Gerard Way Reveals Original Idea For 'Fabulous Killjoys' Comic

My Chemical Romance's fourth album, Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys, may have been tied to frontman Gerard Way's Fabulous Killjoys comic series, but that wasn't always the intention.

In a new interview on the Cartoonist Kayfabe show, Way explained how he was reluctant to blend his music and comic book writing but was so enthralled in the Killjoy world that the two naturally blended.

“The Killjoys project is an interesting thing, because it really evolved and grew into this other thing," Way explained. "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."

“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 continued. “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.”

Before the album took shape, the comic's concept was quite different. “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," he said. "That’s how Killjoys really started, and that’s something that I think we’ll revisit one day.”

Watch the full interview below.

Photo: Getty Images