Invader Zim has been absent from our screens for more than ten years, but it has just returned in comic-book form. The first issue has come out this month, and I read mine from cover to cover as soon as it arrived.
I won't spoil anything for people who haven't got to it yet, but I loved it. It's been so long since the show got cancelled, but it feels like nothing's changed. Actually I read that Jhonen Vasquez is always a bit mystified that fans miss Zim because in his head the show never stopped — maybe that's why the comic feels so much like Zim and not like the sadly revivified corpse of something we used to love.
It did feel like the comic was pitched at an older audience, but then so did the TV show — I never could figure out how it got broadcast on Nickleodeon. Maybe it will find a more lasting success with the right target audience.
Has anyone else read it yet? What are your thoughts?
Oh cool, I didn't know "Johnny" used to be strips before it was a comic! The books always struck me as fairly polished, but then I never read "Carpe Noctem". At any rate, the new "Zim" comic has been a lovely excuse to go back and watch the show, so I've been rediscovering a lot of fond memories.
It wasn't unpolished, it's just you could tell he was used to making self-contained pages. He started using that to make it feel frantic, but at the start they were collections of pages that could have functioned independently. The Zim comic has gags, like the training montage, that would work very well in a cartoon but don't work so well in a comic. It's still funny, it's just has this current of "I'm reading a comic that wants to be a cartoon" running through it. I'm expecting that to go away after a few issues.
You're right about the training montage, now that I think of it. I don't read comics all that much, so I guess I didn't notice. Aside from the distinctive art style, for me "Zim" has always been about the language ("frolicking dirt-child", "human worm-baby", "shut your noise tube, taco-human", etc.) Those were always the bits that delighted me, and I was very happy to see them come back, and to see that Vasquez wasn't just rehashing old jokes. Did you read "TruthShrieker" as well, the promotional comic that came out before the first issue?