Invader Zim Creator Returns To Comics for Time-Loop Finale Story
Even after years of cancellations and tribulations, oddball artist and Nicktoons auteur Jhonen Vasquez cannot quit Invader Zim. Try as he might, Vasquez keeps getting pulled back in to the Florpus hole just when he thought he was out, and, for doubtfully the “final” time, he’s going back to his roots in comic book form. The running adventures of the haughty, accident-prone alien invader and his equally haughty young nemesis Dib will come to an end at the pen of Vasquez in the standalone finale Invader Zim: Dookie Loop Horror from Oni-Lion Forge Publishing, which he will be co-writing alongside Eric Trueheart, with art by Aaron Alexovich.
Vasquez got his professional start in comics in his brazenly bleak limited series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, published by Slave Labor Graphics in 1995. An aficionado of the indie comics such as Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Vasquez made the surprising transition from insidiously dark, yet darkly humorous black-and-white indie comics to being a full-fledged creator of children’s cartoons when Invader Zim premiered on Nickelodeon in 2001. Starring the green-skinned, poorly disguised alien invader from the planet Irk in his laughably ineffective attempts to conquer the Earth, the now beloved cartoon, comically rife with cutting social commentary as well as gross-out humor such as "Bloaty's Pizza Hog" restaurant franchise, was cancelled in 2002. Nevertheless, the show attained cult status for its bizarre surrealist humor and grotesquely quirky sense of humor, so much so that it was revived for the 2020 Netflix film Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus. The comic has been published by Oni Press, later Oni-Lion Forge, since 2015, with Vasquez occasionally taking writing duties.
However, all things must end, and in an interview with GamesRadar subsidiary Newsarama, Vasquez reiterated that this might be the end. “It's been a crazy 20 years of Zim comics but everything comes to an end, and as far as I know it IS an end,” said Vasquez, “but who knows if it's for real the way the things seem to keep coming back now.” He added, “the moment someone pops up and offers some kind of revival my brain gets going again and dreams up new Zim ideas whether or not I even think I'll do it." Check out the preview art below.
This final Invader Zim adventure will concern a time loop problem created by an alien race known as “The Chrono-Dumpers,” extra-dimensional beings who eat time, going along with the themes of anti-wastefulness, and then… evacuate themselves in our dimension, causing apocalyptic damage to the time-stream. An apocalypse is on the cusp of happening, repeatedly, forever as Dib and Zim are stuck in a “time poop loop” reliving the same day the universe ends ad infinitum. And there’s only one thing in the universe that can save them: the insane, malfunctioning, food-obsessed, strangely adorable, fake-dog robot Gir.
If this somewhat toilet humor-oriented slant surprises readers, Vasquez made clear that, rather than craft a poignant swan-song to remind fans of all the important countercultural lessons they’ve learned along the way, he would rather instead tell a story that is as stupid and crass as he can possibly make it adding as a qualifier that he is a proponent of “Stupid Done Intelligently.” As he told Newsarama:
We intentionally feel there are no real big questions that need answering when we can go for mind-numbingly stupid stuff instead, so this ending is about as stupid I could come up with.
Can Dib and Zim team up one final time to take down the Chrono-Dumpers, or is this it for this dueling duo? Invader Zim: Dookie Loop Horror by Jhonen Vasquez releases August, 2021 from Lion-Oni Publishing.
Source: GamesRadar.com