July
1 Way rocks comics with 'Umbrella Academy,' Part 1

Part of what draws Way to comics is the creative process and the constant search for something new. “When you’re in a band, you’re always trying to discover new sounds. It’s like comics are the same way,” he says.

The idea for the Umbrella Academy began with one of those interesting questions that defies probabilities that only a fan could ask.

“I had always said to myself, ‘What if a big studios originally commissioned David Lynch to do the X-Men, and let him do whatever he wanted and didn’t breathe down his neck. What would it look like? What would a comic like that be like?’”

The project ended up at Dark Horse Comics with editor Scott Allie, who also edits Mignola’s Hellboy comics. Way says Allie was a major help and big influence in refining his ideas for the comic and finding a voice for the comic.

Doing the project right was important, with Way insisting on writing the project in full script.“I had to do it like a real comic writer,” he says. “I wasn’t going to cheat and send in a loose-leaf notebook with a bunch of squiggles and say make a comic. I had to be a real comic writer, and it involved a lot of learning really fast and a lot of discipline and a lot of sitting behind the computer for hours and really doing it.”

That wasn’t easy to do when My Chemical Romance was on a world tour promoting “The Black Parade.” The project was done on a tight schedule and deadlines were often barely met. “It wasn’t like, ‘All right, let’s look at these six issues and see what we want to change.’ It wasn’t like that. It was written in order and month to month, like this is the next episode,” he says.

Finding Ba was another contribution from Allie, who suggested the artist as the right man for Umbrella to Way, who agreed. The writer says he appreciates that Ba not only took the comic seriously, he became a full partner and collaborator in its creation.
“He saw this book as very much his as it was mine and to this day he still does,” Way says. “And that’s what made it work,  was the fact that he really believed in me. He wasn’t snobby about the fact I was in a rock band at all.”

Way says that working with Allie, who helped him improve his dialog skills, he found himself beginning to write the comic to play to Ba’s strengths. “I would originally say to myself, okay this is what I wanted, but Gabriel will do this so much better. So in the process, I learned how to really work with Gabriel and work with his style.”

Such collaboration is similar to being in a band, and is influencing the comic as a second series is being readied to begin in November.

“There’s now moments that I realize Gabriel does so well, and he does them, to me, better than anybody else. It’s these kind of moments where, if I could inject any kind of sense of reality or life in there — like a crowded subway station, things like that — he’s not only not lazy about drawing that stuff, that’s the stuff he loves to draw,” Way says. “The book has found its own voice that way, where it is now going to become more about these moments that are less superheroic and more about, in a bizarre way, like post-modern/real life kind of situations.”

In Part 2, Way discusses his influences, reactions of comics fans, what's next for Umbrella Academy and his thoughts on comicbook movies.