As far as doing something geared toward kids, it wasn’t hard at all. I mean, a lot of what I do is still kind of based on what I did growing up. A lot of the stuff I’m into is exactly what I was into as a kid: video games, robots, monsters, just spooky stuff. So that wasn’t a big deal. It became a big deal later on, because I was making what I thought would be a cool show for me to watch as a kid—which didn’t always mesh with what some of the people who were producing the show thought would be a cool kids' show. But I stuck with it. It’s difficult—you’re arguing a lot for what you want to do, but if I didn’t do that, I think it would’ve ended being a much more generic show. So I think the suffering was worth it for the show. For me, it was just stress. As long as the show was something I was proud of, it was something I would argue for.

As far as stylistically and visually, that was a lot more difficult because you’ve got so many passes from your character designs to the storyboard artist to the overseas animator, and it comes back not necessarily looking like what you drew. It’s like watching the first season of The Simpsons—it looks nothing like modern-day Simpsons. And I look at that first season of ZIM, and it looks like everything it shouldn’t have to me. So it was cool seeing it progress to a state where I was a lot happier with it. And then it got cancelled. But what are you gonna do?

Through the mainstream exposure of Invader ZIM, did you get offers for other mainstream projects?

Oh yeah. As soon as ZIM ended, I got offers to basically do the exact same thing at other networks: an animated series for kids. I went through a lot of meetings just saying “Thanks, but how about something else?” But they want what’s familiar. You almost have to trick people, practically. With ZIM, they thought it was going to be a cute, little alien show. It’s not until you finally get the deal to go ahead and make your series that you turn it into something that’ll give kids nightmares—which is what I love. Then they’re like, “Oh God, these kids are having nightmares!” You’re lucky if you can get enough shows in that way. But to go to someone and say, “I want to make something that’s going to give kids nightmares”—not a great sell. I’ve had offers with other pretty big animation studios that are producing shows for television right now, and people who put stuff out for an older audience. But the thought of doing series television work is so unattractive to me right now. It’s not that I ever say outright “no,” but in terms of what people are looking for from me, it’s not necessarily what I want to do. I don’t want to do another kids show. To make a long story short, there have been offers, but I just usually say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I’d rather be doing something that I’m a lot more interested in.

Would you like to design a video game?

I wouldn’t want to get stuck doing video games, but I’d love to do just one or two. I mean, I grew up on them—a huge part of my inspiration is video games. I’d love to have just taken part in one that I’m proud of having helped create. And it’d just be cool to control the characters, not just watch them—something that came from my head that other people can interact with. That’s another lifelong dream. One was comics; got that out of the way. One down. Animated series, pretty cool. But I’m still trying to get into the gaming thing.

What kinds of games do you like playing?

A lot of action-adventure, science-fictiony stuff. Basically anything but sports games. But I do like driving games. Beyond that, almost anything: real-time strategy games, first-person shooters, third-person adventure games, platformers—I’m a huge fan of platformers. I’ve got my PC games, I’ve got all my consoles, and my handhelds. Everything. That’s like asking me what kind of movies I like—aaaah, your head just explodes.

Do you have any new projects that have got you excited?

Yeah, but the more excited I am, the less I want to talk about it until I’m ready to just unleash it on people. Again, it’s part of that audience expectation thing. You can control it, if you want to play it that way. You can say, “Oh, here’s a little tidbit of what I’m working on,” and reap the attention you get from promotion, but I don’t know. I’ve always been a lot quieter about what I do—I like doing it, and then it’s suddenly out there, and having people find it. It would be interesting to work on something that has a huge promotion behind it: “It’s coming soon! Blah, blah, blah!” But that’s never been the way I’ve worked. My stuff tends to creep up on the audience, which is probably a good thing because I’m not depending on an immediate success to determine if something is a success in the long run.

Do you plan out your projects, or do you just let ideas pop up?

Oh, the ideas definitely just pop up—my head’s basically a constant storm of ideas that I’ve either worked on or are waiting to work on. But there’s this enormous back catalog from elementary school. A lot of the ideas that I still want to do are ideas I came up with as a little kid, and then there are those that just popped up a week ago or last night. But when it comes time to work on them, as far as the comics go, it’s a lot more stream-of-consciousness. It’s a free-form kind of thing. There’s a basic idea down there, where I want to start it and end it, but in between it’s a panel at a time as far as the dialogue and actual creation goes. That works for me a lot of the time, and other times it just damns my stuff because I end up at the end of a project going, “Oh my God, this is a mess. There’s no structure here. There’s just a mess of ideas.” But it works for some things; for something like Johnny, it was so scattered it really helped the feel of the book. For something like ZIM, which was much more structured, that was something to get used to for me; that was suddenly dealing with revisions on scripts before we even get to animation. I like both ways; I don’t have a real preference right now as far as how I work. I’m always interested in trying a new approach for a specific project that may benefit from chaos or complete obsessive compulsive detail stuff.

You can learn more about Jhonen Vasquez's comics at publisher Slave Labor. (Hit the “Creator Info” link on the homepage.) You can also buy his comics at the Slave Labor online store. And you might also want to visit the mysterious questionsleep.com.