The animated series Invader ZIM first debuted on Nicekodeon back in 2001. While the show never found a Spongebob Squarepants-level audience, its unique style and sense of humor attracted a cult following that remains even ten years after the final episodes aired. Now those fans can take heart that ZIM and friends are returning. Not in another animated series, but in a new ongoing comic book from Oni Press.

Oni Press Teases Invader Zim Comic

ZIM creator Jhonen Vasquez is involved with that new comic, steering its development and even writing the first two issues. We recently had the chance to speak to Vasquez via email. He discussed the joys and challenges of returning to this oddball universe after so long, how closely he and other Invader ZIM veterans are involved and in what page of the first issue GIR will die. Wait, what?Along with that interview, we also have an exclusive look at four pages from the first issue, which will be released on Wednesday, July 8.

Oh, I don’t know that now’s the right time. Hell, this might be a terrible time to bring ZIM back, really, but I guess we’ll find out. As for why it’s being brought back at all at this time, that’s more a question for Oni than for me! They’re the ones who wanted to do it and they were nice enough to ask me what I’d think about that, and what I thought was that it’d be fun to see the characters live again in a more public fashion than just running around in my head like they have for the past couple of years since production on the show ended. I think, at first, I was just curious to see if it would even happen, if Oni would be be able to get NICKELODEON to allow the thing to happen, and when it did, that’s when I started putting my brain towards what the comic could be. At the time, I was deep into production on some other projects, so I wasn’t exactly pushing to add another job to the program, but as soon as the comic started to rev up, I couldn’t help but want to jump in and mash the controls a bit.

Oni's Invader Zim Comic Gets a Fanzine Prequel

Invader ZIM #1 cover

invader zim 01 preview 4 IMAGES

I’m actually a bit disconnected from what’s being sold still. From the very start, ZIM merch was pretty exclusively sold in just one store in the mall, and it was kinda a universe I never crossed paths with unless I was meeting someone who was wearing the stuff or having me sign this or that at a convention. Still, it’s pretty awesome to sit for a bit, sign stuff and see such a wide range of people show up to show support for this thing I did so long ago, kids, parents, parents of parents, corpses that have clearly just been reanimated and want me to sign a shirt or something. As popular as the show is, even to this day, I don’t get the sense that it’s gone beyond being a cult thing. What was attractive about a comic version of ZIM was that it would be in comic shops, could be ordered online, could reach people that weren’t already subscribed to a particular fashion but would just be seen by comics fans, people of all kinds of background (so long as they like comics).Maybe! Like I said, I wasn’t exactly pushing for any of this stuff to happen, mainly because I was, and still am, pretty busy with getting newer ideas off the ground. As I write this, I’m at the tail end of a pilot process for another animated series, finishing up a short for another studio, and also working on this ZIM comic! The comic itself is happening because Oni wanted to give it a go, but yeah, there aren’t the same constraints as with an animated series. It’s a lot less of a wait between having an idea and seeing the idea executed on the page, and an even shorter time to get it out to an audience. I wouldn’t say budgets aren’t a concern, though. If I had my way, I’d have way better people working on it, but beggars can’t be choosers and so I have to settle for sub-par talent like myself. The other people on the team are pretty good, though.Well, at the moment, the creative team is comprised mostly of people who worked on the actual television series, Aaron, Alexovich (art), Rikki Simons, and Eric Trueheart (writing), with the addition of Megan Lawton on inking duty. I had not actually planned on being involved in more than a consulting fashion, but that’s because my original idea for the comic was a pretty different idea than what it currently is. I wanted to bring in all new people and have it be a kind of anthology thing made by newer artists whose work I like and wanted to see take a stab at the ZIM characters, but with their own voices added into the mix. INVADER ZIM is a thing from a while back, and I wanted to see something more modern, not just a call-back to the past, visually and such. What ended up happening, though, was that a bunch of the guys from the show were hired, and that was going to result in something way more familiar than what I was thinking. That’s when I jumped in to steer the thing into a place that was somewhere in between what my plan was, and what appeared to a very different direction from that. So I went from just consulting, to writing the first two issue and doing some covers.I’m writing the first two issues, with issue one being all me and issue two being done with help from Eric Trueheart. After that I’ll loosen the grip a bit and just maybe revise scripts other people work on, but I have a few ideas for writing full issues at some point, depending on how this thing goes! It’s super important for me to at least be able to say whether or not a thing feels right for the characters or the world. It’s maybe annoying to some people who work on the thing, but there are stupid things, and there are right and wrong ways to do my kinda stupid. As far as drawing, I’m currently working on a cover for Issue #1, drawing and inking it, with colors by Simon “Hutt” T, an insanely talented artist I’ve been working with on a couple of different projects now. He’s also doing color on the issues I’m writing.The series had a slight build in terms of story progression, but the point was never to take it anywhere in particular so much as to just be an episodic show. We had episodes that ended in terrible situations but were completely washed away by the next episode. The characters themselves are who people remember them being, but one of the things I’m more focused on now, is making who they are a bit clearer. Back in the day, I think a character looked and sounded the way they did because I just thought it was funny or I thought it looked cool. I think (hope) I’m a better writer now, though, so it’s more important that things feel more particular to a character’s “character”. It’s not important to me that people feel entirely comfortable with a thing they think they know. Some things change just because it makes more sense and it’s more fun to play with a better defined character, even if the point is to still be reeeally stupid with what you do with them.Gaz is a good example of that. In the show, she was a bit one note, just angry and, for some reason, dressed like she was a lot older and more aware of spooky fashions when, really, that’s more of an adult, or teenage thing. Her body was almost exactly the body of Pepito, an anti-christ character from my comics. It’s a thing that bugged me but never really got addressed. Comics Gaz is still Gaz, she’s still really mean to her brother, but she’s also an actual sister, someone that loves torturing him, but should act more like someone who would defend him if someone else was causing him grief that goes beyond an acceptable level of Dib suffering. Visually, you can’t confuse her for anyone else, but she’s no longer just a body swap for another character, with her newer appearance being more a nod to her gaming obsession.ZIM himself is unchanged. You can’t mess with ZIM.I think we’re staying close to the show overall in terms of self contained stories that focus on hugely dumb things. There’s nothing to stop us, though, from single page strips and such. It’s whatever feels right! My first two issues are one continuous storyline, but after that it’s back to some new, absurd science fiction stuff again. Like with the show, I think there will be references to things set up in previous stories, but the focus is definitely not on being serialized.GIR dies on the very first page of the first issue and is never seen again. I kid (it’s page 2). Okay, now that I’ve guzzled this foaming mug of tears, I’ll say that GIR is actually about as unchanged as ZIM. They’re a team, and the dynamic of that team is that GIR is the sidekick. A thing that happens with the cute characters is that they become fan favorites, and if it were up to fans, that favorite would be the show. There’s a danger in giving fans what they want because they can often be like lunatics steering a car over a cliff. GIR should be in aid of a thing and not be the entire reason the thing works! I do like the idea of single page comics drawn BY GIR though.I think fans of the show, if they’re anything like me, won’t NOT be able to hear the voice actors as they read the comics. It’s just brainially impossible to do! I just made that word up, but it feels right. Me, when I’m writing the scripts, I’m pretty much transcribing more so than plotting something out. The voice actors are so connected to these people in the comics that I’m actually gonna try to credit them in the comic itself. Seems like the right thing to do.Not consciously, no, I don’t think my plan is to turn the thing into a re-skinning of JTHM. It’s still ZIM, only I think a lot of that audience IS older now, so they can handle a bit more, but it still has to be the world and the people they know. You can’t just suddenly have ZIM murdering people. I mean..you CAN, and I can think of all sorts of reason for why that’s funny, but it wouldn’t be because that’s how the show was. It’d be more of a joke about the show than feeling organic as a continuation of it.The funny thing about standards and practices, and dealing with them, is that they weren’t the worst part of working on an animated series. There’s something kinda less terrible about a bunch of rules. You can’t do this? Okay. You can’t do that? Alright? It’s when things entered a grey zone elsewhere, outside of S&P, with people whose opinions would affect where we went with a thing, opinions on matters of style or personal humor, and you’d get into these big argument/conversations over the silliest things. I think we actually got away with a LOT on that show, but people seem to have created this whole mythos based on bad, or just more entertaining information.I’m not gonna lie: I haven’t actually read any of those, but yeah, those are inspirational in a way because I like the artists they use, and I like what a beautiful job the chosen artists do on the books! There artful and not just mercenary things, not on the surface anyhow. That’s why I want the ZIM comics to not just be visual echoes of what the show was. I’m not all that interested in having it look exactly the same as what people THINK the show should look like. A lot of time has passed and I’m into different stuff now. I’m a classy person, you know? The pilot I just did, the animated thing, it actually uses someone else’s style altogether, my co-creator on that project, J.R. Goldberg. Looking at what we’ve made, watching it and being just as surprised as anyone else would be is a very different feeling because it’s still a thing I created, but it also has this other DNA in it, something that keeps ME interested. The ZIM comics, hopefully, bring in some of that feel at some point. I’m doing what I can to keep things interesting with the team we currently have, but we’re still the people that did the original thing. A lot of people who were fans of the cartoon have become incredible artists in the years since, and I want to activate their brain implants and use them for my army.Well, I was hoping to have a thing of my own done in time for this San Diego Comicon, something all mine, but things are pretty crazy right now, and getting increasingly so. Check back in a bit??

Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter , or Kicksplode on MyIGN