Gerard Way Says Killjoys Comic Concept Started Out Very Different

Gerard Way has revealed how the storyline to My Chemical Romance's fourth album Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys ended up shaping his Killjoys comic that had originally inspired it.

In a lengthy, comic-based interview on the Cartoonist Kayfabe show, the frontman tells Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg that he was actually reluctant at first to tie in his comic work with the New Jersey emo heroes' full-length, but once he did, the storyline ended up changing rather a lot from its initial concept.

“The comic [Killjoys] was really different back then,” he remembers. “The Killjoys project is an interesting thing, because it really evolved and grew into this other thing. It was the thing I was most obsessed with, creatively, so it bled into the music. And then it became a concept album and a comic. And I was hesitant to marry the two things because I felt like I had done such a good job of separating the two things.

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“But this one was just so a part of my brain that I wanted to make this concept album that connected with the comic,” he continues. “But because of that, I had changed some things about it for the sake of being part of MCR, and I made things a little more dystopian, a little more like a colourful punk-rock post-Mad Max thing. There was an evil corporation, because a lot of the album Killjoys is like art vs. commerce so I wanted to show that: these free and colourful people vs. like the stark white, sterile kinda corporate society.”

“So the story changed a lot and it really started out about a bunch of teenagers that could bend reality by tapping into their trauma. That’s how Killjoys really started, and that’s something that I think we’ll revisit one day.”

Gerard previously stated that Danger Days “helped refine” the idea for Killjoys, with the comic book arriving three years after the album.

Watch Gerard's full interview below where he goes deep into his background in comics:

Quiz: How well do you know My Chemical Romance’s lyrics?