July
7 Way draws on comics, films, music for 'Umbrella' (Part 2)

After going to New York’s School of Visual Arts, Way tried to get work as a comics artist only to find something about it wasn’t working. “I was kind of trying to fake it to get a paycheck, draw superheroes,” he says. “That stuff didn’t work for me. The drawing was there, people loved it, but there was something about it that didn’t work commercially.”
After 9/11, Way decided to seize the moment and make a difference, forming My Chemical Romance and starting down the road to music stardom. But comics always called to Way. “I missed the artform, so I knew I had to come back to it and prove to myself, not anybody else, that I could write it and I could do it,” he says.
Having succeeded in completing the first "Umbrella Academy" series, Way says he has an overall plan for the book. He knows where it ends, but things are loose enough for him to have fun filling in the blanks and changing things up along the way.
“I’d love this comic to change from series to series,” he says. “It’s political in series two, and that’s new for me. This comic never was supposed to be political.”
Being in a popular band gives Way and "The Umbrella Academy" a platform that most comics creators don’t have. Way says it’s been fun to get good reactions from both manga-obsessed kids who say it’s the first American comic they’ve read and middle-age comics fans in Superman T-shirts with families.
“My favorite is when I get the people that are basically from my generation, who read X-Men as a kid and say, ‘This is like "X-Men" for me now in my life,’” he says. That position most closely parallels Way’s current relationship with superhero comics. “I’m writing the book for myself. I’m a guy in his 30s who loved Chris Claremont’s 'X-Men' but I don’t have a love for modern superhero comics,” he says.
While there has been interest in the movie rights for "The Umbrella Academy," Way says it was always meant to be a comicbook first.
“It was absolutely not written in any way intending to be made into a film, but it was structured in a way, in six issues, very concise, to make that series very tight,” he says. “I wanted it to play out almost like a film in comics, but not totally, because I like when people use comics as comics and not as movies. I think a comic is a comic. It is what it is, you don’t try to make it something else.”
With Hollywood obsessed with comics, Way says he sees way too many comics creators making the mistake of pandering to studios and development execs.
“That was disheartening about going to Comic-Con, was seeing people having a booth with nothing. They’re trying to sell you an idea that they hope will get made into a film. And that just kills comics,” he says. “I think it’s just impure to go and make a comic and want it to be a film. That’s just foolish, impure — and you’re going to make a lousy comic.”