Ah, school days. © Nickelodeon.

Dr. T: As a comic book artist of some renown yourself, talk about some of the artists working on the show. Who -- or what -- has really impressed you?

JV: The character designer, Aaron Alexovitch -- who we found right out of school. He was going to Cal Arts, or some nightmare place, and he took the chance to work on the show. He was going to school so that he could break into some kind of animation business, and he was given the opportunity to work on Zim. He took it, and he worked out. Originally he was going to be a clean-up artist and he's made his way up to head character designer now. I can completely trust in what he's going to do. His style is close enough to mine to where he can actually improve upon the look of the show at this point. That's what it's all about, getting better and better. The color crew is great; those people really pick up on how interesting the color schemes are. They are phenomenal in what they do, and in the amount of time they do it. They get a look out of the show that just makes it stand out. It's a dark but colorful look, like I love. They can reproduce it by this point without me telling them anything; they just do it. It's getting to that point where I can leave the building and not lose my mind over what hideous things are happening to my show. It's cool because these people, they love working on the show. Aside from all the nightmarish hours they put into it, you can tell that they actually enjoy it now, as opposed to just having a job.

Dr. T: Would you try this again, Jhonen? Do you see yourself working on a future animated series?

JV: I would have to shoot myself several times in the face to achieve a certain level of brain damage to agree to it again. Which I was planning on doing, but not to get back into animation. I was just going to shoot myself because I could use the rest! I don't want to get stuck working on children's animation, I don't think. Well, maybe I don't think of it as "stuck," but there are so many other ideas I want to work on that are limited by what I can do on a kids' show. I don't want to just have fun with a creepy kids' show, I want to work on something genuinely creepy. I definitely have to, because I have so many ideas I have to get out of my head before I'm dead -- which could be anytime now.

Dr. T: Did you watch cartoons as a kid? What kind of animation did you watch?

JV: The usual garbage you just can't help but like when you're little, like He-Man. I remember when watching He-Man I thought, "Wow, this is garbage!" because they had, you know, five drawings that they used every episode. Stuff that I really, really loved, I didn't find myself being amazed by. It was more just enjoying it in a sort of cartoon haze, a "sitting there, eating your cereal, watching cartoons" kind of level. There wasn't really any appreciation for how amazing the stuff was until I saw stuff like Akira. I always hated Scooby Doo. I couldn't stand how brown everything was! It was like staring at feces for half an hour. Euuh! I think there's a good thing about the fact that I didn't take a lot of this with me, love for these cartoons I saw while growing up, because I don't put a lot of that into what I do now. I don't derive a lot of inspiration from growing up with this stuff. There's a lot of stuff out there that looks like new episodes of a really old show to me. One or two shows, that's OK, but there are a lot of shows on the American side of things that are so retro, so tired-looking to me. It would be cool to see something done on this side that breaks away from that. There's been a cool response to (Invader Zim) just on that level alone, in that people dig the different look of it.

Dr. T: Jhonen, you give a great interview. Is there anything you have never said in an interview that you want to say now? Let it rip!

JV: Daily, I drink about a garbage bag of baby's blood. How's that?

Dr. T: Uh...please don't let Squee hear about it!

Jhonen Vasquez, 26, currently resides in Los Angeles where he plots future horrors from the dark sanctuary of his drawing table. His comic books have been nominated for several Eisner Awards, are produced by Slave Labor Graphics and are kept continually in print to the delight of fans old and new. Jhonen actually prefers Pillsbury crescent rolls to baby's blood, but you won't find him eating Scooby Snacks anytime soon.

Martin "Dr. Toon" Goodman is a longtime student and fan of animation. He lives in Anderson, Indiana.