Pink is the new black

ROCK STAR GERARD WAY MAKES HIS DEBUT AS A COMIC BOOK AUTHOR

First, the bad news: Gerard Way, frontman for the platinum-selling band My Chemical Romance, is, contrary to rumor, not moving to Portland.

Not yet, anyway.

"It's still an option," says Way, calling from his home base of New Jersey. "But me and my wife decided to stay here for now."

Now, the good news: Way's love of comics led the musician to make his debut as a comic book author, for Portland's Dark Horse Comics. Way, the voice behind such hit albums of intense, dramatic pop as "The Black Parade" and "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge," came up with the idea for "The Umbrella Academy," a comic series about a team of gifted, dysfunctional heroes trained to save the world. And, wouldn't you know it, the world needs saving pretty much right off the bat. The saga of this troubled team swinging into action begins with the first issue in the series, "The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite #1." The comic hits stores today.

Way talked about the idea for the series and his background as a comics fan in a telephone interview. Comments have been edited for space and clarity.

With My Chemical Romance, you're performing in arenas around the world. You're already expressing yourself. Why turn to comics?

I guess because it's two different things. I get to use two different parts of my brain. Writing a great song -- there's nothing that beats that feeling. But with music, once you've written it and put it down, for me as an artist, I'm kind of done with it. Whereas with a comic, I think you're building something. There's nothing more rewarding than holding a physical object that came out of your head.

Are you worried that comics aficionados may think this is a vanity project that trades on your fame as a musician?

Comics were actually my first gig. I remember when I was about 12 and went to the corner store in my neighborhood, a really dingy store. And I saw an issue of "X-Men," and on the cover was Wolverine being crucified on a big wooden X. It was the most obscene, striking thing I'd ever seen. It blew me away, and I was hooked on "X-Men" right away. I ended up working at comic shops when I was 15 or 16, and I learned about the more cerebral stuff, "Watchmen," "The Dark Knight" and "Doom Patrol."

And you majored in cartooning and illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York City as well as doing an internship at DC Comics. Did that make you more secure about being taken seriously in comics?

I felt really secure. Don't get me wrong. I realize that being in a band helped me get over a lot of hurdles in doing this. And there's going to be a lot of skepticism. But in fact, I happened to be a dude who made comics, and happened to end up in a band. Comics was my first craft, and my first talent. Then I wound up in a band that went somewhere.

That "X-Men" influence seems to be evident in "The Umbrella Academy," with its misfit band of heroes. Did you intend that?

One of the reviews described "Umbrella Academy" as almost an adult version of "X-Men." I thought about doing this as a superhero book but bizarre, and almost cerebral. The heroes don't fight villains so much as fight concepts and ideas.

Why did you bring the idea to Dark Horse?

They're my favorite comic book company, because of their fearlessness over the years. As a kid, they hooked me on the "Alien" comics, because I loved all the "Alien" movies. So when they continued that story in the comics, in a very brutal way, I thought, "This isn't the kind of licensed book I'm familiar with. I'm used to crummy movie knockoffs." And then "The Mask" came along, and "Concrete" and "Hellboy." They were constantly producing stuff that was grown up and yet still had chaos in it.

Working with Dark Horse brought you to Portland on a regular basis. What do you think of the city?

I love it. It's one of the places I think would be perfect for me. It's very low-key, very artistic, very quirky, it has a lot of personality. I think I'll stay where I am for a year, and then we could go anywhere that we want. So maybe I'll keep checking Portland out.

By Scott Allie

Gerard Way is a busy man, currently on tour with the east coast rock band, My Chemical Romance, which he has fronted since its 2001 inception. SBC wanted to interview the writer/musician/School of Visual Arts graduate (and former DC Comics intern) regarding the September launch of The Umbrella Academy, his Dark Horse comic book series with artist Gabriel Bá. Dark Horse, respecting the busy schedule of their storyteller (and the fact an interview was not feasible at present), did SBC a favor and granted SBC access to an exclusive interview that Dark Horse editor Scott Allie did with Way. Before launching into the interview, here’s a bit of info on The Umbrella Academy: “Once, the Umbrella Academy was unstoppable. Under the tutelage of their guardian and mentor, Dr. Reginald Hargreeves, its members spent their childhoods fighting evil and honing their extraordinary gifts.

Until something went terribly wrong.

Now, nine years later, the estranged members of the Umbrella Academy are reunited by the death of the only parent they've ever known and the rise of a new and terrible threat. Will they be able to overcome their history for long enough to save the world-one more time?”

SBC wishes to thank Way and Allie for the interview, as well as Dark Horse’s Publicity Coordinator, Jacquelene Cohen. On the front end of this process, Gemma Milroy lit a fire under SBC's Tim O’Shea and deserves our thanks as well.

Scott Allie (Allie): Have you kept up on comics while you've been on the road for The Black Parade?

Gerard Way (Way): Not as much as I'd like. I go through phases where I buy a few trades—they get heavy—and I'll read them on the bus. It is nearly impossible to keep up with monthly books, as they are hard to track down and they get destroyed pretty easily.

Allie: Where are the best comics shops in Europe?

Way: The Forbidden Planet's in the UK...I always seek them out when I'm over there. Lots of fun and you can spend hours there.

Allie: So far for titles of stories or issues, we have 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 your songs and records tend to be long and cumbersome too. What do you try to do with titles?

Way: 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 nü-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.

Allie: You've struck up a friendship with one of your biggest influences, Grant Morrison—has he given you any advice on the writing?

Way: Grant has been amazing. The relationship that he, his wife, and I have is very inspiring. It was like finding kindred spirits thousands of miles away and connecting with them. I feel at times like their kid brother. Grant's advice to me has always been simple: just be myself. He had convinced me that I had the ability as a storyteller to connect with people already, said I had already been doing it for years. So just keep doing what I was doing. Also to be fearless, which is what I think of when I think of his work. He also constantly reminds me that I am on this great adventure because of my work and my lifestyle, and to never forget that. He is always pushing me to get the most out of it. I have heard many writers say that writing is like working a muscle—you have to use your muscle every day. Grant's said this to me, and he's correct.

Allie: Readers know The Umbrella Academy is a team book, and they've met all the members of the team now, between online previews and Free Comic Book Day, but what about they haven't seen a major villain emerge.

Way: The villain in the first series is very interesting, very different than an average super villain in that he doesn't have any super powers, or an army of robots, or much of a costume, for that matter. He's someone that's very smart, very passionate ... like someone that found a small loophole in science and he's exploiting it. I like the idea of a team of extraordinary individuals fighting unconventional things, like ideas, theories, or physical structures instead of costumed super villains. This is something I hope to implement more in the future, though The Umbrella Academy will have its fair share of costumed lunatics.

Allie: Do you feel like certain characters are starting to stand out, from what was always intended to be an ensemble cast?

Way: It's an ensemble cast in that I feel the characters are very unique ... either the first of their kind or a strange and new interpretation of an existing archetype. I really tried to think up powers that were very distinct, like The Rumor. I'm very happy with her specifically as far as her powers go ... though it makes her at times a pest to write.

Allie: How about that—can you explain her power?

Way: She has the ability to tell a lie—and it must be a lie—and it comes true. Now. for the most part these are little white lies, or lies that won't outright harm someone. Like she can't say, "I heard a rumor you died of a stroke," and the villain dies of a stroke. She has to say something like, "I heard a rumor that the Steinway piano they're moving on the fire escape is too heavy for the structure ... there's a good chance it'll fall"—and then for some crazy reason, there's a piano, on the fire escape, with movers and the works, and it falls.

Allie: How do you find writing a female character?

Way: Very refreshing actually. I would say she talks the most like a normal person, because she's surrounded by these boys playing cowboys and Indians, yet she has no desire to play anymore. She's the one character where I write a line of dialogue and I don't have to say to myself, "Is this too ridiculous?" I think she says mostly what I would say in some of these situations, responds like a normal person. She's also someone who has had a lot of personal failures in her life, and I find her very sympathetic for that reason.

Allie: Do you see her ever becoming romantically linked to one of the male characters? Or fought over by them?

Way: I can't imagine anyone fighting over her, because there's so much baggage between the characters, that if any of them eventually find they love each other, that will be a rarity unto itself. Though I can see there being some sort of romantic involvement or strong feelings between her and at least one of the other characters. And since they're adopted, it isn't exactly illegal.

Allie: Is she sort of the weak link, the little sister to the others, like Kitty Pryde?

Way: I think she's definitely able to hold her own because of her power. Weak links or "squishy" characters should be reserved for children and monkeys. All of the characters, even the ones that don't have the most outstanding powers, are very resourceful—they're survivors.

More important than the costumes and the powers are the personalities. These are a group of individuals that really bring out the worst in each other ... I think their goal is to eventually bring out the best in each other. As far as specific characters go, Spaceboy is basically my anchor ... He's the one character that will always behave like I want him to. But even more than him, I noticed the Kraken has begun to write himself ... he is such a strong personality that scenes involving him usually go a certain way, and it's never in anyone else's favor. I personally wouldn't want to be in the same room as him, but I have a feeling he will be a favorite. I also really love a character that has no real tremendous power that benefits the team, but he's great with a knife. The more I write the book the more I grow attached to all of the characters, though, and I find they always surprise me.

Celebrities dipping their names into comics is nothing new—we’ve all seen the back issues adorned with the authorized likenesses of Kiss, the Undertaker, Mr. T, even Pat Boone. But My Chemical Romance’s lead singer Gerard Way hopes to blow them all out of the water with his Dark Horse title The Umbrella Academy. The former DC Comics intern is formally trained in the sequential arts and has been working on the project in the free time he’s had on tour, even snapping photos for cover ideas with his camera phone. We caught up with the rocker for a short chat about the series, then turned to his editor Scott Allie for some thoughts about what it’s like working with a megastar’s schedule, how the idea got its legs, and why they’re both confident that this isn’t just another celebrity product placement.

WIZARD: Gerard, how was the writing experience for you? WAY: When I started writing comic scripts 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. 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. 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. Was it difficult to make time for Academy in your touring schedule? WAY: Writing the book while on the road 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 downtime 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! Scott, what’s the premise of Umbrella Academy? ALLIE: Basically you’ve got this team of superpowered kids that this one guy brings together by adopting them all and raising them on his own, but he’s a really, really terrible father and it really causes the kids to become horribly maladjusted. They eventually split up and at the point where the story properly starts, the father figure has died and now they all come back together for his funeral and because they’re all back together for his funeral, some of their old enemies take note that the Umbrella Academy has reunited. Really all they’re there for is a funeral, but the supervillains see it as the reuniting of the team, so they start lashing out, which forces the team to try to work together again after all these years. But ultimately what’s going on is another supervillain who remains pretty much silent throughout is hatching a plot to end the world and the team doesn’t even know about it through much of the series and they slowly catch wind of it. The thing that I really love about it is that the supervillain that has this terrible plot is going directly after one member of the team and playing on that character’s weaknesses in a really harsh way and a really effective way. In doing that, it causes a divide within the team so that in a way, the conflict isn’t really between the supervillain and the heroes but it’s really just between these heroes and all of the trouble that ultimately the story culminates in, all that trouble really comes from the individuals involved and they have to kind of save the world from each other in a way. So this takes place far after the Free Comic Book Day story, then. ALLIE: Yeah, basically any stories that we’ve done or had out there so far would be taking place before issue #1. About half of issue #1 is flashback, it’s like their first mission they had to fight the Eiffel Tower and that’s the first half of issue #1. Then we cut to the present, which is after the death of Reginald Hardgreaves. How did this project first come together? ALLIE: Gerard sent us a pitch; basically, he put together a real professional, standard pitch package with an outline of story, character bios, a bunch of artwork by him. He sent that to us and he sent that to our publisher, Mike Richardson, and Mike’s assistant was a big My Chem fan, and pitches generally, to Mike, don’t get his attention right away, so Eric brought it to me and said, “You gotta look at this, you gotta read this,” and I didn’t at first, because I didn’t know My Chem or anything, so I didn’t really pay attention to it, and Eric kept drumming on me about it. And finally I read it, and I loved it, and I wanted to ask some people, “What’s the deal with this band? I’ve never heard of this band.” And they said, “It’s a really big band, it’s really popular, and the guy in the band is really into comics.” And I didn’t know that, so I read the pitch and I really liked it. It reminded me a little bit of The Amazing Screw-On Head by Mignola, that was very specifically the thing that hooked me about it, was that it seemed like a wild and original as that. I like the general idea of superhero comics, but I just generally don’t seem to enjoy them too much, and this seemed like a take on superhero comics that I’d actually enjoy because of how weird it was, how off-center, and real classic in its approach but still real crazy, that got me real jazzed about it. It was confirmed by other people in the company that the fact that it’s My Chem will make it pretty popular, just on that basis, and I got hold of Gerard and we starting shooting the breeze about the book, and I liked what he had to say and he liked what I had to say, so we started looking for artists, and I just set up a deal. A little while ago when we started talking about potential artists, around that time, James Jean did something for him, did a picture of him for his band, and the two of them got in touch, and Gerard said, “Hey, we should get James Jean to do the covers for Umbrella Academy ,” and I said, “Yeah, my God, that’d be amazing, we should definitely do that.” James was into it, and then we kept going through ideas for art until I showed a bunch of Gabriel’s stuff and he loved it, we thought about it, and we said, yeah, Gabriel’s really the guy, so that’s how it came together. What made you select Gabriel? ALLIE: Partly, I think that Gabriel is not completely dissimilar to Gerard’s own art style. Gerard’s art style, when he’s really cooking, is real graphic, and flat in the way that Mignola’s stuff is flat, or Ryan Soot can be flat, or Gabriel. It’s real graphic, and it’s not rounded, like a lot of superhero stuff. The two most obvious things, that we didn’t want a standard superhero artist, we wanted somebody with what we referred to as a “European feel.” We wanted that world of Umbrella Academy to have that European feel, and by that I mean, not American. There’s a couple of books I’ve worked on where, even though it was so much an American story, it felt like you really wanted to location to feel like they’re sort of someplace else. Gabriel’s from Brazil, but his stuff strikes me as extremely European, in a way I would understand European: There’s a real sense of time to it, and this great atmosphere, and his storytelling is super-clear, and those things really immediately appealed. He has a real distinctive, precise style, all of his characters really come out and jump out at you, the visuals, and that’s a really important thing because we knew that we would be taking Gerard’s character designs and modifying them for the artist, and it also kind of felt like there was this wild contrast between James and Gabriel, that their styles are so different, that that would just sort of make the book feel like a bigger thing, you know? Like, say, if we had Mignola doing covers on Umbrella Academy and Gabriel doing insides, it would kind of feel like these guys were just the same side of the same coin, but with [interiors artist] Bá and [covers artist] James Jean, it kind of shows you radically different interpretations of the same character and that’s really appealing to me, too. Do you happen to know why he chose Dark Horse to pitch to? ALLIE: Part of it was that he was really into Hellboy and Sin City and he felt that the publishing model we created around Hellboy and Sin City and books like that of doing a miniseries and maybe a one-shot, you do a two-issue thing and then a couple of short stories. You approach the series as this ongoing thing, but it comes out when and how you want it to in the way that we do that with Hellboy, the way we used to do it with Sin City, that made a lot of sense to him. I know that was something that appealed to him a lot and also, just the sort of weird take that we have on [things]. If you look at Dark Horse’s history, we’ve never really been a superhero publisher primarily, but from the beginning, we’ve always published these characters who were kind real off-center versions of superheroes like Concrete and the Flaming Carrot who were a couple of our earliest hits. Those guys definitely aren’t superheroes but they clearly come from a world of superheroes. I mean, they come from a publishing world that’s rooted in superheroes and so our real nontraditional approach to superheroes made him feel like this is sort of home. But it was also that Hellboy was a big inspiration for him and a couple other books where he felt like [he could] put Umbrella Academy next to Hellboy, next to The Goon, and that’s sort of where it belongs. It’s like if those are the horror adventure versions of a Dark Horse book, Umbrella Academy can finally be like the superhero equivalent of that.

Do you know if any big rock stars have ever taken on creative duties for a comic before? What makes Gerard Way different? ALLIE: Well yeah, sort of, Rob Zombie written some comics, Gene Simmons has had Kiss comics, Danzig did comics… I don’t know if Danzig ever wrote any of his comics, maybe he did. I know Rob Zombie wrote or co-wrote various things. The thing that’s different about Gerard—and I’m generally kind of cynical about celebrities who use their celebrity to kind of explore every art form; if all they’re really doing is looking for an excuse to get their name out there more then that’s kind of gross—but with Gerard, he went to the School of Visual Arts in New York City and studied comics. He interned at DC and all he really wanted to do was comics. That’s really what he wanted. It was his back luck that he didn’t make that happen when he wanted to and that led to My Chemical Romance forming, so the guy who set out to be a cartoonist gave it up to do a much more rewarding, in some ways, job with the band. He’s sort of come back to comics rather than just saying, “Oh, I’m bored, what am I going to do with my ideas.” He’s not a guy who said, “I really want to make an Umbrella Academy movie, maybe we should make a comic first and then try to sell the rights.” He really just wanted to make a comic and this was the comic he wanted to make. He’s shown me a lot of his sketchbooks and these characters have been developing in real organic ways for a long time. Recently we were going through each other’s sketchbooks and at one point Umbrella Academy is unrecognizable. I think two of the characters who are currently in the Umbrella Academy were in that original version and all these characters have just been traded out and abandoned and swapped. It evolved over a few years into this team but he has tons of characters that are connected to this thing and he just chose the ones he thought were the best to focus on. It’s not something that he just pitched cynically, it’s not something he needed to get somebody else to do for him. Schedule-wise, yeah he can’t draw it, but a lot of dilettante celebrities who come in and want to do comics, they don’t even have the chops to write it on their own. But Gerard really comes from comics. He’s really kind of all about that. So it’s cool to see him doing this thing that he’s set out to do. What has the reactions to the previews been so far? ALLIE: Mostly what we get is, “I was real skeptical because it was another rock star trying to do comics, but this guy looks like he’s the real deal.” Really, the truth of it is that my reaction to it is sort of the overwhelming reaction I’ve been getting. When we first posted some Umbrella stuff online, there were some people who were more snarky about it, who were just quicker to just insult Gerard for being a celebrity slumming in comics. But once the material started getting out there, like the Free Comic Book Day thing, or the story on MySpace that recently went up, or some black-and-white previews we sent out recently, the reaction that I get overwhelmingly is—I mean, the word “skeptical” is used with frightening frequency, but they say they were skeptical at first, but it really looks like this guy knows what he’s doing. Not it’s just a question of “Can this team continue to deliver?” and that’s the question that we want to answer. How much of the project has been completed? ALLIE: Well, right now he’s almost done with the script for issue #3, and Bá is done with the art for #2 and James has four covers in the can. So that’s where we’re at right now. Is it tough for him to balance his schedules? ALLIE: Yeah, it’s downright impossible. It’s been really difficult, scheduling-wise. The touring schedule is real demanding and when we went into this we talked about that and he’s like, “No man, it’s cool because being on the road, you’re bored half the time. You’re just sitting in your hotel room or you’re just sitting in your bus.” But that was him remembering touring off [his last album]. Black Parade really knocked that band into a kind of new level of fame and popularity and it brought with it this whole new level of demand. So he’s a hell of a lot busier on this tour than he has been on other tours and it’s made it really, really hard to keep up with the book. He’s great because he’s in touch with us all the time, he’s never far away, he never slacks in that regard, but finding time to write can be a real strain. With the first issue a month away, is the book on track to still come out monthly? ALLIE: Yeah, it’s tight but he’s keeping up with his deadlines. It’s just a little bit of a nail-biter, but yeah he’s keeping up. Do you ever foresee a monthly ongoing Umbrella Academy? ALLIE: Well, I think he feels kind of the same way I feel, that [mini-series are] a natural way to tell stories. Like “I have this story to tell where this happens and it’s called ‘Apocalypse Suite,’ here’s what needs to happen, it’s going to take six issues to do.” Maybe the next story where they fight this one super-villain from their past, that’s only an issue so we just do it as a one-shot. It’s like Hellboy, the deal there is just that we do whatever story Mike wants, and it’s only as long as it needs to be. It shifts and it changes and if he has a story that’s only 13 pages… well, find a place for a 13-page story. You don’t have to take a 13-page story and pad it out to be 24 and then have another one just like it to show up the next month. That’s the real advantage here, that you do take a break and recharge. You take a story that builds from beginning to end the way a novel does or the way a movie does. You don’t write it with the knowledge that there just needs to be something else on the stands next month. That’s a real different way of approaching comics, the idea of that relentless monthly schedule. It doesn’t give you time to re-group, it doesn’t give you time to pace something out, you just kind of have to be there every month. Given his other career, that would make it kind of impossible to keep up with. But even just creatively I think there’s huge advantages to saying, “This year we’re just going to do one three-issue story, that’s all you’re getting this year.” That’s the story we want to tell. So you see more Umbrella Academy stories coming in the future after this first miniseries? ALLIE: Oh yeah, we’ve got four major miniseries blocked out right now. From experience on Hellboy and other stuff, I would imagine that maybe those four are not the first four that you get, like we might do the first two and then hey, lets just do something goofy and then something more simple and straight-to-the-point, get away from the big over-arching continuity a bit, but we’ve got four pretty big stories that we know we want to get out and all that means is that we’re not going to run out of stuff any time soon. The Free Comic Book Day story kind of jumped right in, is the miniseries going to spend a little more time introducing and developing the characters? ALLIE: Yeah, it’s totally different. With Free Comic Book Day, we just said, “Okay, here’s 12 pages, how much can we do in 12 pages?” and just have a real romp with it. With the first issue, there’s basically a five-page prologue that’s just there to give you the backstory that really just lays it out slowly and tells you how this all came to be. Then you see an adventure of the Umbrella Academy when they were little kids. It introduces the whole team, but it only really makes you try to take in information about two of them plus the dad. One of those characters is Spaceboy who is sort of the closest thing to a main character in Umbrella Academy. You focus on him a little bit in the kiddie story in issue #1 and then you get a few pages with him alone later in issue #1. On the last page of issue #1, we introduce two more characters. So most of the adult version of the team really isn’t even introduced in issue #1, we’re really trying to take our time with that and introduce them in ways that you can kind of take them in rather than just suddenly, “Here’s seven characters!” With the Free Comic Book Day story we very much knew that you wouldn’t really come out of that story with a solid understanding of who each individual was. It’s almost like we liked the idea of sort of overwhelming the reader like that in that story, but with a six-issue series you really want to get the reader and knock them for a loop on page one. Then the DHP story that we just did, we very deliberately focused entirely on just one character because basically where we were when Gerard wrote the DHP story, he was just working on writing issue #2 and we had only introduced a couple of the characters and Kraken, who’s one of the real interesting and most significant members of the team, he was about to appear on panel for the first time in issue #2 and we realized we hadn’t developed him through conversation the way we developed some of the other characters, so it’s like, “Well let’s do an eight-page story with him so you really feel like you know him.” So Gerard wrote this eight-pager that really made us dig the Kraken as an individual character. So that has sort of made him that much more interesting to us on the pages of issues #2 and #3 so far.

I remember the FCBD issue had these rather quirky, funny intros on the inside cover, was Gerard involved with those? ALLIE: Yeah, he wrote those character bios for the Free Comic Book Day thing. He also wrote little descriptions to Bá saying, “Draw a little picture with Space with this picture in the background, draw a little picture of the Horror, draw a little picture of a guy eating sushi,” so yeah, he did all that stuff. As far as covers go, sometimes he’ll give a cover sketch and James will run with it or he’ll just make a suggestion to James like, “Here’s what the story is about, here’s what I think you should put on the cover.” Then James runs with it. Having James involved, we give him as much room as we can and a lot of the time wild ideas that he has on the cover wind up getting featured back in the story somehow. Like his cover for #4, that cover is crazy. That cover is not at all what Gerard had suggested to him. James was kicking around a couple ideas and then he just painted the one that you see and sent it to us and we were like, “Holy sh--, we are the luckiest guys in comics. This is f---ing crazy. Now we gotta see exactly how to make that work back into the comic.” James came up with something that just blew our minds and that’ll happen with a guy like that. So it started out with Gerard giving him a real specific idea of what he thought the cover should be and James just ran with it. So yeah, Gerard’s really involved with all this and actually for the cover for #5, Gerard just sent me a little digital picture of himself on his camera phone. He was on the tour bus and he went back into the tour bus bathroom and posed for this picture with the facial expression that he wanted one of the characters to have on the cover of #5. So there’s that kind of level of collaboration going on, it’ll be funny when we actually see the cover for #5. I’ll be curious to see how much this character winds up resembling Gerard, given the basis of the photo. Could you explain what the actual cover was compared to what it turned out to be? ALLIE: Gerard’s idea had more going on in it, more characters. There’s a villain character, but the focus is this one particular character who goes through a bit of transformation in this issue. I think he may have actually done a sketch for it at one point and then James came back to us and said that the idea sort of made him think of this particular altered photograph by Man Ray of a woman with F-holes on a violin sort of painted on to her back, and we’re like, “Okay, that sounds cool.” But then what he sent us had nothing to do with it. There are F-holes on the female form on the cover, but what he did was completely nuts. Really, really wild and not the image of the character that we had really imagined, but now it’s completely affected the whole way that we’re imagining the character and because of the solicitation cycle in comics you’ve got to have the covers done often before the script is even done, so we have that opportunity where James’ covers come in before the thing’s even written so you do have time to really let it affect what happens in the story. In the future, do you expect more projects to come out of Gerard? ALLIE: Yeah, there’s a couple things we’re cooking but right now we’ve really got to get Umbrella Academy together and really give this the best start and be ready to roll right into the second series as soon as we possibly can. But there’s some other [ideas]. We’ve talked about doing a horror book, we’ve talked about doing, there’s another sort of apocalyptic book that we’ve talked about tackling, that I just hope to God that we can pull it together. But yeah, there’s a few things that we want to do, we’ve talked about a few books but for now Umbrella Academy is such a huge undertaking because we don’t want to just be doing a six-issue series where every issue that we work on here, the conversation’s all about what’s going to be happening 15 issues down the road, so when you’re thinking about the book in those terms, it can be pretty all-encompassing. Adding something else on top of that right now would be crazy even if he didn’t have three tours between now and the end of the year.