I met Gerard Way in Glasgow at the end of 2006 not long after the release of The Black Parade by his band, My Chemical Romance.
The video for the single “Welcome To the Black Parade” had seemed to me a perfect articulation of a kind of, let’s call it “necrodelic,” current I was hoping might show up in popular culture, so I was eager to catch up with him. Those punk, post-apocalyptic echoes of Sgt. Pepper, the elegiac chiming guitars and doomed young soldiers, the Freddie Mercury bravado that compressed the polar extremes of emo and military macho together into a perfect synthesis: the blend was thrilling and showed a pop group with ambition, a vision, and a reach that immediately attracted my attention.
The Black Parade played relentlessly while I was writing psychotic Joker prose for the 663rd issue of the Batman comic, and on all through the endless, cold, dark nights and cigarette-burn days of the miserable Scottish winter.
So by the time Gerard and I sat down together it was already a mutual admiration party. He had the iconic silver crop then but the dye was making his scalp crawl and he’d started to talk about ditching the look. We got on like old pals and spent the afternoon before the band’s sound check talking about comics, travel, rock ‘n’ roll, life, death, Malcolm McDowell, and all that.
Grant Morrison, Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite foreword.