NEWSLETTER

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Gerard Way went to the School of Visual Arts for cartooning, became a massive success with the band My Chemical Romance, and then returned to comics by writing the Dark Horse Comics series Umbrella Academy. The comic is a lot like X-Men if they were all borderline goth (gothish?) and Professor X hated them. It’s a really fun comic to read and look at and has some interesting ideas concealed in it. Gerard is basically living every outsider’s dream. He’s a smart and good-looking guy in a popular band with a popular comic and he and the bassist of MSI just had a baby.

You have an action figure based on yourself. That’s rad.
It looks exactly like me because they scanned our faces. We try to be careful what we license our music to. We could have been perceived weird when those figures came out but we don’t really care if people hate that we did this. When I’m 65 years, old I’m going to have an action figure of myself and you can’t beat that. A lot of people want to do corny wannabe Japanese vinyl but you can’t fake that so we did straight-up action figures.

I read through Umbrella Academy twice and at first I was confused but I thoroughly enjoyed it the second time. It seemed like the core is people who grow up unloved as children. The father figure is known as the Monocle, implying that he scrutinizes instead of encouraging. All of their powers or physical transformations seem to be manifestations of how unloved children grow up.
Growing up I was hooked in by X-Men. I loved those 80s X-Men. I liked Longshot, Dazzler, and Jubilee. I liked those useless characters, which is why a lot of the characters in Umbrella Academy are kinda useless at times. As I got older, I didn’t relate to it anymore. I went somewhere else. I needed something more postmodern, and what appealed to me were the Doom Patrol reprints. I liked them as a teenager but as an adult they really made sense. Umbrella Academy was rooted a little in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, but really, it was rooted in British television, mainly The Prisoner. Even with the characters wearing the black blazers with the white piping. The Monocle’s almost like Number Two in The Prisoner. He puts these young adults through torture. I wanted it to be fun, but I didn’t want to explain it too much so it’s OK if it’s confusing. The most recent story was about time travel, and time-travel stories are a bitch to write. Eventually I stopped caring about the mathematics of it so it might have seemed sloppy. I hate that if you want to plug into the Marvel continuity then you have to check up on a whole bunch of facts. The book has a “fuck it” attitude. It doesn’t matter how they time-traveled, they just did.

I hate when Superman comics deal with him getting married or doing his taxes and try to scientifically explain his powers.
I don’t want to know how his powers work! If you read Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman it’s the best Superman in at least 20 years. They tell his origin in three silent pages because you don’t need to know all the garbage. My problem with modern superhero comics is that they’re catering to a very specific individual. I don’t care what someone who knows what kind of underwear Batman was wearing in 1968 thinks about Umbrella Academy.

It’s all trivia to obsess over, it’s not really about anything.
It’s like memorizing baseball stats.

On my second read-through of your comic, I realized that there’s a character called the Horror who is peripherally introduced and then completely absent from the series. Are you going to explain this character?
We’ll start to deal with him very soon, like a series from now. He was a character created simply as a plot device. He was supposed to exist on the team but I realized I had too many characters so I killed him off. To me he was the least interesting because he was too nice. I don’t really know how he got killed. A reader would be concerned but I don’t care. It’s like how I didn’t fully address the Monocle being a space alien.

What are you working on next?
My next comic is with Becky Cloonan. It’s a totally brand-new thing. We’re announcing it at San Diego. It taps directly into kids going to shows. It’s a nod to old Vertigo comics.

Is Umbrella Academy going to turn into a movie?
I think it’s going to happen. If they don’t make it, it’s not going to break my heart. I accomplished what I wanted with that story. I have a good relationship with Universal and it’s been fast-tracked.

Do you have a wish list for who you’d like in the movie?
I like casting older, like Adrien Brody and Winona Ryder. I think Universal likes the book because they can cast younger. I just want someone good and not trendy but I’d love to see the guy who played Scarecrow in Batman as Séance. It would be great to get Anne Hathaway as Vanya.

What do you think of San Diego Comic-Con?
I love to be overwhelmed, so I love it. Just walking around seeing way too much shit, way too fast. People talk about it possibly being bad for comics because of all the noncomics stuff there but I think it’s ultimately good for comics. But you have this group of creators now making comics just to try to get optioned for a film or TV show. That’s an example of Hollywood being bad for comics.

What’s it like being famous?
I always had good experiences at the places I frequented anyway. Comic shops, comic cons, horror cons. I went to New York Comic-Con when it first opened and I was waiting in line, apprehensive of what might happen. Whether people like my band or not, they sometimes just want to get a reaction. You never know what they’ll say to get that reaction. People who are drawn to the same things as me are overwhelmingly friendly and seem surprised to see me at horror cons. I meet comic retailers all the time who thank me for getting people into the comic shops who’d never read American comics before. It’s cool to be able to inject some life into comics.

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