Finding his way back

Finding His Way Back

MCR’s front man channels the dark side.

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You really have to hand it to Gerard Way. Only three years ago, the raccoon-mascaraed MC of Goth-punk powerhouse My Chemical Romance (MCR) was literally so partied out, the working title for his then-unrecorded third album was The Rise And Fall Of MCR. Witty, but most assuredly not amusing to the man himself. “I hit this point where I was like, ‘You know what? This has stopped being fun – I’m really unhealthy, I’m really on the edge, I’m really depressed and I’m really unpredictable,’” sighs Way, 30. “When you’re doing something that you love to do, but you have something that’s making it so you can’t enjoy it, it’s time to stop that and make a very simple decision. So it was a hard process, but a very simple choice – I’d hit rock bottom, but it wasn’t the kind of rock bottom where I jumped out a plate glass window or ran someone over with my car.”

The singer’s clean and sober rebound, then, appears near phoenixlike in context. MCR defied all expectations (not to mention critics, who passed them off as a flash-in-the-pan emo band) with that aforementioned third album, eventually released as The Black Parade – an ambitious, anthemic concept record revolving around Way’s artistic creation of a skeletal bandleader named Pepe. The band enhanced the idea onstage with matching marching-band uniforms, all in appropriately grim ebony.

That was just the warm-up. Way also launched his own comic-book series, The Umbrella Academy, featuring a reluctant team of awkward young superheroes, through the hip Dark Horse imprint. Currently, he’s been putting the finishing touches on The Black Parade Is Dead, a new concert CD/DVD taped live in Mexico City last October, but will make one last small-club sweep through the Bay Area before disappearing into a studio to reinvent himself once again. Only Way knows what ethereal form he’ll take next.

The Wave: What characters and plots are you conceiving for your Umbrella Academy?

Gerard Way: It’s very reminiscent of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. It’s just very bizarre-type superheroes, almost as if they got thrown into it from when they were kids and they didn’t really wanna do it. But the dad’s really crazy and kinda forces ’em into it. It’s one of those comics that’s not the easiest to explain because it is so weird, and sometimes they’re fighting things that are more like concepts, rather than supervillains. And I’m actually a fan of characters that don’t have a tremendous amount of powers, so one of the characters was the first boy in space, and he was really smart, an excellent pilot, a better pilot than any adult on the planet – he was the first person to actually complete a mission to Mars. But he got in an accident on the way back from Mars, and they had to switch his body with that of a Martian simian, a primate that was indigenous to that planet. So his head got attached to the body of a giant blue space ape. Another character is called the Rumor, and her power is that she can tell really small lies, and they all come true. So I tried to really think about the powers and make them useful, but not so useful that you’re dealing with a Superman character.

TW: Were you tormented as a kid for liking comics?

GW: Yeah, I guess so. There definitely weren’t a lot of kids I could hang out with and talk to about ’em. That was the thing – they were all trading baseball cards, and I tried that and I hated it. And I didn’t really watch sports, so I had no idea what I was talking about. But I knew a lot about the X-Men, and I knew about Spider-Man and Batman. But there were no other kids around that were really into that. Now I always carry a ton of art supplies with me on the road. I really like standard black ink – I like brush and ink, and blue pencil’s what I use to lay it all down. Then I ink over it, kind of an animation way of working. And I like watercolor a lot, too, I’ll use it sometimes when I actually have time. But doing comics is a lot of work – it goes from guy to guy to guy, and then months and months later, you have a comic.

TW: I don’t trust anyone who hasn’t gone to the edge and stared into the abyss. In music and art, you seem to have managed that quite well.

GW: Yes. I think you’re just playing around if you’re not doing that. And that doesn’t mean to say that you have to be gloomy or depressed or anything. But if you’ve never been to the edge and stared into it, you’re never gonna become a better human being, I don’t think. And it’s facing that stuff that makes you a good person to other people – it makes you good to yourself, it makes you smarter, it makes you faster, it makes you better. Out of all these tragedies, you’re born as something better, so I think that staring into the abyss is one of the things that the band does really well.

TW: What, exactly, have you seen there?

GW: Really, a lot of black. I stare into that sometimes when I have to tap into it and write lyrics, and I see my life going in ways I didn’t want it to go, I see... just this kind of darkness. Without sounding corny or clichéd, that’s really what it is, you’re staring into the black and you don’t know what’s there. And it’s really that you’re staring into what you don’t know and all your fears at the same time, and all your anxieties and all your depressions, plus all your hang-ups on yourself and all the bad sh*t you’ve done in your life, everything. You’re staring at it, and you’re either gonna switch it off, or you’re gonna dive on in.

TW: I saw a great bit of graffiti once: “The abyss stares also.”

GW: [Laughs] That’s amazing! I never even thought of that.

TW: So you’ve probably seen great dark flicks like Audition and Oldboy.

GW: Those are really big films for me. We based an entire video, shot for shot, on Audition, almost to the point where it felt like we weren’t being that creative. And I LOVE Oldboy. That scene where he eats the octopus is one of the most intense things I’ve ever seen. When I was at art school, one of the last classes I took was video art, just the history of it, as a requirement. And I found myself to be so interested in it, I was like “Wow! Some of these things, they’re not supposed to make sense, they don’t have a plot, they’re actually just visuals.” But they were so interesting to watch.

TW: Is it true you’re going to write some horror books for Scholastic?

GW: It was a really amazing opportunity that came up. I’m actually really interested in young adult stuff, because I find that to be a pretty crazy playground right now. You find a lot of authors like Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker going to that form, so in a weird way its limitations give you more freedom, because if you’re writing for young adults, you can push the boundaries more. But it also keeps you from doing the things you would normally do in an adult book. And I think that’s what’s great about young adult – the stuff that crosses over.

TW: And one thing you’ve got to admit – all the stimulants and depressants in the world can’t equal the wonder of real life.

GW: Yeah. And not only is [real life] ugly and beautiful at the same time – because anything needs to be both ugly and beautiful – but it’s just so amazing, and there are so many opportunities there to do so many crazy things if you’re just not f**ked up. And the point the band’s at now, creatively, especially on Black Parade? We pushed it so far with that record that we can do all kinds of crazy things now. And that’s what’s really exciting.

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