"I got to draw monsters, robots and write funny stories. I loved doing that stuff and working with the actors. But it got to be less and less that stuff and more about trying to be everywhere and not being able to do one thing very enjoyably"
About this Quote
Creative work always dies a little when it gets promoted to a brand. Jhonen Vasquez frames his early joy in the simplest, most disarming inventory: monsters, robots, funny stories, actors. It reads like a kid’s dream job because that’s the point; his art is built on the manic pleasure of drawing what shouldn’t exist and making it speak. The list is also a thesis for his whole sensibility: the grotesque rendered cute, the cute rendered cruel, comedy with teeth.
Then the sentence pivots into the real horror: “trying to be everywhere.” For a cartoonist, that’s not just touring and press. It’s the modern expectation that creators become omnipresent content engines - sketching, writing, pitching, marketing, tweeting, taking meetings, keeping a pipeline alive across formats. Vasquez isn’t romanticizing struggle; he’s diagnosing dilution. When attention is fragmented into perpetual availability, the work becomes managerial, not imaginative. The phrase “not being able to do one thing very enjoyably” lands like a quiet indictment of hustle culture: it doesn’t merely exhaust you, it flattens pleasure into obligation.
There’s also a tell in the way he mentions “working with the actors.” It hints at animation/TV adaptation contexts (and the collaborative thrill of hearing drawings become voices) while acknowledging the industrial machine that follows success. The subtext is blunt: the dream gig is still labor, and the moment your job becomes “everywhere,” your monsters stop being fun and start being product.
Then the sentence pivots into the real horror: “trying to be everywhere.” For a cartoonist, that’s not just touring and press. It’s the modern expectation that creators become omnipresent content engines - sketching, writing, pitching, marketing, tweeting, taking meetings, keeping a pipeline alive across formats. Vasquez isn’t romanticizing struggle; he’s diagnosing dilution. When attention is fragmented into perpetual availability, the work becomes managerial, not imaginative. The phrase “not being able to do one thing very enjoyably” lands like a quiet indictment of hustle culture: it doesn’t merely exhaust you, it flattens pleasure into obligation.
There’s also a tell in the way he mentions “working with the actors.” It hints at animation/TV adaptation contexts (and the collaborative thrill of hearing drawings become voices) while acknowledging the industrial machine that follows success. The subtext is blunt: the dream gig is still labor, and the moment your job becomes “everywhere,” your monsters stop being fun and start being product.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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