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Carry The Fire Podcast with Gerard Way: Full Transcription

Welcome to Carry The Fire, a podcast where we explore the big questions of life through the lens of the good, the true, and the beautiful. I’m your host, Dustin Kensrue, and my hope is that through these conversations with people of diverse and divergent backgrounds and beliefs, we can glimpse the world anew through each other's unique perspectives.

Gerard: Fiction is something to a degree that you'll hide behind in a way, and it allows you to expose yourself… I always saw the characters that I've played as some aspect of myself turned up to 12... Overall, I considered The Black Parade to be a death fantasy… death and rock and roll were kind of intertwined… Every time you get onstage you have to be prepared to die.

Dustin: Hey everybody. It is episode five of Carry The Fire podcast. Today we are joined by Gerard Way who is the singer of the band My Chemical Romance as well as also having released some killer music on his own. He has spent the last few years though, spending most of his time writing comics, including the very popular Umbrella Academy comics which have recently been adapted into a great show on Netflix. In our conversation, we talk about creating worlds and inhabiting characters, we talk about the beauty and the difficulty of creative collaboration, the complexity of trying to incorporate time-travel into a story, and we also get into Gerard’s spirituality a bit, and I want to give a brief heads up for some of you regarding that.

Gerard is going to talk a bit about magick and witchcraft. While I’m no expert on either, I do know enough to know that these words in this context probably don’t mean what most of you think they do. Some of you might not bat an eye hearing them but a lot of you probably came up inside a worldview where someone who was interested in these things was considered very evil. Gerard is very far from that. If I can try to provide a new framework for you it would be this: Generally, modern practices of magick and witchcraft, while being diverse in form, incorporate various insights and rituals from animistic pagan and folk religion, as well as incorporating some psychological intuitions from different fields and traditions. Practitioners generally tend to be very concerned with the earth and our connection with it. While this is not my spiritual tradition or practice, I recognize that we all have things to learn from each other. I think especially the ideas in these traditions about finding our place within the natural world are a helpful corrective to a lot of the western traditions’ tendency to want to dominate over nature, rather than seeing ourselves as a part of an interconnected web of being. I had no idea we’d be talking about any of this going into this conversation, but in the spirit of this podcast, I was so excited to hear from another unique perspective on the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I hope you will be too. Let’s get into it.

Dustin: Thank you so much for doing this.

Gerard: No problem.

D: It's super good to see you.

G: You too!

D: I'm trying to think of the last time we even saw each other and I- it was probably on tour.

G: Was it on the arena tour?

D: That's what I'm thinking.

G: It's been a long time.

D: And we were playing a bunch of World of Warcraft.

G: Yeah! That's my strongest memory. I have a lot of great memories of you guys, obviously, but the one that sticks out in my head the most is when we're all playing Warcraft in this big room and you had to go onstage, and you literally had your rig hooked up, you had your in-ears, they weren't in yet, but you were wired up, and I believe you even had a guitar, and you were still playing. You went literally from the keyboard from the computer right on stage.

D: Dude, I got way too addicted to that game. It's your guys' fault.

G: It was our fault, yeah!

D: Oh dude, it was so fun. It was probably like, what? Eight or nine of us playing in a room.

G: Yeah!

D: I don't know if it was the tour after that or two, and I had started just dreaming in Warcraft, and I went onstage one day and I was onstage and I had this moment where I was like, "I'm done! I can't," because I had tried to wean a little bit and it wasn't working, so I was like, "I gotta go cold turkey."

G: Yeah.

D: And I got offstage and I gave someone the Warcraft and I said, "Don't give this back to me. I'm done. I deleted it." Yeah. Which is funny because I seriously hadn't played video games since then until I just bought my kids a Switch.

G: Okay!

D: And they're playing Zelda.

G: Zelda, yeah.

D: And I decided to treat myself.

G: Nice, nice.

D: That's why I got a Switch for the road because Zelda's the best.

G: Yeah, I play Zelda with my daughter and it's so big though. We're having a really hard time getting a handle on the game because it's so vast.

D: Yeah, it is crazy.

G: I had to quit Warcraft too. I had to go cold turkey because it was still in my life when I wanted to write The Umbrella Academy.

D: Oh.

G: And I actually had this- I was at the crossroads and I had this moment where I was like, "I can either play Warcraft or I could write this comic."

D: It's a time sink.

G: Totally.

D: That game especially.

G: Yeah.

D: The social aspect, it just ends up being enormous.

G: Yeah yeah, so that was it. I quit and never looked back.

D: So, I was gonna ask you, prompted you earlier to think about it. What was something that gave you a feeling of wonder as a kid?

G: Okay so, I have a couple really obvious-

D: Or multiple things.

G: Multiple things, yeah, I have a couple real obvious answers.

D: That's alright.

G: And I know this is such an obvious one but Star Wars was really big. It just was and I know it was for millions of people. Once I saw that, it was like the first movie my parents ever took me to see and I was really young, but the thing back then was they were running these in theaters for like three years.

D: Oh really? I don't think I realized that.

G: Yeah. So Star Wars had come out and then they just kept running it until The Empire came out. I must've been two or something and they brought me to the theater.

D: Oh wow! I think I remember, I think my first memory of going to a movie was seeing- Was Jedi '84?

G: '83, yeah. I think it was '83.

D: So I remember going to see that, standing in line with my dad.

G: Me too!

D: That's the first, I don't know, there's just those moments where you have those- I remember listening to certain records in my dad's car.

G: Yeah.

D: And he'd turn it up loud.

G: Yep. That's one of my favorite memories of my dad is him picking me up from school early and then taking me to go see Jedi.

D: Oh that's cool.

G: Yeah, we waited in big lines that wrapped around. Even back then, there were a couple people ordering pizza. That's one of my favorite memories of being with my dad.

D: That's super cool. What about Star Wars specifically created that wonder? Was it the world?

G: The world, I think. It was the world, the scope, just this world you wanted to live in, that you wish existed and there was only three movies back then, so your brain would kinda fill in the gaps like, "What is it like? What are their supermarkets like?" And your brain would kinda- and later, that would come into play when I would RPGs, which is another thing I'll bring up in a minute. There was a time where I was in college, or right before college, where we were playing a Star Wars RPG that I was running, and it's just such a rich world.

D: Like a tabletop one?

G: Tabletop, yeah. And it was a really great game and it was super epic because the one thing about it was everybody already had a sense of that world in their head.

D: Yeah, you don't have to build that already.

G: Yeah, you didn't have to build.

D: You just add onto it.

G: Yeah yeah, so they all knew the world so when you would describe something, everybody had a vivid picture in their head, and then anything you hadn't seen before, you would just describe, but people had a point of reference so they would know.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: But yeah, Star Wars was like the first one and I was just obsessed with that for my whole childhood, playing with the action figures with Mikey, and we had our own sarlacc pit which was a dirt pit, and stuff like that. And then the other thing that was really important to me were tabletop RPGs. So, I was in the 3rd grade at a new school, but I still hung out with my best friend who was still at the old school. Anyway, basically he had an older brother- his friend had an older brother in college and he was way into D&D and he would run D&D for us, and we're all 3rd graders. That was a major moment for me.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: Yeah, it was. And to have a college-aged Dungeon Master who knew the game inside out was a really amazing way to play.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: Yeah. And that really opened up a big world for me. So then I would go on to- so I never stopped playing since the 3rd grade and then I took a try at being a Dungeon Master, and even just from playing and Dungeon Mastering, I learned how to tell stories, and I was really into that. You'd learn things even about leadership if you go to become the party leader, or if you're the DM, you learn how to keep people engaged. You learn how to keep momentum, things moving.

D: That's interesting. I feel like that's something that maybe a lot of storytellers are not paying as much attention to as they used to. There's the book I brought you, it's called Invisible Ink.

G: Oh, cool!

D: This guy, Brian McDonald, who's kind of like a story guru. He consults at Pixar all the time, teaches screenwriting, he's very cool. But he grew up watching a bunch of the classic movie directors coming up in the '60s and '70s or whatever, and they all had this vision of what stories were and really paid attention to how- they thought about how the audience would react, imagined them in the theater, or whatever. And then, something he was talking about is he just feels it's dropped off, that interplay of trying to connect and let that influence how you're actually creating the story.

G: Yeah. I'm excited to read that. I'm a big fan of structure and I'm a big fan of outlines.

D: Okay.

G: Yeah.

D: You'll like this.

G: Yeah! Good! I'm a big fan of those things because the way I see it, if you know your whole story, and I always feel like you don't need to know all the details, you don't need to know all of it, but you should know kind of- you should have some kind of outline or a structure, and then you get to have fun because you do know the beats you need to hit, but all the spaces in between, you get to fill that in.

D: I think it's rare that anyone doesn't do that and does it well. Stephen King's maybe the only one that I can think of that just doesn't write that way, and somehow he just has internalized it or something, and it ends up working itself out.

G: Yeah.

D: That's cool, man. So would you say those kinds of things, these imaginary worlds, these built worlds, are the things that still bring you the most wonder and joy in a sense?

G: Yeah! And it's something that I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to build my own worlds that people could share and be a part of, and that was something I did all throughout the band was just kinda- and building all these different worlds and the people that inhabit those worlds and the details down to the stickers on the Trans Am for Danger Days, those were all planned out. So my favorite thing to do is world building. And I've done it for projects that haven't come to fruition as well. Like I was working on this sci-fi TV show for a while and I just went deep, and I just came up with- with my friend Jon Rivera, we just came up with this whole world. So world building is something I'm a big fan of. And it's something I've noticed people talk about when they're talking about either my work with Umbrella Academy or My Chemical Romance, is the world building aspect, so. World building as a job title isn't a job, but I think it's- that element is, I feel like, one of my strengths.

D: Yeah. As far as the world building, I feel like you've not only built those worlds, but with MCR, you lead in inhabiting them in a way.

G: Yeah.

D: It's fun to watch. It's scary for me a little bit, watching it. Is it scary for you or is it safe for you? To be in that character.

G: That's a good question. I think there's a bit of safety that comes with being a character, and obviously, I was looking up to my heroes when I was constructing that. I was looking at David Bowie, especially around Black Parade, that's when I was like, "I'm gonna be a character." Early Black Parade stuff was like, I had written this line out that basically said, "What if Death had a rock band?" It obviously changed from that and we all became Death in a way, the whole band, but there was a safety with inhabiting a character, and the character I was during Black Parade was fun because I think in an entertaining way or a positive way, there was this level of disdain that you would have for you audience as playing as The Black Parade. But it was, to me, a healthy kind, because you were just playing really. And I thought that was a fun aspect of that character. But then there's a lot of you in the character and it's kind of- I always saw the characters that I've played as some aspect of myself turned up to 12. It's interesting when I would meet people afterwards and stuff, they would be like, "I didn't think you were gonna be so normal when I met you," just because the way I would act onstage. And I met a lot of kids who were like, "I thought you were gonna be such a jerk."

D: That's funny.

G: Because I would play one, you know. And it was just part of the drama for me.

D: Yeah. That's cool. Have you read any Ursula K. Le Guin?

G: I love her! I just reread Earthsea, the first one.

D: I haven't read it. I've heard it's amazing.

G: Yeah, it is.

D: I just got into- I read The Left Hand Of Darkness.

G: Oh, I've not finished that, but I loved what I've read.

D: It is a very slow book, in a sense. It's not exciting, in a sense, but it's got this patient movement and by the end, I was just floored by it. It was fantastic.

G: I have to finish that one. I love her and her work, especially Left Hand Of Darkness, it does have a patient movement, I think that's the best way to describe it. And I've also loved the way that she talks about storytelling in writing, and one thing I've read from her recently that really stuck with me, this is a quote of hers, and I'm paraphrasing it, I don't know if I'm getting this exact, but she basically said, "Not every story needs to have a message. It could just be the act of telling a story. You don't have to lecture your readership or your audience, or hit them over the head with this big message. It doesn't have to have one."

D: Which is interesting because I feel like she is a very message orientated writer in a certain way, but maybe that's coming in in a very natural sense.

G: Yeah.

D: [C.S.] Lewis talked about that too, where he was like, "The last thing you wanna do is write this thing that's just trying to tell something." He's like, "Whatever truth that you actually believe, those things are coming out if you just write."

G: If you just write, I agree with that.

D: Like Narnia, apparently, started from- he had a picture in his head of a faun in a snowstorm holding a parcel with an umbrella. That's the whole world built out of that, and he loved that image, and his love for it blossomed into something.

G: Yeah! That's awesome!

D: It's super cool. So, the beginning, in the intro of Left Hand Of Darkness, Le Guin says, "I am an artist, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor." So even when you're making music, you were talking about you're making these fictions, you're lying as it were. I was watching something the other day, you said something like, "Sometimes fiction is closer to fact," or something in that range. Is that accurate of how you feel creating, that sometimes by- you're getting at a deeper truth by telling a fiction?

G: Yeah yeah. That could happen, and I think it's kinda magical when it does happen. Black Parade especially is filled with a lot of metaphors and maybe the fiction is something to a degree that you'll hide behind in a way, and it allows you to expose yourself. Because exposing yourself is really hard and one of the- just allowing yourself to be vulnerable is really hard and one of the things that Rob Cavallo said to me when he was producing Black Parade was, "Making a record, a great record, is you're almost pulling open your insides and you're pulling all your guts out," and things like that, and it's a brutal process because of that, but I think I did that on that record a lot. There's a lot of self loathing and there's the Catholic guilt I grew up with appears in stuff like Mama and House of Wolves, how you think you're destined for Hell and things like that, but it's cool, yeah. Fiction gives you a way to express these things and make yourself vulnerable and open yourself up and that's the way I like to use it, and then sometimes, there's stuff that's just straight fiction or fantasy. Overall, I considered Black Parade to be a death fantasy. A rock and roll death fantasy because I thought death and rock and roll were kind of intertwined in a way, because I think Mick Jagger had said once, "Every time you get onstage you have to be prepared to die."

D: That's amazing.

G: Yeah! So, it was this rock and roll death fantasy, Black Parade.

D: That's cool. I have the worst memory. So, I was preparing for this and somebody was like, "Hey, ask Gerard if he really wrote the treatment for the Image Of The Invisible video," and I was like, "Holy shit!" I totally forgot that-

G: Oh my god!

D: That you did that.

G: Oh my god! That was so fun too! I totally forgot! I gotta rewatch that.

D: What's funny too is I watching your videos and I was like, "This is so cool, these characters. We've never really done anything like that. I guess Image Of The Invisible is kinda like that," but didn't even make the connection, but it's totally that way because you were building that world!

G: That was so much fun.

D: And I got to live in it and it was cool.

G: That's cool. Yeah, I was really honored that you asked me to conceptualize a video for you guys.

D: It was fun. I don't think we've ever had another one where it was such- well, definitely not such a developed story.

G: Right. Didn't we do something too where we had lights on their helmets?

D: Yeah.

G: Their eyes were supposed to be lights or something?

D: Yeah, maybe it was like a single eye was a red laser-y light.

G: Yeah. That was cool. I'm gonna rewatch that when we're done.

D: So you grew up with the Catholic guilt, you said. Did you ever feel like you inhabited that world, or was it something being kind of thrust on you that you didn't- I mean, it's hard as a kid.

G: Right.

D: You don't even know, but I'm curious about that and then where you'd feel like your kind of big frame worldview is now on like, "What are we all doing on this rock?"

G: Right, right. My family, my parents, they weren't super religious. I come from this Italian Catholic background though so it was the kind of thing, my grandmother would go to church sometimes, but never would push us to really go. But for Christmas or something, my mom would go with her. But I think they thought, my parents thought, "This is the right thing to do. We should raise our child with believing in God and raise them Catholic because we're good. Even though we're not always there, we're good Catholics." So, they kind of put me on that path and I think the first thing I learned from being Catholic, or just religion in general, maybe it's somewhat at times specific to Catholicism, is this fear. And this fear of Hell, that's they really instilled in us. I think I was in the 1st grade or something, really young, and there was this thing that would happen where they would talk about death and Hell and all that stuff, and there was this period which, because of these classes, these after school classes, I would have these bouts of just crying. I guess I was coming to terms with the fact that my parents wouldn't be there forever or I would lose them and they would die. But then the additional fear of, "Well, if they behave bad, they'll go to Hell, and I'll go to Hell too," and so, there was this period where it was really upsetting for me, and I channeled that. I tapped into that stuff on a couple records, and on Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, I borrowed a lot of Catholic imagery, and that second video for Helena being in a church, and things like that. So I kinda started- and in some of our merch designs too. I remember we had one with a cathedral and a rosary and all this stuff, and then that would come to a head in the song Mama on Black Parade but, yeah, my journey in terms of spirituality and where I came with that. Obviously, at some point, I was confirmed in the 5th grade, so I did that. But then after that, my parents didn't have any more requirements out of me, because it was all about baptism, communion, and confirmation. And if you did those three things, you were good, then you could go as you wanted. So they never pushed me to go. And then, over the years, obviously I got into punk rock and I didn't believe in God for the longest time, and then I just started to really need spirituality in my life as I got older. And I'm more of the sense where I believe in there being some- I don't know if it's a God, but I do believe there's something.

D: Something, yeah.

G: Yeah. There's something out there, there's some kind of reason. I also believe we come from- because we do, we come from star stuff.

D: Yeah.

G: We come from the universe. We're birthed from the universe. I'm a believer in the fact that the universe is chaos and born out of chaos and it's uncontrollable, and there's kind of no rhyme or reason to anything, and tragedies and accidents and bad things happen and good things happen, and it's really just chaos being this constant true thing in the universe, and I came to those discoveries through my study of magick, occultism, and things like that, which I was inspired to do by my friend Grant Morrison. He's kind of like a big brother to me, mentor, he's really supportive and he's very into magick. And so I became interested and he's given me some lessons, and I actually wanted to do a podcast one day with him where I literally just sit down with him and have him talk about magick, because the way he describes it is, you would almost need it to be recorded to fully explore all the theories and things like that. So, I started to need magick, high magick, chaos magick, and eventually witchcraft, and witchcraft is something I felt more comfortable with because I always felt like, when I was reading about chaos magick, it felt like it was about making the universe bend to your will, whereas I was looking for something more that you were in service to the universe.

D: Interesting.

G: I think I got this from reading Crowley's book on magick, but basically, I don't know exactly what he said, but basically reality is your perspective. And that was kinda one of the key points of magick, your brain builds your reality.

D: Yeah.

G: And I thought that was a really great take away from all that. So, yeah, I've been interested in spirituality and things like that and studying shamanism, and all that stuff. We, with our daughter, we didn't raise her with religion, but we, Lindsey, my wife, is really spiritual too. Not like a practicing witch or anything, but she's just naturally adept at those kind of things. She's really in tune with nature, she knows a ton about herbology, a lot of the founding cornerstones of witchcraft is just kinda part of her life. And so, we do raise Bandit with- Lindsey teaches her all about herbs and plants and we have a witch's garden, and communicating with nature and trees and animals and things like that. So we're teaching our daughter that there is a kind of magick to life and magick does exist. It's not Harry Potter magic, but you know.

D: A lot of that seems like it's about an embodiment, a connectedness to everything, to other people.

G: Yeah, connectedness, for sure, yeah. And just teaching her that she's connected to the universe. And if she grows up and wants a different kind of religion, that's great too, and I know I explored those. I was looking for a religion in art school, because I had a class where we had to study all the religions, or most of them. And I kept going from each one and I was like, "I like bits of this one, but I don't like that." I couldn't find one that I landed on until I got later in life into more spiritual things like magick and witchcraft.

D: Cool. So with something like witchcraft, which for a lot of people are gonna hear it and have not at all the idea that you're talking about I think, so something like the idea of goodness in that, where does that derive from? Is that coming from the inter-connectedness? It seems like there's a moral view to it rather than morality being a decree maybe. It's something that arises out of those connections?

G: Right right, yeah! I think the positivity in it, to me, and here's the thing. I don't consider myself a practicing witch or anything like that, I just read a ton of this stuff. And that's one of the things they kinda warn you about with magick and everything, you could read all the books you want and some people spend their whole life reading books and never practice, but the thing they tell you to do is practice. And I think yeah, the goodness comes from being in service to the earth. Being connected to that and also, what I've learned about witchcraft, or at least the kind of witchcraft that I like, is it's very gray. It's not black magick, it's not totally white magick, it's just understanding that the universe and all things in it are very gray, there's no black and white to everything. And I've really liked that the most, because I get older- when I was younger, I was very black and white about a lot of things. Especially in the earlier days of My Chemical Romance, everything was really military and rigid, and black and white, and this is right and this is wrong. You kind of get older and you start to realize, "No, things aren't that simple. Not everybody's all good or all bad. There's a grayness there."

D: Which, I think, I have a song of the latest Thrice record called The Grey and it's dealing with that idea of deconstructing the black and the white, and I think the biggest danger there is the idea that even if there was straight black, straight white, you are betting a lot on your ability to discern it at any given moment.

G: You are.

D: And then if you are actually holding to it, and you're basically betting on your ability to discern this thing and now it's of the most ultimate consequence and you filter out everything that doesn't fit into that, which is basically a bunch of yourself and a bunch of everyone around you.

G: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

[ad break]

D: So I have a couple questions I’ll pepper in here from some of the Patrons. James Corvit said, “What is the purest form of goodness you’ve experienced as a human being, and how do you explain it?”

G: Purest form of goodness.

D: I don’t know, it’s deep.

G: Yeah.

D: I don’t know if that’s from someone or just internally.

G: The purest form of goodness. It’s a tough question but it’s a great question. I think the purest form of goodness is forgiveness. Or that would be something I would say is a very strong form of goodness. Even when you see people that the most terrible things happen to them, like a serial killer murders their loved one and then some of these people, not all of them, and I don’t blame the ones that don’t find forgiveness, but some of them find forgiveness and are able to forgive people for the most atrocious things, and so that feels like a really powerful form of goodness.

D: Yeah, I feel like in the middle of me deconstructing a lot of that stuff, something I was like- the idea of grace and forgiveness is something that goes deep there and I’m not willing to let go of that. Over the centuries, there’s been countless efforts to define beauty. Aristotle defines beauty as having “order, symmetry, and definiteness.”

G: Hm.

D: But it’s always struck me as a fairly anemic version of beauty. And then I saw on the cover of the My Chem single Sing, there’s a question on there that says, “Would you destroy something perfect in order to make it beautiful?”

G: Right.

D: This makes me think that you probably also take issue with that definition a bit. I wanted to ask, is there something about brokenness that’s near the heart of beauty for you?

G: Absolutely, yeah. And that, I was trying to remember that phrase a couple months ago too, that was on the cover saying, yeah, “Would you destroy something perfect to make it beautiful?” And yeah, I think beauty is way more complex than symmetry and I think there is a brokenness to beauty. I think, you look at a lot of musicians, you could arguably say from a certain perspective, if you subscribe to symmetry and things like that, a lot of musicians or front-people, men and women in bands, some of them you could say they’re not traditionally beautiful, or not what you would think is beautiful, but something about their vulnerability or their confidence and things like that, make them beautiful. And that’s in any case, even non-musicians. Like people that just go to work in the world and have normal jobs, there is something about beauty that is much deeper than just what you see visually.

D: One of the Patrons was saying that, “My Chem’s music reinforced to me and my friends that being an outcast was okay.” Was that something that you wanted people to feel? What were things growing up that made you feel like it was okay to be an outcast or a misfit?

G: I think by the time I was definitely not in elementary school- well, I didn’t have to struggle with being an outcast in elementary school. I actually went to a really cool school, it was just a normal public school, but the one thing I thought looking back that was very interesting about those years is we all got along, we were all friends, even the weirdest kids, and a lot of kids would just have these parties back then and everyone was invited. And then my first real experience with being an outsider was going to middle school, and then so, you aren’t all friends anymore, and there’s all divisions and cliques and things like that, and then I found myself to be one of these outcasts, one of these weird kids that listened to heavy metal and wore flannels. There were only a handful of us in the school that were like that. But it wasn’t until high school where I fully embraced being an outcast. The first year, freshman year was really hard because I was really an outcast and I didn’t even know where to sit at the lunch tables, because I didn’t fit in with any of these groups. And it turns out I ended up sitting with a table of metalheads because they saw me sitting by myself and they were like, “Why don’t you sit with us?” And that’s where I would learn about certain bands that they were into, like Murphy’s Law and the kind of things they were listening to back then. But it was important for me to have something that spoke to outsiders with My Chemical Romance because when I was that age, there wasn’t anything that really spoke to me like that. Or there wasn’t something so specific to being an outcast. There was lots of stuff that if you were an outcast you listened to like The Cure or The Smiths, so of course, I found all those bands. But there was nothing specifically geared to somebody that feels invisible or is an outcast or rejected and things like that, so when we started My Chem, it felt very much like we were channeling the energy of being an outcast onto whoever listened to us. And in the early days, it wasn’t a lot of kids. I mean, there weren't any kids that really listened to us. It was kinda older punk rockers, it was very interesting in the beginning. And of those older punk rockers, a lot of them were actually outcasts as well.

D: Yeah.

G: Within a scene so. And maybe they weren’t even full-on punk rockers, they were just a guy with a leather jacket at a bar who just saw something in us.

D: Yeah. That’s cool. The Patron Jonathan Clark is asking, “Do you have any rituals or practices that you do to find your center, wait for yes, get connected, see the good, the true, the beautiful in others, or let go a bit?” Basically he’s kinda asking if you have any meditative, mindfulness, something to practice.

G: Right right. I really enjoy T.M., Transcendental Meditation. Actually, I’m in an interesting spot with this though.

D: That’s where you’re chanting.

G: A mantra, yeah. You have a mantra and you kind of just repeat it in your head. It helps you, basically when you’re doing it, it releases negative energy and tension and things like that, and it’s very good. But sometimes, at least in my experience, and this is why I’ve kinda paused my practice at the moment, sometimes it could release trauma and things like that, and sometimes you end up reliving that and it makes it- and granted, your body is letting go of it, but sometimes it’s hard and I found when it would get its most intense, I would catastrophize things in my head and be- so I would be focusing on the mantra, but then things would happen like I would be thinking about the worst things that could happen to my family or my loved one, or something bad happening to them or getting hurt.

D: Is that something that happens to you? Do you tend to catastrophize in general?

G: Sometimes. I do tend to catastrophize sometimes, and it’s something I work on in therapy. I’m a big believer in talk therapy and, I don’t try to push medication on anybody, but I always just share my experience, and that it’s helped me.

D: Yeah.

G: I was somebody who was extremely imbalanced all through the years of My Chemical Romance, and go through these extreme highs and crushing lows where I wouldn’t get out of bed for like three months, but then I would be in a manic phase, and I would be up until 4am working on zines all of the sudden, and I would say to Lindsey, “I don’t need to sleep. Why do people sleep? I don’t get it.” So there was a lot of that, and then Lindsey found me a therapist and we did a lot of really hard work and I faced myself a lot, I looked inward. And at the same time, before we were able- before we explored and did the work, we stabilized my brain chemistry. That was the key. Once we were able to stabilize my brain chemistry-

D: You were able to actually…

G: Do the work, yeah. So, I am a big believer in T.M., it’s just that sometimes I struggle with it, but I know all I have to do is check in with the T.M. center and explain what I’m going through, and actually my therapist had found me this woman who’s one of the heads of, I’m not sure if it’s the David Lynch Foundation or something else, she actually said, “You should come in, I’ll talk to you, I’ll walk you through the trauma stuff and all the hard stuff.” But I’m a big believer in it because when it was cooking, and there were two months this year where it was totally changing my life until some of the negative came out. It was, I was a more productive, more focused, calmer, more engaged, more present. I’m a believer in it and a big believer in therapy and just having somebody to talk to.

D: Yeah. That’s awesome. On the drive up, I was thinking about Umbrella Academy and I really love it in general. I remember getting the comic when it came out. The show turned out so great. Are you really happy with it?

G: Yeah yeah! I’m totally happy. At the end of the day, it was somebody else’s vision and I was able to let go of that. I think I needed to. When the process first started in making it a TV show.

D: That’s gotta be hard.

G: It’s hard.

D: That’s your baby.

G: Yeah yeah! But I was really upfront when I was talking. I went in to meet with UCP and Dawn and the people there. I was with Dark Horse and they said, “What is your goal?” And I said, “My goal is to make great comics because I already went through a whole big thing with Universal trying to make this a movie and it just drained me.”

D: Oh okay.

G: And it was full of really difficult things, it took up a lot of my time, and disappointments, and I really turned my focus back to comics because I was like, that’s where you’re in charge. Nobody can- you have an editor, obviously, if you have a great editor, you’re doing great work together and you’re making changes, but it doesn’t feel like something creative is being ruled by committee, and that’s what it feels like in Hollywood. I was really upfront with Dawn and I said, “I want to make great comics so you guys have good material to make a good show.” I ended up being more involved than that. The extent of my involvement is giving notes, especially about things like wardrobe, costumes, the look and feel of the world, the fact that it’s kind of an alternate reality, and I give notes on scripts and I give notes on edits and things like that, so I am involved for sure. But I was able to realize this is somebody else’s baby and I’m happy with the results for sure. My whole thing is the proof is in the fact that everybody loves it.

D: I like Klaus a lot and I can’t remember, because I read the comics so long ago, how true to the book that character is.

G: Right.

D: Do you feel like it’s capturing what you were trying to get out with it? G: It is capturing, yeah. It’s capturing, to me, what Robert who plays Klaus, he’s capturing this kind of sadness and tragedy to the character. Also obviously, the humor. In the comic, Klaus is a little bit more of what I call a dry goth. He’s very nihilistic in some ways.

D: Not quite as whimsical, maybe.

G: Yeah, not quite as whimsical as what Robert ended up doing. But the way Robert approached the character really ended up working and he adds a lot of humanity to the character, that maybe there’s not so much of it, or you don’t see it very often in the comic with Klaus. Klaus just does bad things and makes bad decisions and obviously, a lot of that is coming from a place of trauma that he experienced as a child, and in the show, it’s cool because the drug use is there to help him quiet the voices in his head. They explored that a lot deeper and I thought that that was really cool.

D: Is that less of a focus in the comic?

G: A little bit. I never really explored the fact that he’s constantly seeing and hearing and talking to ghosts, and so these drugs kind of quiet his mind. I’d never explored that really deeply.

D: Which is cool because you, it’s another evidence of you’re building a world and someone else was living in it, and then they were like, “Well yeah.”

G: Yeah!

D: “Of course he’s like that,” and you’re like, “Well dang.”

G: Yeah! That’s a cool thing. They’re able to point at things you weren’t seeing because sometimes when I’m doing stuff like creating a world like Umbrella Academy, a lot of it is running off the subconscious. A lot of it is, some things you don’t realize you’re putting in there. And when they look at making a TV show or a movie, they really kinda deconstruct it and look at it and say, “Well, this makes sense because of this.”

D: Some of the beauty with the comic is that the concise kind of form makes it to where you don’t always have to trace down all of these rabbit trails, but when you're trying to blow it up into something else, you’ve gotta figure out how to make sense of it all.

G: Mhm. And to bring it back to the question of a sense of wonder. That was the other thing I thought about this morning when you asked me the question was, “what do I get a sense of wonder from,” and comics were a big one. Because to me- and then I would later reinforce these feelings when I started making them and writing them. You could do anything in them and that’s really what’s beautiful about them. I also love the mechanics of them, because there’s definitely things you could do in comics that you can’t do in film and TV and I love that. So I’ve really learned to embrace the medium when I’m writing them. I think I’m writing comics that are definitely comics, and they’re not just a TV show playing out in a comic.

D: Yeah. How much do you draw your own stuff just to get your ideas going? Or is it more conceptual?

G: Quite a bit. No, I do- well especially for something like, less so on Doom Patrol but Umbrella Academy, Gabriel Ba, the artist and I have this really cool relationship and I think the ideas kinda need to start with me, and I’ll do a sketch and then Gabriel will completely reinterpret that and kinda make it much cooler and much better.

D: That's because that’s your complete world from scratch, whereas with Doom Patrol you’re reinventing something?

G: In the beginning, Umbrella was definitely my complete world from scratch and I had this idea, but Gabriel, especially even in the early days, he helped build that world. I was able to give him a couple references and I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe it’s the ‘60s, maybe it’s the ‘70s. People are dressed like the ‘60s and cars look like they’re from the ‘60s, but there's modern things too.” And he loves drawing architecture, which you don’t find a lot of in comics. A lot of people try to stay away from the buildings in the background and the architecture, but he embraces the architecture so he really built that world with me in the beginning. But we still have our process and the process usually, not always but usually is, especially if it’s a villain or something like that, I’ll do some kind of sketch, even if it’s bad, and then Gabriel will take that and make it something.

D: That’s cool. Collaboration is terrifying and super fun when it’s working.

G: Yeah! When it’s working, it’s amazing, yeah. I love collaborating, and I’ve learned to really embrace it over the years. Delegating and collaborating were two skills I really needed to get really good at, and I think I got better at collaborating after the band. Although, we were pretty good about collaborating in the band, I just got better at it though.

D: Yeah. It’s definitely for Thrice, the most fun but also the hardest thing for sure, and it causes the most tension.

G: Right. Yeah, for sure.

D: Just because you care.

G: Because you care, yeah! You care, and sometimes you do see or hear a complete vision so you want that realized.

D: I think that’s the hardest part. You’re like, “I see all this,” and you’re like, “Okay but there’s three other people.”

G: Yeah!

D: Every single time that I’m set on something, and then everyone else is like, “Dude, no,” every time by the end, I’m like, “Wait, what was I stuck on?”

G: Yeah.

D: It didn’t matter anymore.

G: Yeah!

D: It’s totally a psychological issue at that point.

G: It is!

D: “It has to be this way.” No, it could be a million ways and they’re all different and cool.

G: Yeah. And that’s what I learned too when collaborating on music, is exactly what you just said. You don’t even remember what you were hung up on.

D: Totally.

G: Because it’s just much better after everybody's worked on it.

D: It’s very similar to being super upset about something in the moment and you’re just not thinking clear, and you sleep and you wake up and you’re like, “I was real upset about that. It doesn't seem like a big deal anymore.”

G: Yeah.

D: Time travel is a big thing in Umbrella Academy.

G: Yeah.

D: Which it’s notoriously troublesome to write stories with time travel.

G: Yeah.

D: And not have it just fall apart. If you’re trying to get a specific future, you have to have a bunch of people constantly fixing these things.

G: Right right!

D: I like that way of interpreting because usually it’s, “Oh, we fixed this one thing,” and you expect it to just keep going straight, but no way.

G: Right. I really like that the show took that from the comic and really explored it. All these people making these little corrections, sometimes they’re violent corrections, but sometimes they’re very simple. But time travel is such a pain in the ass. I did not envy them when they were starting to do the writer’s room for Umbrella Academy.

D: They try to make it all work.

G: Try to make it all work. And they’d have to put up these big timeline boards and be like, “Alright, this happens this year,” and that’s what I was doing when I was writing the second volume, Dallas, because there’s not much- I don’t think there’s any real time travel, besides Number 5 coming back, there’s no real time travel in volume one, Apocalypse Suite. But Dallas is all about it, so that was the hardest volume I’ve ever had to write, because time travel is just, it’s so hard.

D: Are there any stories that you like that you feel do it really well?

G: I don’t know if I’ve read enough time travel stories. I mean, I thought Back To The Future did it really well.

D: But then I always get stuck on the idea that you have to, there’s an endless cycle of Martys that have to go back.

G: Oh right!

D: And keep- my brain breaks when I try to be like, “But what if he doesn’t? Then none of it works anymore?” It all breaks.

G: Yeah, it can break very easily, and I think almost every time travel story has the possibility of completely breaking, or at least in some person’s mind out there, it is broken.

D: Yeah.

G: So sometimes you have to take time travel stories almost at face value and be like, “Alright, this works.”

D: Yeah, you can’t- well I think part of that is on the writer or whoever’s making it to address and deflect. The Brian McDonald guy I was telling you about, he talks about that somewhere where he’s like, “You gotta spot the problem and then you just need to have some character address it, and then sweep it away,” just so that it helps whoever’s watching or whatever, it helps them be like, “Oh yeah, what about this?” And then, “Oh, they thought about it.”

G: Yep.

D: And it’s not like it’s making it perfect, right? But it gives you permission to let it go, I think.

G: Yeah yeah. And you do have to address these concerns. I realized my answer might have been possibly a little lazy about taking things at face value, but one of the things I had to do in Dallas was address every concern that I thought the reader would have.

D: Which is great. When you do the addressing, it lets the reader or the watcher or whatever, it lets them let it go and enjoy the story.

G: Yeah, exactly. I’m about to start volume four of Umbrella Academy and I’m really happy because I don’t think it’s gonna have any time travel in it, so I think we’re a little bit away from more time travel in Umbrella Academy.

D: Alright, this is a question from Mike Morale, he says, “In his recent arc, Cliff Steele aka Robotman, regains his humanity, at least in outward form. But on Gerard’s latest, ahem, cliffhanger, Steele burns it all up after facing the painful inhumanity of someone with power to hurt him. I suppose my question is, how do we protect the precious beauty of our humanity while remaining vulnerable to those who have meaning in our lives?”

G: Oh wow. How do we protect that humanity? Well that’s a big question, because especially with given how the world is now and the toxicity out there online and things like that, how do you protect your humanity? Because toxicity, like the kind that Cliff experiences when he goes to visit his mother in that nursing home, it’s a very real thing and it’s something you have to deal with. I don’t know how you hold onto your humanity, it’s hard sometimes.

D: While being vulnerable too.

G: While being vulnerable, yeah exactly.

D: Which I guess is almost synonymous to holding onto your humanity.

G: Yeah.

D: Because you could close off but that’s not good.

G: Yeah exactly. I know this isn’t the healthier, great answer, but I think one of the things I did was to kind of remove myself from certain social medias. But it wasn't unhealthy because what I did was I decided to look inward at that point. Instead of, and I could tell you as many harsh people are on the internet, I was much harsher on myself. I looked in and I asked myself tough questions, I really asked myself what’s right and wrong. I think about these things deeply when I’m writing, but holding onto your humanity is very hard. And Cliff, obviously, he doesn’t hold on to that humanity, and he goes back into his cage because that makes sense to Cliff.

D: His follow up question was, “And does skin make the man, or can metal reflect who we really are just as well?”

G: I believe metal can reflect who we are just as well. I think Cliff Steele is very much Cliff whether he’s a human or a robot. He’s still Cliff and I think that’s one of the things that’s great about the character and why he’s so fun to write because no matter what, he’s still Cliff.

D: I wonder if there's anything you’ve been listening to, watching, reading, that you think people should check out?

G: Let’s see. What have I been reading recently? Well, this is old but I just decided to reread Lord Of The Rings from start to finish, and I made it through the books rather quickly and they’re just such a joy to read. They’re so relaxing, but there is a real build up to Lord Of The Rings. It gets so dark at one point, and horrific, but there’s a calm and a peace to reading it. And the way Tolkien writes, you’re just thinking about the greenery and the trees and the rivers and all of those things, and so it’s a real relaxing read for as much as it ramps up. I have a hard time watching TV. I feel really trapped when I’m watching it so I tend not to watch it at all, which is interesting about having a TV show. I bring a different perspective when I’m giving notes because I don’t watch a lot of TV. And more or less the only TV I watch is edits of Umbrella Academy. But every once in a while, Lindsey will rope me into a show that she feels like I absolutely have to watch, and she did that with Breaking Bad, and I’m really grateful she did. She literally rewatched the whole thing with me, made me watch it, and it’s still one of the best I’ve ever seen. And then she got me into Cobra Kai, have you seen that?

D: No, is it good?

G: I think it’s really good, yeah. Especially the first season is really amazing.

D: I had huge doubts about if that would be good at all.

G: Yeah, watch the first season and one of the things that actually helped hook me into the show is the episodes are a half hour, so it was really cool. I didn’t feel as much of a prisoner of the television when I was watching them, because you can watch a half hour and be done.

D: But books don’t make you feel that way? They expand.

G: Books are my favorite thing, yeah. Books are- you know how a lot of people will use a television to kind of tune out and shut off and relax? I use books to do that, so there’s piles of books next to my bed.

D: Thanks so much for sitting down. It’s been so good to talk to you.

G: You too! It’s been a long time. I miss you.

#gerard way #dustin kensrue #carry the fire podcast #full transcription

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