I ONCE SAVED THE WORLD BY BEATING A LITTLE GIRL TO DEATH WITH HER OWN CAT.

Alright, now that we’ve gotten the intro part of these posts out of the way, we can really just dive right into the pertinent stuff, the stuff you want to shoot up between your toes while everyone in the room looks away sickened, the hard stuff…

The ZIM stuff.

At the time of getting my own show on network television, my only writing experience had been in comics, and even then comics written as though I was being chased by bears in the forest as I scrawled down whatever I could and getting lucky if any of it made a bit of sense.  What’s sad about that is, of all the comic books I had done up to then only one of them had actually been written while I was being chased by bears.

The network took that huge leap of faith, putting me, untested, in the gunner’s seat of a huge operation the way it did, but it wasn’t quite okay with not putting a few safeguards in place around me.  These came in the form of far more seasoned professionals who had experience working either in animation or in television production in general.

In time, the network relaxed a bit and I ended up becoming the show’s head writer, with me making the final calls on what was happening in the stories, how it was happening, and in what voice, a thing I was doing even when we had our previous head writers, only now without the awkward gymnastics necessary when there was someone between me and the final product.

People often ask how to go about writing for television, and I’m not entirely sure what to tell them as I can only give my personal slant on the process, a process that I employed from the very start of the show.  I couldn’t say that this is how it is done on every other show, and I’ll hazard a guess that it isn’t, but because I didn’t come from any formal training, any proper animation writing background, what I brought was perhaps a radical new perspective to the operation.

You’ve probably seen various forms of “writing rooms”, maybe on television or in movies, maybe commercials or some such thing, in which a group of writers sits around a room, usually around a table, banging out show ideas or whatever.  It’s a ferocious, stream of conscious kind of creative think-tank where the writers essentially come up with what eventually becomes the world of the show, the very things you know to be the things you laugh about at school, talk about with your co-workers, or scream about to frightened network employees employees who get to hear about how some mother now has to hear her daughter cry about how she thought pulling her eyes out would result in her getting even cooler eyes because “the cartoons told her so”.  What you quote or re-enact with fellow fans, or scratch your head at, wondering how anyone could find that funny, was just a blip of a suggestion, a thing made up on the spot because SOMETHING had to fill up those blank pages of a script.

The writing process on INVADER ZIM was a bit different from that.

FACT:

You write about what you know, right?  Isn’t that what the proverbial they always say to do?  Well, they’re right, but it isn’t always easy, a fact made terribly clear once I found myself actually having to write for a show whose very premise reached far beyond my own experiences.  Not only was I not an evil alien bastard, I had never even been to outer space or sucked the organs from child’s gutted belly.  This was a huge hurdle for myself, and for the writers.  I couldn’t, in good conscience, deceive the audience by not being honest with them.  People look to television to teach them, to stand in as entertainer, parent and priest.  I had to reconcile my desire to entertain with my need to feel good about what I was doing to those eager, hungry, innocent minds out there.

This applied to how I felt about what my writing team was doing as well.  We all had to live up to these standards I was laying down, had to be as honest in what we were doing as possible, lest our souls burn in cartoon hell for all eternity.  Even I wondered if I wasn’t being too extreme in my approach to what most people would simply see as a silly show for kids, but unlike most people I wasn’t a bunch of stupid idiots.  Still, there was a time, in the early days of the series’ run, where I wasn’t entirely sure what the results of not enforcing some system to maintain an integral balance between fun and fact.

We had our own version of that classic writers’ room thing, where we’d meet up, usually in the lobby area, a couch-filled room surrounding a television where the entire crew would go take their breaks, or where tour groups would come in to watch bits of what we were making every now and then.  It was in this area where the earliest incarnation of the writing team was having a little throw-in,  talking about what sort of stories they were thinking of doing, what sorta stuff would be funny and so on.

One guy (I’ll change his name so as to spare his family the indignity), let’s just call him “Powers Boothe”, was one of these writers that had been forced on us by the network, a ‘pro’.  Thus far, none of what Powers had pitched in seemed in line with what I wanted the show to be like.  That was one of the biggest problems in the early days, and still too significant a one even in the final days, the reigning in of people’s off-target notion of what the show was and wasn’t.  Still, everyone was trying, and even Powers Boothe was trying in his own weird way.

“Okay, picture this.” he started, standing up to deliver his pitch.  “ZIM goes to the moon, and sets up a lemonade stand to lure the Earthlings to follow him, and while the Earth is empty, he takes it over!”

A few of the writers laughed, giggling at how stupid or silly it was.  The meetings were like that, full of bad ideas that could maybe be good ideas.  Even I chuckled a bit in my fat, old way.  Still, something was nagging at me.

“I don’t know, Powers.  It’s kind of funny, but I don’t knowww….It seems a bit like you’re making things up. ”

“What?” asked powers, his arms still held high from delivering the climax of his pitch, now slowly returned to his side.

“Well, it just seems like maybe–Okay, let me ask you.  HAVE you ever been to the moon?”

Everyone began to laugh, slowly at first, but then breaking into full on laughter when they took the moment to be some Goodfellas like ribbing.  Then they stopped again, realizing maybe they were wrong.

“Have you?” I repeated.

“Well, no, but it’s just gonna be fun.  Come on, he goes to the moon to make a lemonade stand!  It’s so stupid!  And maybe it ALMOST works, but then Dib comes along and ruins it for him or something.  I dunno…I’m still working it out.”

“I’m just worried, man.  It doesn’t seem right to me.  It sounds to me like what you’re doing is deceiving people.  I mean, you’ve never done any of these things, never–okay…have you even had any experience making lemonade stands?”

“Jhonen, relax.  He’s got an okay idea and it could maybe be funny.  Just let’s see what he does with it?”  That from one of the other writers.  I looked around the room and saw silent agreement from still more others.

I tried to relax, listening to Powers Booth go on about what else might be done with his episode, the other writers laughing and clapping, even pitching in, pitching in with more and more lies…

Until the rumbling.

Powers didn’t seem to notice it, as he had become so animated in his storytelling, jumping around, waving his arms, soaking up the attention of the crowd.  The others noticed it, their faces registering alarm and then  confusion as the spot of blackness began to spread around Boothe’s feet.  It was as if the color was being bled out of the universe in a spot on the carpet that was now the size of garbage can lid.

“Powers.  Powers, stop.”  I said, trying to sound assertive, but ending up barely able to hear myself.

Powers was going on and on, a web of lies streaming from his mouth as he acted out potential scenes.

“And GIR is all DOO DOO DOO DOO!  HAHHAHAHAH”, he went on and on, completely oblivious to the blackness at his feet, the rumbling of the room, and even the gawking, suddenly very silent group around him.

Boothe suddenly dropped through what was now a hole in the floor, catching himself through blind luck with his outstretched arms on the edges.  He didn’t scream.  Just gaped, perplexed and shocked at his sudden change of elevation, his world all legs and feet now, and horrified faces looming above.

It wasn’t until the teeth began to push out from the inner edge of the hole that he began to scream.  Ragged, nasty, shark’s teeth forcing through what appeared now to be black, oily flesh.  We smelled burning meat.  We realized that Powers was being cooked from below.  No smoke belched out for everything was being sucked inward, down, below.

“HELP MEEEEEEEE!  OH, GOD HELP ME!” screamed Boothe, and some made feeble attempts to reach out, to grab him, but everyone knows you don’t rescue the damned, you just make a silent vow not to join them.  We watched as the opening snapped shut around Boothe, the teeth, that lamprey’s ring of agony tightening around him like a fanged sphincter.

It took a minute for it to bite completely through his torso.

His upper half, from his crushed ribcage on up, popped up, slammed into the ceiling, smashing one of the ugly fluorescents above then made the trip back down to the floor along with glass and plastic.  It was there for only just a second when the hellish maw opened back up again to snatch up what it had left.  That black, tarry slick remained, but we knew that the thing had gone.

Stunned silence.

“I KNEW IT!” I cried out.

After that, everyone had to write about only what they knew, and if they didn’t know it, they had to do it to know it.  If a writer wanted to do an episode about space, that fucker had better go to space then.  If they wanted to fight a giant monster made of babies, then holy shit they’d better get to finding just such a monster (easy enough in Burbank) before they even thought about writing these things down.

Lead by example.  ZIM shrinks himself down to microscopic levels and infiltrates Dib’s insides.  Awesome idea, right?  Yeah, well maybe you’d not have pursued it if you thought there’d be a chance that you’d have to experience that scenario.  But I had set up the rules, and I had to show my writers that I was made of the very stuff I was talking about.

Shrinking myself down was easy enough, but building a vessel small enough to pilot around inside of a human body was what proved to be the tricky part.  Finding a volunteer to have myself injected into was even harder!  Failing that, I simply told one of the P.A’s to jab executive producer Mary Harrington with the needle that I was floating around in.

I zoomed around in there for a bit, firing rockets at random shit here and there, just getting a feel for what it would be like to fuck someone up pretty good from the inside, and not in a porny way for a change.  Satisfied that I could now write about an experience I had actually had I made my way out as best I could and returned to proper size.  I had misgauged my exit, however, and activated the growth sequence while still inside of Harrington’s left nostril, effectively obliterating the thing.  Remember that scene in Total Recall where he’s pulling the tracking device out of his agonized, stretched to diaphanous nose?  It was like that, only the nose exploded.

The writers gathered around me, cheering, patting me on the back as I exited the vehicle.

“It works.”  I said.  “Our system works.  We can write what we want so long as we do what we want!”

A huge cheer went up, and the janitor came in to mop.

Things went on like that for a while, with some writers messing up along the way, being sucked down to hell for their mistakes.  What that did was to simply streamline our team, make it so that only the strongest, most diligent survived.

“Jhonen, I want to write an episode about aliens that steal planets the way repo men take cars!” someone would say as they popped their head into my office.

“Sounds good, but I’m not gonna help you if you get stranded out there.” I grunted back, grabbing a spacesuit and throwing it at him.  He’d put the thing on and I’d hear the sound of rockets carrying him off into space just minutes later.

New blood was always interesting. Eric Trueheart was one of the later additions to the team, and one of the best.  His approach to silly was a bit different than mine, but it was his science fiction love that made his presence make sense.

You ever hear people talk crap about INVADER ZIM because it’s a show “for emos and little goth girls”.  Sure you have–hell, maybe you’ve even said those very things because you’re a loser, but the fact of the matter is, the show was a thing made totally separate from what it might eventually be marketed as.  All I gave a crap about while making it was that it was funny, absurdist science fiction, because that’s what I dig, that’s what a bunch of the crew dug.  If Trueheart came in wearing a baseball jersey, wearing shit like a gangsta rapper, or clad in a dracula cape, the only thing that would end up mattering was how well he matched the feel of the show.  Trueheart picked up on that early on, and with his suggestion that ZIM ruin Dib’s life via the use of time traveling rubber pigs I knew I now had a writing partner I could rely on to deliver the goods.

Thing is, Trueheart wasn’t at all prepared to commit to what it took to actually write the stuff.  How he kicked and screamed as we dragged him to the edge of the timegate.

“WHAT?  WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?  HELP!  HELP!” He screamed, grabbing onto whatever would buy him just a few more seconds of time.

“You’re an animation writer now, man!  SHOW SOME DIGNITY!” I screamed at him, knowing he’d be fine soon enough, but also wanting to get this whole mess over with as I was technically on a lunch break and wanted to shawarma.

“THERE’S A BIRD IN THE HOUSE” I called out, and sure enough storyboarder Ray Angrum came smashing through the walls.

“Oh, yeahhhhhhhhHHHH!” he roared.  “What’s the situation?”

I simply pointed at Trueheart, clinging like a sea monkey to the railing on the side of the ramp into the timegate. Ray nodded and headed over to where Truheart was making his last stand.  Ray grabbed Trueheart around the waist, a single hand good enough for the job, and pulled with no visible strain.  Truehearts arms both broke, sockets breaking, bones snapping.  He howled as they flopped about like air-balloon mascots you see at car repair places.

“NOOOO!  OH GOD NOOOO! NOOOOO!”,  cried Eric Trueheart, as Angrum simply threw him through the shimmering eye of the timegate.

We waited, mere minutes for us, an eternity for Truheart.  When he returned, he was older, calmer.  He understood.  Walking toward him, ascending the ramp, I threw him an electric razor for his long white beard.  He snatched it in midair and went right to it, speaking as he shaved.

“So I figure at the end ZIM’s brain gets replaced by a rubber pig, and it’ll be funny.”

“That’s awesome shit.  Go with it.  I’m getting shawarma.”

That’s how it went from then on, with each of us doing what we could to be as sincere and truthful in our storytelling.

It’s really too bad the show got cancelled when it did, because the writing was one of my favorite bits and I was looking forward to working with some of the new guys, some wanting to be permanent, some just going for occasional guest writer spots.

Liam Lynch came in to talk about writing for the show.  He was a fan and I dug his stuff and it just seemed like a fine fit.  We chatted, talked about potential ideas and generally just shot the shit, enjoying one another’s bespectacled, nerd-clone appearances.

I don’t recall exactly what the idea was, but it had to do with being buried alive, so I buried him alive.  I could hear him still laughing as the last shovelfulls of dirt went on the makeshift coffin we made for him.

Then the show was canceled.

Going back to the studio, even the patch of dirt next to the studio, just didn’t feel right, so we never did.  I imagine he’s out there, still, Liam, thinking he’s doing a helluva bunch of research for an episode of ZIM.

Or he’s dead.  I dunno.  I’m gonna get some shawarma.

–ZIM FACTS. Here’s why—