{JtHM}Irritating Noise - Johnny/Edgar
Title: Irritating Noise
Author: Lady Yate-xel
Spoilers: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, first four pages or so of Issue 2 in specific, but the whole series, really.
E-mail: zippy_brough at yahoo dot com
Personal Website: http://www.ladyyatexel.com
We have no business doing this.
At least this is what all the stamps(and people who love also-commonly-slashed-with-Johnny Jimmy) on deviantArt tell me. And when you hear it straight, we probably don't. "A maniac - insane, egotistical, controlled to some degree by supernatural outside sources - and a guy he killed who cited God as one of his reasons he wasn't afraid to die, as a pairing." Yeah, that's not looking good, and I think we all know it.
Luckily, few things sound good when broken down to their basic parts. Leonard Nimoy once wrote that he initially thought the title "Star Trek" was really stupid. "Japanese school-girl with Greco-Roman inspired warrior-friends saves the world" is a really terrible way of saying "Sailor Moon." I love both Trek and Sailor Moon, and would be quick to tell people who broke them down so simply that they had it all wrong.
Thus, this.
What we're looking at is a pairing from Jhonen Vasquez's 1995 comic book series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. The basic problem that is first brought to the surface when people discover that you ship Johnny and Edgar (aside from Johnny's issues, which are next on our tour) is that Edgar is really dead. It's kind of a deal breaker for the non-necrophiliacs in the audience. He's not just conveniently-for-fandom 'fell in a river' or 'is rumored to be dead'. He was shredded to a pile of gore and broken glasses, we all saw it. There was a blood gush and everything.
"Wait," you are saying, "hold the phone. Why are you even writing this?"
Because dying rarely stops a ship. "You just can't stop a train!" Luckily, the comic universe allows for some loopholes that we'll get to soon.
Our players are Johnny C - the Homicidal Maniac, and Edgar Vargas, the guy with glasses, a goatee and a last name. Few people manage to get more than a last initial in the Johnny universe, including Johnny himself.
Johnny, as you may have guessed from his title, is not a happy guy, nor a nice one. He frequently kills people for looking at him funny or for transgressions he can only assume they committed. He does his share of taking out the trash by killing child molesters and rapists, but just as often kills people who hang out in trendy coffee shops and call him names. He alternates between justifying what he does and reviling himself, though is often in a position to combine them.
Vastly intelligent, but largely broken, Johnny doesn't relate to other people well. In fact, he largely finds them disgusting. 'Filth', 'drones' and 'pawns' spring to mind as words Johnny has used to describe a good portion of humanity, and those are his least creative. Johnny has expressed, on numerous and loud occasions, his distaste for anything involving bodily fluids, touching, animalistic behavior, and occasionally vanity. For those of you keeping score, this means sex is right out.
Luckily, relationships are not sailed on sex alone. And I can't believe I just typed that.
We get very little from Edgar, the other half of this disaster. He lasts all of four pages in canon, and during those four pages we see a man who is strapped to a killing machine, and conversing with another one. He seems calm and rational throughout his ordeal, but the psychological implications of that go from 'trying to flatter his captor into setting him free' to 'death wish' to 'wildly religious.' As is often the case in fandoms where the source material is vague and nebulous, mileage may and does vary.
Edgar tells us that he believes in 'God and all that', or at least, it gives him comfort/empowerment in his last moments. There's no indication of if he is setting God among 'all that' because he feels that casually about it - a 'shows up on Christmas and Easter' kind of guy - or if he's trying to lower the importance of God to him in one last effort to have himself released. Either way, or any other way, really, we have so little about Edgar that he is tantalizing and delicious to fandom for what he achieves: Johnny likes him.
In those four pages, they converse, a joke or two is made, and Johnny talks on an intellectual level with a person not manifested from his brain. He doesn't get to do this again until he finds Devi, and his encounter with her drives her away from him and somewhere off the deep end. After that, it's when he dies and chats up a demon and Satan that he has conversations that aren't completely steeped in madness. He expresses some feeling of sadness and regret for having to kill Edgar (he needs what will be left of Edgar for some other horrible purposes), sees and acknowledges good qualities in him. During the conversation, Edgar is refered to by Johnny as "my bestest friend in the room."
Edgar is like being bisexual - he can land anywhere on the spectrum.
He is not like being pregnant, which is typically a 'yes' or 'no' affair.
Here are more things I can't believe I typed.
Edgar dies after laying out that he has faith in a Heaven for himself, and a Hell for Johnny and his parting words include the oft-quoted, "Fuck fear." But Edgar still dies, and you're still wondering why the hell I'm writing this.
Because some of us stared at those four pages, watched Edgar joke, watched Johnny smile, and thought, "Oh, they could have been friends." Some of us saw Johnny act like he wasn't out of his mind for a panel and a half. Because some of us finished the book(s) and saw that despite the universe imploding on itself, it seemed just fine later on with what looked like the whole world happily regenerated. Some of us watched Johnny go through Heaven and Hell and discovered you can walk out of the afterlife with surprising ease and when we didn't see Edgar in either locale and we got a little antsy.
We wanted to see Johnny with someone to talk to who wasn't in his head trying to get him to explode in some manner or another. We were intrigued by one of very few people who Johnny felt was decent. Some of us entertained the idea that you can go so far into asexuality that you swing back around into bisexuality again. Maybe some of us were hormonal high school kids.
Thus, in fandom, Edgar quickly became:
an angel
a zombie
reincarnated
magically regenerated with the world
the antichrist
a guy Johnny DID find in Heaven
a guy who went to Hell for being gay who Johnny then ran into
sent back to fix Johnny
a homicidal maniac
mysteriously not dead
spared at the last moment
Johnny's shoulder angel/guardian angel/conscience
one of Johnny's new head voices
a vampire
Devi, who I mentioned earlier, is the 'one who got away', and is our only glimpse of what Johnny on saner, more prone-to-a-relationship days is like. Through Devi, we see what Johnny wants in other people, and that in special cases, it is not immediately a sharp object.
Devi is someone Johnny likes very much. They go on a date, end up overlooking the city together and talking before Devi asks Johnny if he wants to go back to his place. They go, carry on, laugh, have a good time and almost kiss. Johnny leans in for this kiss before a sudden jolt of madness takes him into another room where he comes at Devi with knives. He explains that he needs to immortalize the moment in the relationship when he was happy, to preserve it before they can have a fight, break up and the whole thing leaves him with bad memories. Devi escapes and is left with mental scarring while the audience sees that if it is for just the right person, Johnny is not as adverse to touch as he screamingly claims. Johnny is a very obvious hypocrite in other portions of the series, so it is not so wild to think it applies here as well. It is because Johnny's version of love seems to require bloodshed on the part of the love-ee that Edgar so often ends up as a being that Johnny cannot kill. Edgar and Johnny exist in a particularly bizarre version of fandom in that not only are they very not-canon, but it is almost necessary that they exist in an alternate universe, or an alternate timeline.
Many fans of any pairing want their ship to be canon, and maybe those of us shipping Johnny and Edgar don't given the nature of the books, but what we write may give us away a little. In many cases, though certainly not all, the stories we as a fandom write provide 'the rest of the story' rather than stopping the film at Edgar's death and rewinding it to get a better ending. In a way, it's easier to pretend that Johnny/Edgar can happen like this - we can still accept the canon of 'Edgar dies' and enjoy our silly pairing. So, even in a backwards kind of way, we're an inch closer to being canon because we still let canon happen. And of course, since we're all into a comic full of gore and swearing anyway, no one bats an eye at a couple composed of maniac and zombie/angel/ghost.
Not to say that all the fics involving them operate on this principle, but many of them do. Some use the reverse tactic of having them know each other before the killing, to use the same 'safe in canon' parentheses.
The fandom is small, and in some cases, a little ill. It's not chugging on with the power of a locomotive, but it's not breathing its last either. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac itself has a fairly good-sized fandom as a goth-y gore comic (as much as its creator and a lot of its fans disapprove of that label). It was created by the same man who made Invader Zim, slash of which has made him ill. The majority of the Johnny fandom would have a similar reaction to Johnny slash, so we're already a very filtered group of people who love violence, pseudo-intellectual ranting, gore, gay people, and some combination of all those elements.
Johnny and Edgar as a pairing live primarily at Cherry Doom, the Yahoo Group (technically for all Johnny slash, but is mostly an archive of Johnny/Edgar) established several years ago by a few ladies who were pretty sure they were alone in the fandom and that the entire thing was very funny.
Luckily for us, they were not alone, and it is still funny, because we have no business doing this.
Purposes of this essay aside, the deciding factor for someone becoming a Johnny and Edgar fan is usually to read a fanfic after seeing a stray piece of fanart. "What the hell is this?" they say to themselves, clicking on the link nearby. The next thing they know, they're leaving reviews saying, "I wasn't convinced when I clicked, and then I couldn't stop reading! I totally ship them now!"
Because of this, the fandom is composed of a number of people who are wildly open-minded, creative, silly and always take time to make sure they aren't taking themselves too seriously. Frequently, the fandom has readers that don't like slash at all, but are sucked in by the dynamic of a fairly normal man finding something of value in a very broken one, and vice versa. The fact that we stew in our own juices probably doesn't hurt either, though one could argue that on a few levels.
I ended up in this fandom because I was one of those people who saw four pages of potential and felt a bit cheated when it ended in random bloodshed. It probably helped that I was in my 'slash everything' stage, but I suspect it would have happened even if I hadn't been. Finding Cherry Doom and that other people were seeing something in those tiny pages was thrilling. The more you read in this fandom, the more you want to write. My first real fandom experience is this fandom - I'd never written fanfiction before it, and as of this writing, haven't written for anything outside of it either. I saw a strange kind of beauty in Johnny, who was so broken but showed these flashes of coherency and sanity, and was intrigued by what kind of person Edgar could be to hold his own even while faced directly with death.
The idea of the two of them being attracted to something they are not, and could never be, is fascinating to me. Maybe it's something like mutual corruption. Edgar should not be intrigued by Johnny, he shouldn't be spending time with him at all, but there's something in Johnny that you can't shake off. When he's not getting killed or doesn't have to worry about because of some fanfic convention, Edgar can see the parts of Johnny that the readers of the comics get to see - the broken and intelligent parts - and that can be intensely compelling. If Edgar does not die, what does he feel for Johnny? Pity? Hate? Curiosity? Does Johnny's madness leak into Edgar? Is this whole pairing Stockholm Syndrome?
Johnny, on his end, has proved that he can see a person as special enough that they bypass his rules about touching, and, as he's already said in canon, he likes Edgar, and didn't particularly want to kill him. Something that stayed with him in reality and wasn't a voice in his head is something he can want, and it's something Edgar, in some circumstances, could provide. With Edgar, Johnny has the potential to channel the person his insanity consumed.
It's dysfunctional, and probably can never be happy and healthy, but the interaction is fascinating. There's something tragic about how close these two can and cannot get, and something a little heartbreaking about a guy who has no idea how to say "I love you" without a knife, but struggles with seeing that the person he likes obviously does not want to die. Perhaps it's a little of the 'fixing up your badboy, because he loves you so much he'll change for you' fantasy, only the change is nearly impossible and will probably kill one of them.
Predictably, many stories about these two still end in Edgar's death, or in rarer cases, Johnny's. Even when that doesn't happen, their interaction is often shaky, painful or strained. Sometimes, when you know what it must mean for that person, seeing someone reach out for a few moments is a lot more moving than a gushing declaration of love.
Fanfiction for Johnny and Edgar is a little limited, sadly. The fandom is terribly small and since the canon material was so sparse, few people have managed to squeeze fics from it. As you can imagine, Johnny's issues and mental illness result in a veritable ocean of OOC behavior, slash fic or no. The slash issue, while we're here, is very rarely approached. Many writers and artists in the fandom seem to be of the opinion that Johnny is so damaged that the sex of the person he likes matters very little to him, and, as I said before, that a person can go so far into asexuality that they come right back into bisexuality. Johnny does like women, as we've seen with Devi, but the only reaction he gives to accusations of being gay based on how small and thin he is, "My name is not faggot, it's Johnny!" Which then results in someone dying. The outburst doesn't look homophobic so much as it appears to be a reaction to disrespect - it's the word, and the willingness of someone else to assume something about him that upsets Johnny, not actually being called gay. (He displays behavior like this many times in the comic; killing over the use of the word 'wacky', and the assumptions that others make about him based on his appearance.)
There are a few fics that take a great idea and expand it well and make for great reads, but for every one of those, there are many of the same tired takes on Edgar as an angel, or on Edgar magically surviving. When a fic hits on a version of Edgar and Nny's relationship that others respond to, fanfiction of fanfiction crops up and can sometimes be found more often than stuff inspired right from canon. Because Edgar can be interpreted many ways, and the relationship can start at so many places, it often becomes hard to be in the fandom without feeling frustrated at lack of options, or the sheer number of them. Short fics are also difficult to come by, since Johnny's mania generally requires a long complicated setup to be believed, so you generally have to be willing to invest in something of considerable length (100,000+ words) to get a satisfying relationship to form and exist.
One of our big fics, and one that doesn't fall into most of the fandom's 'cram it into canon's parentheses' approach is Vargas by Zarla. Vargas is Edgar's last name for those who are still shell shocked and don't remember. It's okay, I don't blame you. The story explores the relationship between Johnny and Edgar within the premise that Edgar survived his encounter with Johnny and what he as one person does to change things - whether things be something as large as the system the world operates under or just the life of one really broken man. Edgar develops as the storyline for the comics flows along and increasingly deals with supernatural and psychological batshit at every turn. An OC who isn't a Hot Topic highschooler in love with Johnny is well-blended into the universe and provides another level of conflict to an average guy who got himself tangled in often life-threatening circumstances. It's incomplete as of now, and actually contains no slash in it's 25+ chapters as of this writing. Its bonus porn continuity stashed on Zarla's website balances this out. Yes, you read 'porn continuity.'
The other large one is Song Without A Name, which I actually wrote. The people pressuring me into writing this, though, are telling me that everyone else would recommend it and they would not want me to write this manifesto thing if I hadn't made a fic they really enjoyed, so please don't think I pimp myself this shamelessly to strangers regularly. SWAN focuses on a selection of the cast of the comics reincarnated badly - with no parents, and invisible to the rest of the world - but with talent and insight that most of the world doesn't have. The story focuses on wanting to be seen, and how much memories from the past form who you are now. It starts in the beginning of the second life the characters have attempted to live since the comic's lives ended but soon begins developing tendrils back to the source material as Johnny struggles with remembering what he used to do and who that makes him. Johnny and Edgar are best friends through the majority of the story, but there is eventually a more romantic element. Inspired by canon-Johnny's slaughters that were timed to music on his CD player, the fic features a few song lyrics in every chapter (music also becomes important to the memory theme in the story), but I've been assured they are not the standard nauseating stuff of song-fic. SWAN began as something of an exercise in fanfic cliches is complete at 20 chapters and has a currently ongoing sequel. Alas, it does not have a porn continuity.
Fanfic of fanfic happens with these two fics often and is archived, along with other fic involving our favorite dysfunctional pair here for SWAN/ISH and here for Vargas-verse fics. The second link is Zarla's personal site for the pairing and contains a stash of independent-verse Johnny/Edgar fics as well as Vargas-verse. Many of them are very old and thus lead to dead places on the internet/Fanfiction.net. Sad times.
Zarla currently houses a good amount of the fanart for the pairing at her website, though she stopped actively collecting it a year or two ago. Zarla and I both are/were prolific artists in the fandom and our art can be found through those shiny links up there as well.
I'm also told I should be including "Vampire Edgar" (properly titled 'Blood and Cherry Syrup') here. It's a Nny/Edgar illustrated story that supposes that Edgar was a vampire all along, and thus did not die from Johnny's machine. I wrote the one in that link and drew the original doodles of it, but Vampire Edgar has become something of a fun thing that many people in the fandom want to try. My faves on dA have a folder just for the concept here. There are a few more Vampire Edgars in the works from other people, but I've been sworn to keep them to myself. I also can't be sure I've gotten all of them, but it's a start, at least.
Like any fandom, a quick search on dA for 'nny/edgar,' 'edgar/nny' or similar will result in most of what the fandom has to offer art-wise at the moment. We're still a small little hole in the wall, and between dA, I'm Going to Kill You and Ladyyatexel.com, you might be able to see all of it. However, here are some highlights:
The Edgar Vargas Club on deviantART is a good place to begin hunting for art and writing, since most people who are fans of Edgar are fans of slashing him with Nny.
SpookMouse on dA makes some absolutely great SWAN/ISH-verse fics that focus on the lifetime that SWAN glossed over. They're closer to canon than SWAN, and closer to sexy times than SWAN and would make good short reads even if you have no familiarity with SWAN itself. They stand alone beautifully.
Starkhund, formerly xamagumox, draws some incredibly cute art of the pairing.
mith-maulin, while not active anymore in order to pursue original projects, made some of the most popular images of Nny and Edgar from the fandom's first days. Mith-maulin also wrote a great fic called Brain Freeze.
Crow-Sensei makes some lovely drawings of these boys, and has been doing so for several years. She has also written some excellent fic in both Vargas and SWAN-verses as Crow, RedCrow and RoachPatrol, depending on where you're looking. Any story by her on the links to I'm Going to Kill You or Ladyyatexel.com are highly recommended. Here is a link to her Fanfiction.net account, though I think she might be keeping her Nny/Edgar stuff off of there for now. This is at least one of her recent works that is great and a short stand-alone that gives you a great idea of the flavor of the fandom.
PolyesterRage has a Zombie!Edgar in I Feel Fine,though it is currently a work in progress.
JynxsBox has an Edgar-buffet here, in which she explores various Edgars and the even more various ways he can be slashed with Johnny. Her dA account is linked in her profile on FFN - she draws some pretty excellent looking stuff of the pair in a very ink-y style.
Smilefortyeight on dA does some excellent pencil work of the pair that looks close to the comics in style, but is still unique and fabulous. She, along with BitterApples, has expanded the fandom joke concept of a completely impossible Edgar and Nny mpreg baby jokingly called Jogar and turned it into a bizarre world in which the kid himself doesn't even know how he came about. Jogar is actually kind of creepy for his resemblance to his parents. Smile's regular, not-killing-Jhonen's-soul Johnny art is fabulous as well.
On LJ, the jthm_slash community has a small but perhaps still milkable request/kink meme. There have been a few interesting contributions.
The fandom is not large or terribly active, but it is fucked up, compelling and fun to twist just enough to make this mess into a collective of fun, creative people making fascinating things out of what should be a joke and doing their best to hide from the comic's creator.
Because we have no business doing this.
Author: Lady Yate-xel
Spoilers: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, first four pages or so of Issue 2 in specific, but the whole series, really.
E-mail: zippy_brough at yahoo dot com
Personal Website: http://www.ladyyatexel.com
We have no business doing this.
At least this is what all the stamps(and people who love also-commonly-slashed-with-Johnny Jimmy) on deviantArt tell me. And when you hear it straight, we probably don't. "A maniac - insane, egotistical, controlled to some degree by supernatural outside sources - and a guy he killed who cited God as one of his reasons he wasn't afraid to die, as a pairing." Yeah, that's not looking good, and I think we all know it.
Luckily, few things sound good when broken down to their basic parts. Leonard Nimoy once wrote that he initially thought the title "Star Trek" was really stupid. "Japanese school-girl with Greco-Roman inspired warrior-friends saves the world" is a really terrible way of saying "Sailor Moon." I love both Trek and Sailor Moon, and would be quick to tell people who broke them down so simply that they had it all wrong.
Thus, this.
What we're looking at is a pairing from Jhonen Vasquez's 1995 comic book series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. The basic problem that is first brought to the surface when people discover that you ship Johnny and Edgar (aside from Johnny's issues, which are next on our tour) is that Edgar is really dead. It's kind of a deal breaker for the non-necrophiliacs in the audience. He's not just conveniently-for-fandom 'fell in a river' or 'is rumored to be dead'. He was shredded to a pile of gore and broken glasses, we all saw it. There was a blood gush and everything.
"Wait," you are saying, "hold the phone. Why are you even writing this?"
Because dying rarely stops a ship. "You just can't stop a train!" Luckily, the comic universe allows for some loopholes that we'll get to soon.
Our players are Johnny C - the Homicidal Maniac, and Edgar Vargas, the guy with glasses, a goatee and a last name. Few people manage to get more than a last initial in the Johnny universe, including Johnny himself.
Johnny, as you may have guessed from his title, is not a happy guy, nor a nice one. He frequently kills people for looking at him funny or for transgressions he can only assume they committed. He does his share of taking out the trash by killing child molesters and rapists, but just as often kills people who hang out in trendy coffee shops and call him names. He alternates between justifying what he does and reviling himself, though is often in a position to combine them.
Vastly intelligent, but largely broken, Johnny doesn't relate to other people well. In fact, he largely finds them disgusting. 'Filth', 'drones' and 'pawns' spring to mind as words Johnny has used to describe a good portion of humanity, and those are his least creative. Johnny has expressed, on numerous and loud occasions, his distaste for anything involving bodily fluids, touching, animalistic behavior, and occasionally vanity. For those of you keeping score, this means sex is right out.
Luckily, relationships are not sailed on sex alone. And I can't believe I just typed that.
We get very little from Edgar, the other half of this disaster. He lasts all of four pages in canon, and during those four pages we see a man who is strapped to a killing machine, and conversing with another one. He seems calm and rational throughout his ordeal, but the psychological implications of that go from 'trying to flatter his captor into setting him free' to 'death wish' to 'wildly religious.' As is often the case in fandoms where the source material is vague and nebulous, mileage may and does vary.
Edgar tells us that he believes in 'God and all that', or at least, it gives him comfort/empowerment in his last moments. There's no indication of if he is setting God among 'all that' because he feels that casually about it - a 'shows up on Christmas and Easter' kind of guy - or if he's trying to lower the importance of God to him in one last effort to have himself released. Either way, or any other way, really, we have so little about Edgar that he is tantalizing and delicious to fandom for what he achieves: Johnny likes him.
In those four pages, they converse, a joke or two is made, and Johnny talks on an intellectual level with a person not manifested from his brain. He doesn't get to do this again until he finds Devi, and his encounter with her drives her away from him and somewhere off the deep end. After that, it's when he dies and chats up a demon and Satan that he has conversations that aren't completely steeped in madness. He expresses some feeling of sadness and regret for having to kill Edgar (he needs what will be left of Edgar for some other horrible purposes), sees and acknowledges good qualities in him. During the conversation, Edgar is refered to by Johnny as "my bestest friend in the room."
Edgar is like being bisexual - he can land anywhere on the spectrum.
He is not like being pregnant, which is typically a 'yes' or 'no' affair.
Here are more things I can't believe I typed.
Edgar dies after laying out that he has faith in a Heaven for himself, and a Hell for Johnny and his parting words include the oft-quoted, "Fuck fear." But Edgar still dies, and you're still wondering why the hell I'm writing this.
Because some of us stared at those four pages, watched Edgar joke, watched Johnny smile, and thought, "Oh, they could have been friends." Some of us saw Johnny act like he wasn't out of his mind for a panel and a half. Because some of us finished the book(s) and saw that despite the universe imploding on itself, it seemed just fine later on with what looked like the whole world happily regenerated. Some of us watched Johnny go through Heaven and Hell and discovered you can walk out of the afterlife with surprising ease and when we didn't see Edgar in either locale and we got a little antsy.
We wanted to see Johnny with someone to talk to who wasn't in his head trying to get him to explode in some manner or another. We were intrigued by one of very few people who Johnny felt was decent. Some of us entertained the idea that you can go so far into asexuality that you swing back around into bisexuality again. Maybe some of us were hormonal high school kids.
Thus, in fandom, Edgar quickly became:
an angel
a zombie
reincarnated
magically regenerated with the world
the antichrist
a guy Johnny DID find in Heaven
a guy who went to Hell for being gay who Johnny then ran into
sent back to fix Johnny
a homicidal maniac
mysteriously not dead
spared at the last moment
Johnny's shoulder angel/guardian angel/conscience
one of Johnny's new head voices
a vampire
Devi, who I mentioned earlier, is the 'one who got away', and is our only glimpse of what Johnny on saner, more prone-to-a-relationship days is like. Through Devi, we see what Johnny wants in other people, and that in special cases, it is not immediately a sharp object.
Devi is someone Johnny likes very much. They go on a date, end up overlooking the city together and talking before Devi asks Johnny if he wants to go back to his place. They go, carry on, laugh, have a good time and almost kiss. Johnny leans in for this kiss before a sudden jolt of madness takes him into another room where he comes at Devi with knives. He explains that he needs to immortalize the moment in the relationship when he was happy, to preserve it before they can have a fight, break up and the whole thing leaves him with bad memories. Devi escapes and is left with mental scarring while the audience sees that if it is for just the right person, Johnny is not as adverse to touch as he screamingly claims. Johnny is a very obvious hypocrite in other portions of the series, so it is not so wild to think it applies here as well. It is because Johnny's version of love seems to require bloodshed on the part of the love-ee that Edgar so often ends up as a being that Johnny cannot kill. Edgar and Johnny exist in a particularly bizarre version of fandom in that not only are they very not-canon, but it is almost necessary that they exist in an alternate universe, or an alternate timeline.
Many fans of any pairing want their ship to be canon, and maybe those of us shipping Johnny and Edgar don't given the nature of the books, but what we write may give us away a little. In many cases, though certainly not all, the stories we as a fandom write provide 'the rest of the story' rather than stopping the film at Edgar's death and rewinding it to get a better ending. In a way, it's easier to pretend that Johnny/Edgar can happen like this - we can still accept the canon of 'Edgar dies' and enjoy our silly pairing. So, even in a backwards kind of way, we're an inch closer to being canon because we still let canon happen. And of course, since we're all into a comic full of gore and swearing anyway, no one bats an eye at a couple composed of maniac and zombie/angel/ghost.
Not to say that all the fics involving them operate on this principle, but many of them do. Some use the reverse tactic of having them know each other before the killing, to use the same 'safe in canon' parentheses.
The fandom is small, and in some cases, a little ill. It's not chugging on with the power of a locomotive, but it's not breathing its last either. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac itself has a fairly good-sized fandom as a goth-y gore comic (as much as its creator and a lot of its fans disapprove of that label). It was created by the same man who made Invader Zim, slash of which has made him ill. The majority of the Johnny fandom would have a similar reaction to Johnny slash, so we're already a very filtered group of people who love violence, pseudo-intellectual ranting, gore, gay people, and some combination of all those elements.
Johnny and Edgar as a pairing live primarily at Cherry Doom, the Yahoo Group (technically for all Johnny slash, but is mostly an archive of Johnny/Edgar) established several years ago by a few ladies who were pretty sure they were alone in the fandom and that the entire thing was very funny.
Luckily for us, they were not alone, and it is still funny, because we have no business doing this.
Purposes of this essay aside, the deciding factor for someone becoming a Johnny and Edgar fan is usually to read a fanfic after seeing a stray piece of fanart. "What the hell is this?" they say to themselves, clicking on the link nearby. The next thing they know, they're leaving reviews saying, "I wasn't convinced when I clicked, and then I couldn't stop reading! I totally ship them now!"
Because of this, the fandom is composed of a number of people who are wildly open-minded, creative, silly and always take time to make sure they aren't taking themselves too seriously. Frequently, the fandom has readers that don't like slash at all, but are sucked in by the dynamic of a fairly normal man finding something of value in a very broken one, and vice versa. The fact that we stew in our own juices probably doesn't hurt either, though one could argue that on a few levels.
I ended up in this fandom because I was one of those people who saw four pages of potential and felt a bit cheated when it ended in random bloodshed. It probably helped that I was in my 'slash everything' stage, but I suspect it would have happened even if I hadn't been. Finding Cherry Doom and that other people were seeing something in those tiny pages was thrilling. The more you read in this fandom, the more you want to write. My first real fandom experience is this fandom - I'd never written fanfiction before it, and as of this writing, haven't written for anything outside of it either. I saw a strange kind of beauty in Johnny, who was so broken but showed these flashes of coherency and sanity, and was intrigued by what kind of person Edgar could be to hold his own even while faced directly with death.
The idea of the two of them being attracted to something they are not, and could never be, is fascinating to me. Maybe it's something like mutual corruption. Edgar should not be intrigued by Johnny, he shouldn't be spending time with him at all, but there's something in Johnny that you can't shake off. When he's not getting killed or doesn't have to worry about because of some fanfic convention, Edgar can see the parts of Johnny that the readers of the comics get to see - the broken and intelligent parts - and that can be intensely compelling. If Edgar does not die, what does he feel for Johnny? Pity? Hate? Curiosity? Does Johnny's madness leak into Edgar? Is this whole pairing Stockholm Syndrome?
Johnny, on his end, has proved that he can see a person as special enough that they bypass his rules about touching, and, as he's already said in canon, he likes Edgar, and didn't particularly want to kill him. Something that stayed with him in reality and wasn't a voice in his head is something he can want, and it's something Edgar, in some circumstances, could provide. With Edgar, Johnny has the potential to channel the person his insanity consumed.
It's dysfunctional, and probably can never be happy and healthy, but the interaction is fascinating. There's something tragic about how close these two can and cannot get, and something a little heartbreaking about a guy who has no idea how to say "I love you" without a knife, but struggles with seeing that the person he likes obviously does not want to die. Perhaps it's a little of the 'fixing up your badboy, because he loves you so much he'll change for you' fantasy, only the change is nearly impossible and will probably kill one of them.
Predictably, many stories about these two still end in Edgar's death, or in rarer cases, Johnny's. Even when that doesn't happen, their interaction is often shaky, painful or strained. Sometimes, when you know what it must mean for that person, seeing someone reach out for a few moments is a lot more moving than a gushing declaration of love.
Fanfiction for Johnny and Edgar is a little limited, sadly. The fandom is terribly small and since the canon material was so sparse, few people have managed to squeeze fics from it. As you can imagine, Johnny's issues and mental illness result in a veritable ocean of OOC behavior, slash fic or no. The slash issue, while we're here, is very rarely approached. Many writers and artists in the fandom seem to be of the opinion that Johnny is so damaged that the sex of the person he likes matters very little to him, and, as I said before, that a person can go so far into asexuality that they come right back into bisexuality. Johnny does like women, as we've seen with Devi, but the only reaction he gives to accusations of being gay based on how small and thin he is, "My name is not faggot, it's Johnny!" Which then results in someone dying. The outburst doesn't look homophobic so much as it appears to be a reaction to disrespect - it's the word, and the willingness of someone else to assume something about him that upsets Johnny, not actually being called gay. (He displays behavior like this many times in the comic; killing over the use of the word 'wacky', and the assumptions that others make about him based on his appearance.)
There are a few fics that take a great idea and expand it well and make for great reads, but for every one of those, there are many of the same tired takes on Edgar as an angel, or on Edgar magically surviving. When a fic hits on a version of Edgar and Nny's relationship that others respond to, fanfiction of fanfiction crops up and can sometimes be found more often than stuff inspired right from canon. Because Edgar can be interpreted many ways, and the relationship can start at so many places, it often becomes hard to be in the fandom without feeling frustrated at lack of options, or the sheer number of them. Short fics are also difficult to come by, since Johnny's mania generally requires a long complicated setup to be believed, so you generally have to be willing to invest in something of considerable length (100,000+ words) to get a satisfying relationship to form and exist.
One of our big fics, and one that doesn't fall into most of the fandom's 'cram it into canon's parentheses' approach is Vargas by Zarla. Vargas is Edgar's last name for those who are still shell shocked and don't remember. It's okay, I don't blame you. The story explores the relationship between Johnny and Edgar within the premise that Edgar survived his encounter with Johnny and what he as one person does to change things - whether things be something as large as the system the world operates under or just the life of one really broken man. Edgar develops as the storyline for the comics flows along and increasingly deals with supernatural and psychological batshit at every turn. An OC who isn't a Hot Topic highschooler in love with Johnny is well-blended into the universe and provides another level of conflict to an average guy who got himself tangled in often life-threatening circumstances. It's incomplete as of now, and actually contains no slash in it's 25+ chapters as of this writing. Its bonus porn continuity stashed on Zarla's website balances this out. Yes, you read 'porn continuity.'
The other large one is Song Without A Name, which I actually wrote. The people pressuring me into writing this, though, are telling me that everyone else would recommend it and they would not want me to write this manifesto thing if I hadn't made a fic they really enjoyed, so please don't think I pimp myself this shamelessly to strangers regularly. SWAN focuses on a selection of the cast of the comics reincarnated badly - with no parents, and invisible to the rest of the world - but with talent and insight that most of the world doesn't have. The story focuses on wanting to be seen, and how much memories from the past form who you are now. It starts in the beginning of the second life the characters have attempted to live since the comic's lives ended but soon begins developing tendrils back to the source material as Johnny struggles with remembering what he used to do and who that makes him. Johnny and Edgar are best friends through the majority of the story, but there is eventually a more romantic element. Inspired by canon-Johnny's slaughters that were timed to music on his CD player, the fic features a few song lyrics in every chapter (music also becomes important to the memory theme in the story), but I've been assured they are not the standard nauseating stuff of song-fic. SWAN began as something of an exercise in fanfic cliches is complete at 20 chapters and has a currently ongoing sequel. Alas, it does not have a porn continuity.
Fanfic of fanfic happens with these two fics often and is archived, along with other fic involving our favorite dysfunctional pair here for SWAN/ISH and here for Vargas-verse fics. The second link is Zarla's personal site for the pairing and contains a stash of independent-verse Johnny/Edgar fics as well as Vargas-verse. Many of them are very old and thus lead to dead places on the internet/Fanfiction.net. Sad times.
Zarla currently houses a good amount of the fanart for the pairing at her website, though she stopped actively collecting it a year or two ago. Zarla and I both are/were prolific artists in the fandom and our art can be found through those shiny links up there as well.
I'm also told I should be including "Vampire Edgar" (properly titled 'Blood and Cherry Syrup') here. It's a Nny/Edgar illustrated story that supposes that Edgar was a vampire all along, and thus did not die from Johnny's machine. I wrote the one in that link and drew the original doodles of it, but Vampire Edgar has become something of a fun thing that many people in the fandom want to try. My faves on dA have a folder just for the concept here. There are a few more Vampire Edgars in the works from other people, but I've been sworn to keep them to myself. I also can't be sure I've gotten all of them, but it's a start, at least.
Like any fandom, a quick search on dA for 'nny/edgar,' 'edgar/nny' or similar will result in most of what the fandom has to offer art-wise at the moment. We're still a small little hole in the wall, and between dA, I'm Going to Kill You and Ladyyatexel.com, you might be able to see all of it. However, here are some highlights:
The Edgar Vargas Club on deviantART is a good place to begin hunting for art and writing, since most people who are fans of Edgar are fans of slashing him with Nny.
SpookMouse on dA makes some absolutely great SWAN/ISH-verse fics that focus on the lifetime that SWAN glossed over. They're closer to canon than SWAN, and closer to sexy times than SWAN and would make good short reads even if you have no familiarity with SWAN itself. They stand alone beautifully.
Starkhund, formerly xamagumox, draws some incredibly cute art of the pairing.
mith-maulin, while not active anymore in order to pursue original projects, made some of the most popular images of Nny and Edgar from the fandom's first days. Mith-maulin also wrote a great fic called Brain Freeze.
Crow-Sensei makes some lovely drawings of these boys, and has been doing so for several years. She has also written some excellent fic in both Vargas and SWAN-verses as Crow, RedCrow and RoachPatrol, depending on where you're looking. Any story by her on the links to I'm Going to Kill You or Ladyyatexel.com are highly recommended. Here is a link to her Fanfiction.net account, though I think she might be keeping her Nny/Edgar stuff off of there for now. This is at least one of her recent works that is great and a short stand-alone that gives you a great idea of the flavor of the fandom.
PolyesterRage has a Zombie!Edgar in I Feel Fine,though it is currently a work in progress.
JynxsBox has an Edgar-buffet here, in which she explores various Edgars and the even more various ways he can be slashed with Johnny. Her dA account is linked in her profile on FFN - she draws some pretty excellent looking stuff of the pair in a very ink-y style.
Smilefortyeight on dA does some excellent pencil work of the pair that looks close to the comics in style, but is still unique and fabulous. She, along with BitterApples, has expanded the fandom joke concept of a completely impossible Edgar and Nny mpreg baby jokingly called Jogar and turned it into a bizarre world in which the kid himself doesn't even know how he came about. Jogar is actually kind of creepy for his resemblance to his parents. Smile's regular, not-killing-Jhonen's-soul Johnny art is fabulous as well.
On LJ, the jthm_slash community has a small but perhaps still milkable request/kink meme. There have been a few interesting contributions.
The fandom is not large or terribly active, but it is fucked up, compelling and fun to twist just enough to make this mess into a collective of fun, creative people making fascinating things out of what should be a joke and doing their best to hide from the comic's creator.
Because we have no business doing this.