He's a homicidal maniac😮got the idea from another ai and there was no bots of him so yah know☺️hes such a bbg✨dictionary time...Johnny as an individual is different from Johnny in the framework of society. Vasquez is very literal about this idea. The reader primarily sees Johnny from the eye of the artist, who wants the reader to sympathize with his character. This perspective is of a smoothly drawn Johnny, proportionate, and cute. The artist’s main perspective is a positive one. However, Vasquez provides a different perspective of Johnny as seen by one of Johnny’s victims, where he is disproportionate, and very ugly. Vasquez thoughtfully labels the scene “seen in amazing asshole-vision.” This throws an interesting twist into the idea of representation. The same artist chooses to represent the same character in two radically different ways. While both are designed to earn the reader’s sympathy, this accomplished through differing routes. In the first, we are sympathetic toward Johnny because he is cute and looks likeable. In this other we are sympathetic toward Johnny because of the poor way other people view and treat him.

The “assholevision” provides an idea of how Johnny is represented in his own world, which itself is a representation of the entire world. This paradox offers quite a bit of insight and also furthers the connection between the reader and Johnny. As the reader is by this time familiar with a representation of Johnny from a specific perspective, he is also familiar with a representation with himself. This eccentric comic tends to attract an audience that identifies very closely with this representation of Johnny and as such causes the reader to consider his own representation within his own world. Do the jerks who make fun of the reader see him as these “assholes” see Johnny? The paradox brings first a rush of self-consciousness immediately followed by a sense of relief. Perhaps these people do see the reader this way; however, here the reader is reassured that cruel people are inferior and will some day meet their own “homicidal maniac” of sorts because of their own cruel nature.

In this sense, Vasquez is extending the idea that society, by its very design, is unmerciful and irrational with its cruelty. While in Heaven, Johnny meets an apathetic God who is asleep on a recliner. What little the deity will say to him is of no help. This idea of an uncaring god is a statement of the world at large. The concept does not necessarily project an atheistic view so much as a general loss of kindness. After all, the point of a god is to lead, but Vasquez seems to believe that God has forsaken the world by allowing awful people to be who they are.

Not all society that produces a violent response within Johnny; he tortures only the inhumanely cruel people of society. His entrance as an interaction with Squee offers an excellent opportunity to examine how Johnny reasons within his own reality.

Squee’s name comes from the noise he makes when he gets scared, and because of this it becomes Johnny’s nickname for the boy. Squee is the unwanted product of two unloving parents. His parents do not attempt to mask this: “Mommy’s ignoring you, go bother your father,” “I haven’t smiled once since you were born.” The family moves into the cookie-cutter home next door to Johnny only to have their son find that his neighbor is a homicidal maniac. The entire series of comics opens in issue #1 with Squee frightened by a noise at night. He and the reader see Johnny for the first time in Squee’s bathroom looking for Bactine. Johnny explains, “some of this blood is mine.” Predictably, Squee is frightened at the prospect of having such a neighbor, but Johnny succeeds in paradoxically charming him while frightening him at the same time with references to the torture he performs on others.

Johnny visits and protects Squee throughout the series. In one scene, a child molester attempts to kidnap Squee at the mall, and Johnny protects the boy by mutilating the molester. I