaving Edgar and Tenna alone by the pool. Don’t you get any ideas, Mr. Vargas. Hear me?

Well, that’s all I have for this adventure. And I totally forgot about the honeymoon, maaan! Sims can have a honeymoon, right? Oh, well. I had a blast, anyway!

[sauntervaguelydown]

okay if you’re interested in this, now is the time to buckle the FUCK in cause I got the book open next to me

What is the message of JTHM? Inasmuch as it has one, this can be broken down into two points. One: life is absurd and miserable, and if you let yourself become obsessed with the absurd misery, you will wake up one day and find that you’ve become its instrument. Two: alienated groups (sub cultures in particular, but also racial groups to some extent) contribute to their own suffering by tearing each other down.

I’m going to talk about the second one of those. I’m going to talk about women.

I’d better start off by saying that my gender politics are very much informed by my own lived in experience, and I can only speak to the places in which I believe my experience overlaps with other people’s. So. I’m afab, and I allow people to identify me as a woman because I do not—personally—have the energy to build an identity as agender. The process of my learning how to relate with womanhood has been a post-social-media process of noticing how the world sees me (negatively), and how it reacts to me (negatively), and how this experience is shared by people of various types.

Alright moving on

Of the named adult cast in the comic, 6/10 are female. Of those who show up in more than one episode—Nny, Devi, Tess, Krik (I’m not counting Dillon because he’s insensible after the first appearance), and Anne—you can see a trend happening. JTHM is remarkably true to life in terms of women’s presence in it. It’s not only a game of quantity, though. Johnny, the isolated misanthrope with a heart of sour grapes, seems on the surface incapable of relating to any other human being. There is a reason so many characters are or began as figments of Johnny’s imagination. So who, in JTHM, successfully connects with Johnny? Well, the brief-lived Edgar Vargas makes some small dent, in that Johnny warms up to him before murdering him anyway, and the equally brief-lived Jimmy manages to convince Johnny of their similarity, much to his own downfall. But with neither of these characters does he seek to build a relationship in any way. They’re episodes, flashes in the proverbial pan, discarded and forgotten despite any lingering affect their words may have had on the protagonist. Who, then, remains?

When you’ve whittled away the joke characters and the victims, the figments and the monsters, what remains are the women.  I’ve already talked about this to some extent in my short essay about Devi and JTHM, but the relationship which Johnny has with women is primarily characterized by his distrust of beauty. Despite this, Johnny is unconsciously or consciously pulling women and only women into his small personal sphere. Devi’s date with him is deeply de-sexualized: “I would have been happy just to go to the bookstore and see you there” he says, in response to her prompting about why he waited for her to ask him out. It’s Devi who is bringing them out of the friendzone, she an active participant on him, a passive subject. Johnny follows her lead throughout the scene—it is her idea to go back to “his place”, and she is the one to lean in and kiss him. The reversal could not be more plain.

Anyone who’s ever taken an entry level “women in lit” class can tell you that the primary characteristic of fictional women is passivity. They are objects to be acted upon—desired or reviled, chased or discarded. Consider the Bechdel Test, or the even less forgiving Sexy Lamp Test. Women only matter in the sense that they matter to men. Women in fiction, I mean to say, are as a class reactive. Anyone who identifies as or has been identified as a woman knows what it means to live in a world where you are expected to live like a buoy afloat on a rough tide, resigned to waiting for both good and bad things to happen to you, hoping that nothing terrible crashes into you. Anyone who has experienced catcalling knows what it’s like to be on edge for the next shitty thing coming your way—or worse, to be having a good time right up until someone makes it their business to put you back in your place. For Johnny, who cannot even get lunch at a fast food restaurant without having a stranger comment condescendingly on his appearance, this is the major source of his anger at the world.

A teenage girl buys JTHM from the rack at her local comic store. She has agonized at some point over whether her t-shirt, perhaps bought from the men’s rack at Target, is sufficiently desexualized to let her pass unmolested through the world. She has probably already endured condescending remarks about her presence in said store from some neckbeard whose idea of “women’s place” probably still equals “kitchen”. When she picks up this comic and flips through it, how can she not relate?

Comedy only works if on some level you believe it. That’s why racist humor is so insidious, why punching down is such a problem. JTHM works because the foundation of all the demented fantasy is an unhappy reality that its fans have already lived. JTHM is a goth comic which was written for a goth market. It is niche, alternative, and more concerned with intra-group politics than inter-group politics. So we understand why Jhonen might have written this without particularly thinking about it in terms of women or femininity—as a writer he has always demonstrated a clear understanding that women are people, and as goth in the mid-ninties, he was part of a subculture that valued fashion as a mode of social organization. And yet, JTHM has a reach far and beyond the scope of goth readers in the mid-nineties.

The more I think about this the more I think that anyone who isn’t a cis man is going to have had a pretty similar experience of reading through JTHM as a teenager. The remarkable thing about Nny is that his world experience has a gender-fucked vibe that just about anyone in the queer community can identify with on some level. From his dysphoria-tinged revulsion with his own sexual biology to his long suffering “[as if] I’m the way I am because I want the incessant gawking of strangers”, much of his anger with the world is raw and real to the experience of queerness.

So how does the feminine, specifically, affect our reading of JTHM?  

As a character, Johnny is reactive. To some extent he is also passive, an object acted on by the whims of the universe in both an eldritch and mundane sense. His very being is itself a receptacle for an unwanted substance, a vessel and a tool, and this is a cosmic position to which he has absolutely no recourse. It was selected for him, and only the fact that he is bad at filling this role makes him worthy of note by the powers that designated him such.

Johnny is emotional, a famously feminine failing. He wears his heart on his blood splattered sleeve. To say he’s a little sensitive would be an incredible understatement—with his mood swings and his depressive episodes, the only thing more volatile than Johnny is fucking C4. Now, Johnny spends quite a lot of the story being angry (often for good reason, sometimes not so much), and anyone familiar with gender policing in America knows that the one sure emotion men are entitled to is anger. Nothing revolutionary there. But in the midst of the cynical comedy, Johnny is allowed something that even as an uncritical teenager I felt affected by: tears. When he’s realizing that he’ll soon forget nailbunny the way he’s forgotten everything else; during the suicidal low point of “Another 2 AM”; during the moment in “Descent” that the comedy cuts out entirely, as he is wishing he could be saved. These are moments of profound sadness, and perhaps they could get a pass in some other stories about male protagonists, although not as many as we might wish. The moment that most interest me is the brief and semi-comic scene in which Johnny is conversing with the straight-jacket victim. Her mascara running tears are exactly like his, a few panels after. While there is a set up and a punch line in this episode, neither affect the panel where he cries. In fact, this panel is what I might venture to call one of the comic’s “justifying” moments.

The way that you get an audience to root for and identify with a villain protagonist is to give that character resonant emotions, to give them relatable experiences, and in this case, to offer the audience a fantastical validation of their worst emotions. Although (I hope) we all know intellectually that murder is bad, moments like Johnny’s furious and tearful “maybe ‘pretty’ people like you […] don’t remember people like me,” validate our feeling that Johnny is a victim in addition to being a monster. One thing constant about Johnny is that even when his reasons are petty or nonexistent, he is always honest about them. He tells Edgar that he picked him out for no reason, and he tells the people in the café all the stupid sins they’re guilty of, including trying to bring back bellbottoms. If Johnny claims he is killing someone because they hurt him emotionally, we have no reason to suspect that he isn’t telling the truth. He is a victim. He does feel pain. He is vulnerable and fragile, and in this particular panel he is not only delivering a cutting observation about amusement and pain but also crying. The joke isn’t that he’s crying. The joke is that he’s responding to this situation by whacking a girl with a scythe.

Johnny’s tears stand out to me as the most resonant part of his design. From the “womanly” weeping of Odysseus to the red-faced exhortations of a little league father screaming at his son that Boys Don’t Cry, there is no doubt that tears have always been considered feminine by western society. There’s not a whole lot of things more vulnerable than tearing up, and that’s why so many people are loathe to do it in public. Men in fiction are only allowed a very thin slice of acceptable vulnerable moments. The loss of a loved one, usually, is the beginning and end of it. Johnny’s suicidal ideation, a real danger to living breathing men, is a particularly taboo subject. And his hurt feelings, his sticks and stones moment with the straight-jacket victim? When was the last time you saw a male character be sensitive about his appearance, let alone brought to tears over it? I’m drawing a blank after Deadpool.

We’ve got a pretty good tally of things that feminine readers identify with so far. Let’s ask ourselves another question. Who does Johnny identify with? With Devi, who shares his opinions of who deserves to be looked down on, and Tess, who is less easy to parse. Let me briefly take a stab at it.

Johnny recognizes in Tess a kindred spirit. Aside from the fridge-cleaning assistant, Tess is the only person Johnny ever brings into his house and shows no interest in killing or torturing. He certainly doesn’t nab Tess to help him do housework, or for any nefarious sexual purposes. If anything, it seems like he keeps her for validation. Tess asks Johnny why he only hurts Dillon—implicitly asking why it is that she’s here, if not to be tortured as well—and Johnny answers in a curiously roundabout sort of way: you, Tess, must be enjoying this reversal on some level. 

Tess, who could see on her boyfriend’s face that he wanted to hit her, because she made him feel stupid. Tess, who shrinks back in her conversations with him in order to remain in his good graces. Tess is the imagined beneficiary of this demonstration. It’s reasonable to believe that Johnny follows them closely enough from the theater to the parking garage that he overhears the same conversation we witness. Who knows why he fixated on Tess specifically (I like to think it was the fact that she defended his boots), but if you break down the beginning of Tess and Johnny’s conversation, you get this:

“Admit it, his admirable qualities are less than prevalent—” a fair observation, a justifying moment. “even in dealing with you—” designating Tess as a victim. “How could you not entertain the thought of his getting what he deserves?” drawing the connection between the two of them, an appeal to justice.

The implication of this exchange is that Johnny is trying to awaken a similar anger and need for vengeance in Tess, who like himself is belittled and alienated even from people who should sympathize with her the most. And he’s right in a way—when the Moose tears Dillon apart, Tess’s admitted satisfaction is visceral and profound. Tess is often forgotten by fandom, but it is arguably Tess who gives us the best glimpse of the world that created Johnny C. as we know him. Although their ways of handling the world’s nastiness are sharply divided, they share a specific type of victimization.  It is Tess, not the later appearing Jimmy, who Johnny willingly identifies with and reaches out to.

So let’s wrap this whole four page monstrosity up, and thank you if you stuck with it this long. What do I mean when I say that Nny has feminine qualities? Essentially, that his emotionality spills over the bounds of what is accepted for men in fiction and, the gender history of literature being a binary system, into what is standard for women. Johnny is transgressive in several senses, making him the domain of many groups which overlap like a venn diagram specifically in their relationship to him. 

What do I mean by saying that this informs the message of the comic? Women don’t always support women. Goths don’t always support Goths. Humans don’t support humans, even when all logic demands that they should. I’m not even going to talk about biphobia or gatekeeping or the toxicity in some drag houses.  It’s part of the absurdity of the universe, that a new victim is truly born every day, and you have very little control over whether you are one or not. Does your pain amuse the cosmos? What other explanation can there be for the cruelty of life?

JTHM is popular with the queer community because when you’ve been angry enough for long enough, sometimes you’ve either got to laugh about it or you’ll fucking kill someone.

In today’s essay I’ll be discussing how Nny’s feminine qualities not only inform the message of the comic but also the spirit in which it is received by the queer feminine audience,,,