Inverview by Selina Romao
SR: When you were a kid, did you get picked on?
JV: Yeah, I mean that just happens.
SR: In any severe degree?
JV: I never got in any fights. A majority of people just wanted attention. They had a crowd around them, they had their friends. They thought they could be more likable by making fun of someone else. It was never actually anyone trying to inflict any physical harm. Basically it was just verbal abuse.
SR: Was it just in childhood?
JV: All you have to do is leave the house and people will make fun of you. People are so isolated. It’s sad, but they’ll make fun of anyone that’s different from them. It’s all been said before. There’s nothing new about the idea of being made fun of.
SR: Where you in the “clique” or were you left out? Or did you want to be left out? Johnny seems to have those feelings… he might want to be “in”, but he really doesn’t like that whole idea. Is that coming from you personally?
JV: Like I’ve said to people before, any person that’s writing another character… is basing it on themselves or someone that they think is a completely different person than themselves. The idea is that this person that they’re creating is still coming from the artist. Every thought is this person’s thought - Johnny being a little closer to me than others. As for his reactions to things, he has so much more passion, no matter how ill-directed it is, than I do for a lot of things. So the idea of wanting to belong to a certain clique or this or that, personally I’d rather not have anyone around me than to settle for something that just seems okay, as far as friends go, just for the sake of being a part of something. As for Johnny, he has sort of the same idea, but he goes a step further in the wrong direction by actually caring enough to hate. He devotes too much attention to something, like a group of people that he doesn’t care for, who maybe make fun of him.
SR: And he goes and kills them all in a cafe?
JV: And all that does is leave room for more people exactly like that because there’s always something out there. There will always be a bunch of assholes and fuckers and shitheads…
SR: What you’re saying kinda sounds like what you wrote in issue #2 on the inside front cover: “It’s so rare to really feel anything from anyone. Connections are difficult. There’s an irritation in being among people who’ve already found their connection, and finding those left that haven’t are as undesirable as the void they would be replacing.”
JV: Yes.
SR: This one is a lot closer to you then?
JV: Yeah.
SR: Did you ever have any bad nicknames? Did kids ever… was there any feature in you that people…
JV: There was never anything that really stuck. They would always pick different names on the same theme: basically me being really skinny. Actually, the older you get, the stupider the logic gets, it seems. Different connections with appearances. The older I got, the thinner I became - which meant I was “a fag.” That’s a classic. That’s a mark of quality right there. That’s when you know you’ve made it.SR: I guess your disgust in humans began as a child and then progressed as an adult?
JV: The more time you have, I guess the older you get, the more faculties of thinking you have to acknowledge… just how sad people are. It’s a really easy thing to say that you hate something and that you hate people. That’s the easiest thing to do. If it ends there, that’s not cool. You’re just as sad and as blind as everyone else. You have people just being these primitive monkey people to you. Guys and their testosterone-driven gossipy little crowds.
SR: So there’s an overall contempt for them rather than hate?
JV: You have to really respect something to hate it. I don’t care enought to hate a lot of things that I’m saying, I just really wish I weren’t a part of it. And I am, you know? I’m a horrible thing to someone out there.
SR: Do you hate being a human? [laughs] Because I do.
JV: It’s the whole toilet thing.
SR: Toilet thing?
JV: Yeah, being an organic organism. Redundant.
Note: This is a super long interview, so I’ll write and post it in 6 separate parts. This is 2 of 6. The interview is from Ben Is Dead Magazine, Issue 29 which was released in 1997 according to ZineWiki.
Thank you :’)
