Member Login
Advertisement
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
ACED Info
| About Us |
| Advertise with Us |
| Contact Us |
| Privacy Policy |
| Gerard Way's Umbrella Academy |
|
|
| Interviews - Author | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Jenna Bensoussan | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 18 September 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Umbrella Academy centers around a group of super-powered children who are adopted by a space alien. He makes for a very poor father, leading the kids on a path to hating each other and him. When the alien dies, the kids reunite after years of estrangement, attracting the attention of some old foes—possibly bringing on the apocalypse. {mosgoogle right}Gerard has been cooking up a few stories over the last three years while touring about, using his love of weird superheroes, The Prisoner TV Show, The Royal Tennebaums and his old Doom Patrol favorite to help fuel the comic-writing fire. His sketches for the series will come out in the collection next year, with his drawing of the first cover featured now. Just writing the storyline is a challenge, considering his lack of time due to all the other stuff he has going on with the band, but he still manages to keep up. His favorite character right now is Spaceboy, but that could change at any time as character favorites, and those with death wishes, change often, depending on their writability.
Last year Gerard hadn't written any of the scripts yet. Now, between the first couple issues and some short stories, he's written over seventy pages of The Umbrella Academy. "I didn't get much time to get my feet wet so I ended up diving right into the deep end so to speak ... and there was a hot minute where I felt like I was just trying to stay afloat," reflects Way. "Luckily, my editor threw me a life preserver pretty quickly—and, yes, I realize I just used maybe one too many swimming pool metaphors, but that's the best way to describe the situation. After the Free Comic Book Day story, and into the first part of series one, I found it much easier, started to work the muscle, find the right groove, and got the confidence to take the risks I wanted to take, and simply started telling the story I had been writing in my head for three years, and maybe most of my life," he explains. Gerard continues, "There's no other way to do it ... You can talk about what you want to do to death, but it boils down to sitting down and just doing it. I guess I really needed to get over the fact that I wanted the comic to be so perfect, that initially when I would sit down to write it I would be intimidated by the possibility that it wasn't going to be ... Well, into the third issue now, I can clearly say that it's much more than I ever hoped it would be. I feel like I'm part of something special, and that everyone on the team feels the same way. It feels like uncharted territory in comics." Gerard Way is a dynamic guy, both rocker and author, but how do these roles compare?
"That's an interesting question," says Way. "The two are very different things, but there is some relativity. Being in a band, making music, specifically, is about interpretation and collaboration. Very often it involves bringing a piece of music to your bandmates and having them interpret it. When you have great players and people that share a vision, the result is the creation of something great. In this way, working on the comic is very similar, especially if you have great players, so to speak, like The Umbrella Academy has. I always trust the team's interpretation of the vision." Art has a lot to do with how a comic is interpreted, and Umbrella Academy has some terrific talent behind it. James Jean's lush, soft, warm paintings are a lot different from Gabriel Bá's stark, angular drawings. Bringing them together shows there's a range to what these characters can be–Way had his reasons for bringing them together though.
"I knew that James Jean was my favorite cover artist, and I knew that when James does a cover it enhances the reality or tangibility of the characters, while at the same time adding a sense of vulnerability and strangeness. It turns the pamphlet into an art piece. Finding Gabriel took a much longer time because I needed to find someone that was just as artistic as James, but in a different way. I needed a certain energy, a certain honesty, and someone whose work reflected something timeless, like you couldn't place where the comic was made, where the artist comes from," says Way. "I think the two artists together create a complete thought, whereas sometimes you will find a comic where the editors just tried to find someone that was similar to the cover artist, and it ends up being an incomplete thought or "more of the same." You need two artists that complement each other ... and I feel that we have that."
Meeting the artist James Jean actually came about through an article in Spin Magazine. "This is an interesting story," says Gerard, "I was living in Brooklyn at the time, in an apartment when the Spin magazine's "Annual Reader's Poll" issue had hit the stands, and we had swept most of the awards, including Favorite Band, I believe." "For the issue, Spin had commissioned James to do a piece of Billy Joe Armstrong, Gwen Stefani, and myself as characters from Dungeons and Dragons, reflecting some of my answers in an interview Spin had conducted with me. I'm sure Spin had no idea that James was my favorite illustrator/cover artist, but I was extremely honored by the piece... so much that I e-mailed James, knowing that I was about to head over to Los Angeles for an extended amount of time to start recording The Black Parade." "We made plans to meet up at his house in Santa Monica, and I asked if he would be interested in working on The Umbrella Academy. I loved the first piece he did (the cover to issue two) so much that I asked him to be the illustrator for The Black Parade," Way recounts.
Writing while on the road can be tricky, Gerard explains, " [It was] a challenge at first, and at times still a struggle. It really boils down to discipline, though, as you can have all the time in the world, but if you aren't disciplined you'll spend your down-time drinking too much coffee in cafes and walking around looking at statues all day, which is all very helpful, but sucks up your time." "The biggest battle was becoming exhausted, physically and mentally, from being on the road. It's tough to pull yourself out of bed on an off-day when you have been run ragged, but I get as much sleep as I can these days, go to bed early and wake up early, in order to get as much done as I can on the comic. I've turned into a responsible adult because of the comic. Ha!" Titles for the comic issues are padded with many descriptive words: The Day the Eiffel Tower Went Berserk, We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals, and But the Past Ain't Through with You. Titles for Way's songs and records tend to be long and cumbersome too. He explains his reasoning behind this, "I try to create titles that almost juxtapose the situation they are in. I was always a big proponent for long song titles, even before they became a thing. I think it was because I was so frustrated with the grunge and nu-metal eras ... one-word song titles that had nothing to do with the song." "I decided to make the song and story titles exactly what they are about, almost to the point of humor. I find this works for comics as well. I love comic stories that sound like rock albums. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison both do this, sometimes even titling stories after songs or lines from songs themselves. I find it very effective ... basically making something what it's not."
The subtitle of the first miniseries is Apocalypse Suite—one wonders if there will be a general music theme throughout the comic. "Music will be the theme for the first series, though it wasn't done that way intentionally. I just thought it made for an interesting opponent or challenge. A friend of mine, Jon Rivera, who does a comic called Heartbreak, once told me the factual story of a conductor with a particularly crazy idea. It inspired me to adapt that idea into a super-hero comic, though I must say that music is very connected to one of the characters, very specifically," he explains.
Gerard's songs reflect modern times in a very specific way. The Umbrella Academy series has its own things to say. "I believe I'm saying something with series one. I'm still distilling what that is in my head, but I think every work of metaphor and fantasy is like that. It's underneath all this dust, we just have to brush it off. More often than not, it's at the end of a project where you fully understand what you've said with the piece." "The Black Parade was like that, and I imagine The Apocalypse Suite being the same way. I'm having fun with post-modern superheroes, but I believe underneath all of the masks and capes I'm telling the story of a family, who has a ton of skeletons in its closet, resentments, issues, and all sorts of other nasty things. Basically like every family," says Way.
Gerard has encouraged fans to read comics for a long time. He says, "My desire to turn MCR fans into comic-book fans has always been an interest in showing them where it all comes from, so to speak. Granted, there are a ton of other influences besides comics, but I feel like comics are the place that first got my imagination going. It was the first place that made me feel like anything was possible." "I think that is something they can surely find in this book: crazy ideas, fantastic notions, the endless possibility, something greater than oneself ... and that pure chaos that embodies some of the early work in comics. The days of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee ... where they were just making it up as they went along, throwing crazy ideas at people." Crazy ideas and weird super heroes aside, Gerard Way certainly is a master of musical talent and imagination, and Umbrella Academy is no exception.          
3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved." |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
My Chemical Romance's Gerard Way has been a comic fan for as long as he can remember. Doom Patrol was a favorite when he was a teenager, inspiring his first ambition in life—to be a comic book author. Who'd have ever thought he'd become a rock star instead! With the rock world all but conquered, there was one thing left for him to do—create his very own comic adventure!
xoxoxoxoxxo
actually, gerard (and mcr) is now the reason why im into comics now,but gerard is 3/4 the reason why i now want to be a cartoonist like him 
