EXTRA: WE LOVE SQUEE!

BY JOHN CECIL

[Editor's Note: John originally wrote this as an essential for last week, but after telling him Squee was cool and receiving the piece, I realized that we'd already run a SQUEE essential way back in issue 15. And it was a good one at that. But Cecil's piece had such great and embarrassing reminisces about his youth that we decided to run it here in EXTRA anyway. --Dave]

SQUEE!
Jhonen Vasquez
Slave Labor Graphics
$15.95
STAR08102

True story: when I was in ninth grade, I went and saw Motley Crue in concert. The Lakeland Civic Center just outside of Tampa Florida is where they were playing, a bit of a distance away from where I lived in St. Petersburg. My mom drove my date and myself, a girl named Debbie Skiba, since I was too much of a loser to have a car. Yeah, that's right, my mom drove me on a date to see Motley Crue.

Florida, of course, is not exactly the hub of the music scene. Tom Petty's from Gainesville. Lynyrd Skynyrd was from Jacksonville. I think Seven Mary Three's from Orlando, but I couldn't care less, so I'm unsure. As such, we weren't hip to the up-and-coming acts that, say, Los Angelenos were exposed to. Unless they had a hit on MTV we were pretty much clueless to their existence. Subsequently, when I purchased the tickets at Select-A-Seat (the precursor to Ticketmaster, for you young'uns) I had never heard of the opening act, the folks that were warming up the crowd for "The Crue". I recall quite clearly looking at the tickets, reading the name of the opening act, and saying to myself, "With such a stupid fucking name, these guys are never gonna make it."

It was Guns N' Roses.

Within six months "Welcome to the Jungle" would make them one of the biggest acts in America, but at the time I tried to talk Debbie Skiba into going late, so we wouldn't have to see them perform. With such a dumbass name, I figured they must be a bunch of pretty boys from LA who had no discernable musical talent. I'd much rather just see Motley Crue play "Home Sweet Home," instead

"Where the Hell's he going with this?" You ask yourself. "Wonder if I should skip the rest of this bullshit and see if someone's talking about comics somewhere in this week's issue." Hold on for a minute, and I'll get there.

Just about one decade after Debbie Skiba refused to give me a hand job in the back seat of my mother's car on the way home from seeing Motley Crue, I was working at the best comic shop in Pinellas County, Florida. Emerald City Comics and Collectibles. Check it out if you're ever there. One of my fellow employees, David, showed me a comic and told me to check it out. It was called Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, written and drawn by a guy with the unlikely name of Jhonen Vasquez. And I refused, based on the stupid fucking name.

Much later, I was bored at work one afternoon and picked up a copy of yet another new book. SQUEE! Is what it called. I had no idea that it was a spinoff of JTHM, but it looked interesting enough, so I read it while I should have been working.

And I laughed my ass off.

Soon enough I had to track down all the JTHM stuff I'd missed, hitting myself for once again not getting in to something based on initial prejudices. The day the TPB was released, I bought a copy to give to my brother. He loved it, and showed it to all his friends.

Sidebar true story within a true story: my brother didn't seem to realize that I had GIVEN him this book. I guess after decades of abuse at my hands, he assumed I was a callous bastard, never giving anything to anyone without expecting reciprocation. So he would show the JHTM trade around, saying, "This is my brother's book," thinking I had only loaned it to him.

Now, the Squee character in the stories is a little boy named Todd Casil. "Casil," when said quickly, sounds enough like "Cecil" to the untrained ear. The books also feature insert pages called "Happy Noodle Boy." Happy Noodle Boy is a comic-inside-a-comic of sorts; they're the strips that the Johnny character draws and distributes in the narrative. Therefore, all the Happy Noodle Boy pages are signed, "Johnny C."

Putting all this together, and with a little help from the herb all my brother's friends smoke, they assumed that when he said it was "my book," that I had written it. More than one of his chums would talk to me, clearly impressed, telling me how much they loved it. It took me a while to catch on to the fact that they were congratulating ME, but when I did, I told them that I was not the book's creator. They all quickly lost interest in me, leading me to the conclusion that I should have lied.

SQUEE! was a comic miniseries, a four-issue spinoff of JTHM. I used to keep two copies of issue #1, one for myself and one to loan out. A while back, it was collected into TPB format, with extra goodies like all the "Meanwhile" strips that Vasquez inserted into the JTHM and SQUEE issues (they were not collected in the JTHM TPB, so this is the only place to find 'em, short of tracking down a bunch of over-priced back issues). These strips are worth a TPB all in their own, so this is quite the deal, laugh-to-dollar-ratio-wise.

There's this one, where a couple is out at a restaurant during a date, and the guy has to go to the bathroom, and-- Just read it. Trust me.

Vasquez's art is cartoony and fun, in a Charles Addams kind of way. The black-and-white illustration is a Tim-Burton-ripping-off-Robert-Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-style dream sequence of sharp angles and expressionistic facial expressions (I hate sounding like a C-Average Film Major, but hey, that's what I am). The image of a little boy, standing on his bed and praying for his parents to be happy is priceless. He's got a dollar bill in his hand, offering money to the Lord, and he's concentrating with all his might. He wishes for whatever they want, then we cut to his dad in another room, saying, "I wish that kid was never born." As cruelly funny as this is, it's the artwork that carries it over the top, into a realm where the Marx Brothers meet Sam Peckinpah.

But the biggest selling point SQUEE! has going for it is the writing. Every once in a while, the existential musings contained within miss the mark a bit, but all in all, SQUEE! is one of the funniest things on the market currently. The bit with Nacho the Dog gets me chuckling every time. I'd explain it, but I don't want to ruin it for you. Again, just trust me.

I should take the time to explain that the humor is often dark. Characters die. Often. Squee's best - well, ONLY - friend is the son of Satan, his future self comes back in time only to let him know that his life is meaningless, and his parents try to get rid of him at every given opportunity. It'd be depressing if it wasn't so hilarious.

And that's what Vasquez is telling us about life. It'd be depressing, if it wasn't so hilarious.

True story.

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