Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Everything Can Be Beaten by Chancre Scolex Everything Can Be Beaten (2002) comic books. This item is not in stock. If you use the "Add to want list" tab to add this issue to your want list, we will email you when it becomes available. 1st printing. Written by Chancre Scolex (Jhonen Vasquez), art by Crab Scrambly (Brad Canby). This all-new book follows the adventures of IT as he leaves his boring life to explore and destroy all new realms. Bored with a life spent beating an endless supply of kittens, IT ventures outside and discovers a world entirely new to him. Though he is at first elated to find a place full of wonder and happiness, IT soon realizes that he can never belong. IT is depressed until he realizes that, even in this strange new world, everything can be beaten. This 24-page, full-color 6" x 5" book has glossy cardstock cover. Cover price $3.95. This item is not in stock. If you use the "Add to want list" tab to add this issue to your want list, we will email you when it becomes available. 2nd printing. Written by Chancre Scolex (Jhonen Vasquez), art by Crab Scrambly (Brad Canby). This all-new book follows the adventures of IT as he leaves his boring life to explore and destroy all new realms. Bored with a life spent beating an endless supply of kittens, IT ventures outside and discovers a world entirely new to him. Though he is at first elated to find a place full of wonder and happiness, IT soon realizes that he can never belong. IT is depressed until he realizes that, even in this strange new world, everything can be beaten. This 24-page, full-color 6" x 5" book has glossy cardstock cover. Cover price $3.95. This item is not in stock. If you use the "Add to want list" tab to add this issue to your want list, we will email you when it becomes available. 3rd printing. Written by Chancre Scolex (Jhonen Vasquez), art by Crab Scrambly (Brad Canby). This all-new book follows the adventures of IT as he leaves his boring life to explore and destroy all new realms. Bored with a life spent beating an endless supply of kittens, IT ventures outside and discovers a world entirely new to him. Though he is at first elated to find a place full of wonder and happiness, IT soon realizes that he can never belong. IT is depressed until he realizes that, even in this strange new world, everything can be beaten. This 24-page, full-color 6" x 5" book has glossy cardstock cover. Cover price $3.95. Customer Testimonials Our customers have some nice things to say about us: Customer Testimonials Mailing List Join our Mailing List for news and sales. We’ve been selling comics since 1961 (our first sale: Fantastic Four #1 at $0.25, see one of our first ads) and on the web since 1996. Copyright © 1996 - 2021 Lone Star Comics Inc. Character images copyright © their respective owners. Everything Can Be Beaten by Chancre Scolex. Next month Slave Labor (Amaze Ink) will publish Everything Can Be Beaten , a full color storybook written by Jhonen Vasquez (under the nom de plume, Mr. Chancre Scolex) and illustrated by Vasquez (aka Mr. Crab Scrambly). The book's macabre storyline involves IT , a hapless creature who bored by a life spent beating an endless supply of kittens, who breaks out from a monotonous existence spent in one room. Everything Can Be Beaten is an allegory that manages to be (like Johnny The Homicidal Maniac ) strangely endearing even while it depicts the disturbing and horrible acts that IT commits. Bowing on August 8, and retailing for $3.95, Everything Can Be Beaten is a full color, 24-page, 6'x 5' storybook with a cardstock cover. Diamond has not solicited in Previews for Everything Can Be Beaten yet, though it will appear in the September Previews as well as in an upcoming Diamond Dateline . Diamond has purchased 5,000 copies of the book in advance of solicitation, so it should be readily available. Cold Cut and other distributors will also have the book. Vasquez's previous efforts from the comic I Feel Sick to the TV series Invader Zim have all found loyal followings -- and his work sells well in many different pop culture venues (see 'Merchandising Apparel -- The Smaller Store') in part because Vasquez has a knack for creating toy and apparel items that his fans love (see 'More Zim Connections'). Perhaps his works aren't for everyone, but they do tend to find an audience. Creator / Jhonen Vasquez. Jhonen C. Vasquez (born September 1, 1974) is an underground comic book artist, writer and director best known for the comics Johnny the Homicidal Maniac , I Feel Sick , Squee! and Fillerbunny , as well as the cult animated series Invader Zim . Vasquez's characters are disturbed people living in a Crapsack World. A wildly hilarious one. His most notable characters include a violently schizophrenic serial killer, an unstable megalomaniacal extraterrestrial, an abused and terminally terrified child, and a tortured and suicidal bunny rabbit. Just to name a few. His jokes mostly involve very stupid people getting horribly maimed, tortured, yelled at, mocked and patronized. He's also quite fond of Doomy Dooms of Doom. He's also known for his art style, featuring highly geometric characters with bold outlines. Jhonen Vasquez. Jhonen Vasquez (born September 1, 1974), comic book artist and cartoonist also known as Chancre Scolex or Mr. Scolex. Contents. Early Life [ edit | edit source ] Jhonen Vasquez was raised in East San Jose. He attended Mount Pleasant High School, where he often spent much of his class time drawing in sketchbooks. Taking part in a contest to design a new look for his school's mascot, the Cardinal, he submitted an entry that the judges rejected. On the back of a preliminary drawing for the contest, he drew his first sketch of the character who would later become Johnny C. His high school's student newspaper published a number of his comic strips titled Johnny the Little Homicidal Maniac . Vasquez created Happy Noodle Boy while attending Mount Pleasant. According to Vasquez, "So many years ago, [my little romantical friend in high school] was the unwitting reason Happy Noodle Boy was created. [She] always asked me for comics. But I couldn't draw as fast as she requested. Thus, I tried to create the worst abomination of a comic that I could, so as to make her not want comics anymore. That abomination, my friends, was Happy Noodle Boy". [1 ] While Vasquez read his older brother's superhero comics as a child, he first became interested in the medium through the original independent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman. Quoted by Jhonen's Older Brother: "It wasn't until he started collecting "Ninja Turtles" comics that something switched over in my head. To me, there was something just so different about those books that I DID start to obsess over them – the way the books felt dirtier in my hands, the filthy artwork and hero characters that never seemed healed over from their last battles. There was a sense of person just behind the printed page that I had never felt before, a thinner separation from production to my hands and eyes that just fired hooks out into me. It felt unsafe, ya know? It's like, the book itself was less removed from the initial moment a creator is excited about having just come up with some great idea to when they finally finish a thing, nice and polished and just a little dulled from before the thing was just another book. To me, anyhow. It's just what I interpreted the experience like, and I'm sure to a lot of people it was just a book about big mutant turtles. [2 ]" After graduating in 1992, Vasquez went on to become a film student at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Though he had little formal artistic training, he soon dropped out of De Anza to pursue a career as a professional cartoonist. He met Roman Dirge, Rosearik Rikki Simons, and Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons at Alternative Press Expo in 1995. Dirge later became a writer on Vasquez's Invader Zim, while Rikki Simons became the voice of the show's crazed robot GIR, as well as a member of the show's coloring team. Rikki Simons also worked with Vasquez on the coloring seen in his two-issue comic "I Feel Sick". By September 1996, Vasquez announced in his introductory text to the sixth issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac , he had reached sufficient success in his artistic career to be able to quit his day-job and devote himself full-time to his art. Comics [ edit | edit source ] Jhonen In Johnny The Homicidal Maniac. Many of the characters in Vasquez's cartoons are highly geometric and thin nearly to the point of being stick figures. The protagonists in his comics are typically insane characters who live in dysfunctional societies, and whose manias are able to speak through other objects (as with Johnny and the Doughboys, or Devi and Sickness.) His storylines tend to follow the basic black comedy formula. Smiley faces are often found in his artwork, trying to evoke an ironic sense of happiness in a world of chaos and darkness. His comic works often feature an outside narrative in the form of notes and comments left in the corners of his strips. This can be found in the vast majority of Vasquez's comics, such as in issue #5 of JTHM: A large monster is shown bursting through a wall, arms and hands flailing, tentacles sweeping through the air. It is a scene that surely conveys a sense of violence and danger, yet in the corner of the panel, a small box contains the text "Kids - Don't be scared! He don't bite!" These small touches help with emotional connection to Vasquez's work, and are likely one of the factors in his cult following. Carpe Noctem magazine published early one-page strips featuring Johnny in the early 1990s. In 1995, Slave Labor Graphics began publishing a series of Johnny comics after Vasquez submitted samples of his artwork to them. Vasquez's first comic, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac , ran for seven issues and was collected as a hardcover and a trade paperback book, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut. The cover features the logo "Z?", meaning "question sleep", which appears frequently throughout Vasquez's work and relates to his characters'insomnia and his own hypnophobia. The series follows Johnny as he searches for meaning in his life, a quest that frequently leads to the violent deaths of those around him as well as, briefly, his own. A photograph of one of Vasquez's friends, Leah England, serves as the middle of a portrait collection on the cover for the second issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac . England also gave Vasquez the inspiration for a filler strip about a child who was dangerously afraid of losing sight of his mother, as well as the notorious "Meanwhile" filler piece in the second issue of JTHM . Vasquez's next project was The Bad Art Collection , a 16-page one-shot comic. Vasquez stated that he did the book's art while he was in high school to discourage classmates from asking him to draw for them. In 1997, Vasquez gave Squee, a supporting character from JTHM , his own four-issue series. It chronicles Squee's encounters with aliens,Satan's son, and eventually Satan himself. The trade version (which features a cover image of Squee with the words "Buy me or I'll die!") contains, in addition to the actual Squee comics, the Meanwhiles that were left out of the Director's Cut of JTHM , as well as comics of Vasquez's "real life" and Wobbly-Headed Bob . Vasquez's next project was I Feel Sick , colored by Rikki Simons. I Feel Sick follows a tortured artist named Devi (another character introduced in JTHM ) as she tries to maintain her sanity in an insane vision of society, despite conversing with Sickness, one of her own paintings. Slave Labor has published three Fillerbunny mini comics, the third having been released in March 2005. The mini comic was a spin-off of a filler comic designed to replace a vacant page usually reserved for advertising space in the Squee! comics. Vasquez said at the 2007 New York ComicCon that the original Fillerbunny comics would be done in a single night and he would rush through and do whatever he could in a small amount of time. The third issue, however, broke this mold. According to the introduction, it took over nine months to complete, and he feels it is of much higher quality than the first two.At Comic-Con 2005, Vasquez mentioned that his next comic was a love story. Since this, however, he attended an event in early 2007 and stated he was not working on his 'own' comics - he was collaborating on two comics in the style of Everything Can Be Beaten , acting only as author. The first, titled Jellyfist was intended for release on July 25, 2007. However, the initial print run of Jellyfist was incredibly poor, and so it was re-released in October 2007. Television [ edit | edit source ] After the success of Squee! , the children's cable network Nickelodeon approached Vasquez about producing an animated television series. The series, Invader Zim , was canceled after little more than a year; only 27 half-hour episodes were made, most split into two 11-minute episodes but several full half-hours, and many episodes unfinished. Episodes in the second season aired first internationally and later aired on Nicktoons Network in 2006. The show was cancelled despite its good ratings, [3 ] ostensibly due to its dark tone and violence, although in the DVD commentary Vasquez said he would never go back to Viacom. He later admitted at a 2005 San Diego Comic-Con that he would love to continue animation again as long as it's with a network and people that he trusts. They had signed a contract agreeing that they would make a series finale (which was intentionally the unfinished movie, "Invader Dib"). Vasquez states in the commentary that September 1 is Zim Day, which is also his birthday.[ citation needed ] AnimeWorks, a branch of Media Blasters, released the DVD collection Invader Zim Vol. 1 on May 11, 2004. It contains the first nine episodes plus audio commentary by Vasquez and various cast- and crew-members, including Richard Steven Horvitz, Rosearik Rikki Simons, Melissa Fahn, Wally Wingert, Andy Berman, and Kevin Manthei. The company released Vol. 2 on August 31, 2004, Vol. 3 on October 12, 2004, and a boxed set was released on April 12, 2005. The boxed set contained a "Special Features" DVD with audio-only episodes never aired on Nickelodeon, as well as the original uncut version of the Christmas special. Although Invader Zim merchandise has been an immensely successful franchise at Hot Topic since the show was on air, Vasquez makes no profit from sales of such. All rights to Invader Zim merchandise are owned solely by the Nickelodeon television network, which does not consult Vasquez regarding the designs of said products. Invader Zim has also run on the cable channels Nicktoons Network, YTV (a Canadian youth network) and MTV2 (in the "'Sic'Emation" block of the latter) and is available on iTunes in the United States and in Canada as well as Netflix. Vasquez also directed the music video for "Shut Me Up" by the band Mindless Self Indulgence [4] which centers around a store clerk having a "meltdown." In the music video, you can see Vasquez's characters, Happy Noodle Boy, on top of the aisles and Fillerbunny behind the counter. Other works [ edit | edit source ] Vasquez collaborated with Crab Scrambly to produce the storybook Everything Can Be Beaten , published by Slave Labor in 2002. Vasquez, credited as Chancre Scolex, wrote the story and Crab Scrambly illustrated it. Everything Can Be Beaten is about a strange person who lives in a room in which he can do nothing but beat kittens. However, an adventure into the outside world changes his perspective, and he discovers that "everything can be beaten." The storybook inspired Urban Squall in 2008 to create the puzzle browser game Bloody Fun Day . [5 ] Vasquez did the entire artwork for the deluxe edition of the new Mindless Self Indulgence album "If" as well as the digital single, "Mastermind". He has also indicated that he shows his artwork in galleries from time to time. [6 ] He also did an art rendition of Bioshock 2 called "The Sisters". [7 ] He was quoted saying the following about the rendition: "Who says kids are good for nothing other than emergency food in disaster conditions? I don't, because at this point my badass nieces helped out quite a bit for reference. I dragged them, much like Big Sister there, out for a quick photo session and we had a damn fine time in freezing winds posing like the little, demonic wee ones that they are. Being my niece, the youngest had no problem finding that place in her heart that allowed her to simulate the howling face of a child being dragged down a nightmare alley by an unspeakable horror. Throw in a tall, monstrous friend of mine to stand in for Big Sister and you have four people with chattering teeth and trying to steal my jacket. After that, the line-art came pretty easily enough, save for an adjustment period of finding the balance between a more realistic style and not losing the strange cartoonishness." Art Evolution [ edit | edit source ] Even though Jhonen has a very unique style, it can be notice the changes through the years, from JtHM where everything was more angular to [[I Feel Sick] or Fillerbunny where everything has a softer look even though still is angular. Plagiarism Victim? [ edit | edit source ] Many people believe that Todd Goldman made a plagiarized mix of Jhonen Vasquez's Nailbunny and Fillerbunny. There is a similar situation with Roman Dirge's art. Everything Can Be Beaten – Jhonen Vasquez (as Chancre Scolex) Vasquez hates the goth thing. He makes fun of it enough, but he can’t escape it – his books are always going to be sold at Hot Topic, and the black-clad crew are forever going to dig him just by association. It’s not an alignment he’s unguilty of, either, as everything he’s worked on can be slotted with the “everything suck” mentality of the scene, and his designs tend to favor the cute and garish blend that’s generally favored by the same. That he’s also worked with scenesters Mindless Self Indulgence – well. But there’s a reason Johnny and Squee! are still on my shelf (at least, eh, pending a re-read in the recent past) and that I enjoyed Invader Zim and that I’ll continue to check out writings with which Vasquez dabbles, and that’s that he tends to expand the scope of a lot of his Slave Labor Graphics mates by bringing in this kind of awareness of humanity to balance out all the humanity shitting-on. Similar writers approach this with straight out sarcasm, showing that they “get” that the joke is that they’re human too, but it generally doesn’t approach the same kind of acceptance and exploration that’s touched on in Vasquez’s work. His random humor – mostly in Filler Bunny – also tends to get a bump over the norm (many of that norm he has influenced, mind you) in the way that it draws attention to its own randomness in a “why is this happening?” sense that extends that awareness concept to encompass the author… Blah blah blah, so they’re not just someone spouting dogma or messages at you, but true attempts to express something going on in the creator’s brain. And this is also not to say that everything’s perfect. Certainly, with his pen-hand seemingly exhausted, as Jhonen has turned to having other artists draw some scribbles to match his words in a couple of infrequently released books, it seems that he’s experimenting with a proper way to express himself or his ideas. “Everything” is sort of empty, unfortunately, feeling like it started as a gag – let’s write a kid’s book – and then figuring out the punch line for the gag (which is the title). The presentation is cute in its rectangularly-bound mini-comic way, and it bears the high stock and color production of SLG, but some of it just doesn’t work. Printing all of the “e’s” backwards doesn’t amount to anything except for making it hard to read at points, and “Crab Scrambly’s” artwork works for all of the bloody bits, but is too pen-scratchy to make the juxtaposition of happy land and our main character look really juxtaposed – it still looks sort of evil and scratchy. The “story” is about a character named IT who sits in a room smashing kittens, then finds a door in the room, which leads him to this perfect and ideal land with smiling creatures that confuses him… until he realizes that “everything can be beaten” and he can smash non-kitten things. Womp. The style of writing floats on the verge of funny – typical Jhonen humor of cartoon logic smashed against real logic – but along with the pointless backwards ‘e’ comes a pointless narrative style that keeps making meta jokes about the story and the reader. It almost works, but it’s either not timed correctly with the images or it’s just a little too upfront with explanations about the subtext of what’s going on to feel right. And there are a couple of extra beats (pages) to the book that really make it just feel like an extended joke. But the ending is a win, and is more reminiscent of the dead-stop humor found in Johnny. Jhonen collectors will of course already have this. As a random find for those who like the art style or Slave Labor stuff, I must say this is fairly generic, for better or worse. If you’re exploring the Jhonen catalogue, “Jellyfist” is a more fun example of the writer exploring his style.