“What I’m trying to say is that, yes, it’s a nightmare trying to finish these books with all the other things I have going, but it’s just too worth it to stop, no matter how shitty the result may be. It’s my shit, and I will roll around in it BECAUSE it is all mine. No, wait… that sounds bad.“

The story of Devi, an artist who hates her job painting book covers for the soulless NERVE corporation and is experiencing what can only be described as grief that her personal creative work is dying on the vine while she endures endless lunkheaded diktats from her boss. An unfinished painting of a spooky doll has become the focal point of her self-loathing, which begins to take on a mind and body of its own.

My first experience with Jhonen Vasquez’s work was as a kid, finding some single issues of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac while flipping through the bin of comics they used to hide in the corner at Hot Topic. Eventually I got a chance to read all of Johnny and Squee’s Big Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors in their trade paperback collections, as well as Bad Art Collection and Everything Can Be Beaten. I knew that I Feel Sick existed and I’ve always wanted to check it out but never got my hands on it until just now (possibly due to its never having been collected in a trade). Going in I was hoping for a bit of nostalgic fun, and this comic greatly exceeded my expectations.

This is a book about what it means to make art, on a personal level. What it feels like to have something inside of you that you simply must get out and make real in the world, and even though the actual labor of creating makes you sore and exhausted and fills you with recrimination and self-doubt the alternative of leaving it all inside to fester and rot is so much worse, unspeakably worse, that you cannot help but to do it. This might not be what artistic creativity feels like for everybody, but I relate to it viscerally and this book is a balm.

I did not expect a bloody, scatological goth comic book to remind me of The Artist’s Way, but Devi’s struggle with the monster birthed by her repressed creativity is a great illustration of the way Julia Cameron describes the toll that being a blocked artist takes on a person’s soul.

Vasquez is a maximally expressive artist and in I Feel Sick the design of the world mirrors Devi’s personal turmoil and twisted-up feelings. It’s neat to contrast the differences in the art between this and the apocalypticism and fraying sanity in Johnny‘s art, or the terror and paranoia of Squee. It’s also very funny, and thoroughly self-aware, and it knows when to take itself seriously and when to let that go. Some of the language hasn’t aged well (the R-word was everywhere when this book was published and it is unfortunately no exception), but it’s not a mean book either. Jhonen Vasquez sometimes gets lumped in with misanthropes, but I don’t think that’s quite right. He’s clearly a very sensitive person, someone unable to numb himself to some unpleasant realities that he sees the world around him ignoring or accepting, and the disgust that he registers feels like it’s coming from that place.