Johnny The Homicidal Maniac Author/Illustrator: Jhonen Vasquez Producer: Slave Labor Graphics Presentation made by: Breanna Perkins-Hatfield

Setting Setting: The setting is sort of vague, because no name is given for the city Johnny takes residence in. But anyway, the main settings are: Unnamed City; various buildings (“Café Le Prick, Insane Asylum) and streets Johnny’s house and gigantic labyrinth-like basement Time: Just like the setting, the time of the book is vague too. But judging from the various ordinary things like cellphones, cars, and fast-food restaurants, but still slightly more high-tech things, it’s a sort of “Twenty Minutes Into The Future” type place.

Main Characters Johnny C. : A very, very disturbed man. Through his years he’d gotten more and more broken. A fact about him gives us a guess to where his growing insanity started: The only thing he can remember from his past is that both his parents were murdered in front of him. Johnny has a hair-trigger temper, and will try (and usually succeed) to kill and/or torture anyone who manages to anger him in some way, usually with the odd death machines found around his basement. “Squee”, a.k.a. Todd Casil Squee is a little boy who is frightened of nearly everything, and is plagued with horrifying nightmares every time he goes to sleep. He also has the misfortune of being Johnny’s next door neighbor. He keeps a teddy bear named Shmee, who apparently feeds off his trauma. One of his only friends is the Anti-Christ. D-Boy & Mr. Eff These two are voices in Johnny’s head, in the form of two painted over Pillsbury Doughboys… or so it seems. Both of them torment Johnny and demand him to do things. D-Boy wants Johnny to kill himself, so he may rejoined with his master, whom Johnny kept at bay by coating the wall separating it from the world with the blood of his victims. Mr. Eff wants Johnny to keep killing people, because the more he kills and loses his mind, the more “human” Mr. Eff and D-Boy become; and Mr. Eff longs to actually “exist”. Nailbunny Johnny’s voice of reason. His name is pretty self-explanatory. He’s a dead bunny with a nail going through his chest. Johnny had bought him, fed him once, then went through a bout of rage, and in his anger nailed the bunny to the wall. Nailbunny is the voice that tells Johnny not to kill himself or kill more people, and that if he tries, he can be happy. Unfortunately, Nailbunny is usually unheard. At one point, Mr. Eff ripped Nailbunny’s head off his body, so from then on he was just a floating bunny head.

Plot To be honest, the book doesn’t really read out like a story, it’s like seeing what Johnny’s life is like every now and again. But the main plot is that you see this man slowly loosing any sanity he once had bit by bit, all while watching him brutally murder people. His murders usually come with monologues going into great detail about how the human race has gone down the drain and nearly everyone is simply a horrible cliché put into a fleshed out body.

Climax There are many climaxes in this book, but right I’ll only list the three major climaxes. Johnny is on a date with his new girlfriend, Devi, whom he’d been friends with for a good few months before. Before they can kiss, he gets up and goes into the room where Mr. Eff and D-Boy are. Somehow they convince him to kill Devi and himself to “immortalize the moment”. Fortunately, Devi beats him up and smashes his face in a mirror and gets away. (But Johnny survives the beating) Johnny has captured a man named Edgar Vargas, who hasn’t actually done anything wrong. Johnny simply needs his blood to keep the monster who lives behind his blood-soaked wall at bay. The two converse a while, but in the end Johnny still has to kill Edgar. The third and most relevant climax is when Johnny has set up a machine with a telephone, so that if someone calls him and he talks into the phone, and gun will turn and shoot him in the head. But after a bit of badgering from Mr. Eff and D-Boy, h goes to turn off the machine, but actually turns it on, since it was never on in the first place. To his surprise, someone actually calls Johnny a moment after, and he answers the phone. After pausing for a minute, he asks “Hello?” and it promptly shot through the head.

Conflict The conflict in this book isn’t really as obvious as others, because it’s mostly psychological. Johnny has to deal with the badgering of two malevolent voices along with his own hair trigger temper. He longs to be… well, as close to sanity as it gets, but at the same time knows that this will never happen. Another conflict is that Johnny has to keep a certain wall in his basement soaked with blood at all times, or a horrible monster will come through it. Johnny himself doesn’t know what it is, but he knows he has to keep it at bay.

Conflict Resolution As I stated before, there isn’t really a resolution for Johnny’s conflict. But, towards the end of the book things start to change for Johnny. He begins on a quest to rid himself of all his emotions, and after coming back to life, Mr. Eff and D-Boy are replaced by another head-voice, who seems to only want Johnny to embrace his emotions. But at the same time the new voice wants Johnny to give into the fact that he’ll “Always be a slave to something.”

Opinion Honestly I’ve always been very fond of this book, but to be honest it’s not for everyone. There’s a lot of semi-mindless violence and swearing in some points. But also in the book is lots of philosophy and laments on the human race, so in my opinion it’s well worth all the murder. So yeah, I really like the book.

Twenty Minutes Into The Future "They claim an indeterminate 'near future,' but a careful analysis of the fashions, haircuts, vehicles, and computers seen in this 1987 movie lead us to believe it took place no later than 1988." —Cracked.com's “8 Movie Futures Already Proven Wrong” Welcome To The World Of Tomorrow! Literally. The Future, but not so far into it that you'd notice except for the abundance of Applied Phlebotinum. Often, the future is a lot dirtier than the present, and vaguely dystopian. This is often a linear extrapolation of national malaise, so American works of the 1970s have endlessly skyrocketing crime and inner urban decay while the 1980s brought the notion that Mega Corps and Japan would rule the world. Economic recovery shifted this towards Japan no longer taking over the world, where the Japanese extrapolated their own malaise. If an explicit date is given, it's usually less than 50 years forward from the airdate of the show. Obviously, the setting of most Flash Forward stories, though they usually don't make a big deal of it except as a minor joke (in the case of a show like The Simpsons, a major joke). Of course, Science Marches On, so it's fun to watch 10 years later to see how wrong they got it. Shows set here seem to have a higher than usual failure rate, as well as falling victim to Science Marches On and The Great Politics Mess Up. BACK?