Twelve years ago this month, I wanted only one thing for Christmas – the limited edition version of My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade. I didn’t get that but I did get the standard edition and from the moment “The End” started, I knew that I would never be the same. In this edition of We Want Comics, we take a look at the greatest album in the emo genre and a defining album of the 2000s. What if The Black Parade were translated to comics? What would that look like and who would even make that work? Let’s get into this but I want to also issue a slight content warning for self harm and death.
The Black Parade was the third album from New Jersey’s own My Chemical Romance. At this point, MCR had gained traction and fame with hits like I’m Not Okay (I Promise) and Helena. If you were into the emo/alternative scene, you knew these songs by heart like you wrote them. The Black Parade though took the band into the stratosphere and made them bonafide rock stars. The album is a concept album and tells the story of The Patient as he dies and goes into the afterlife. The album tells one big story about this person, how he died and all that he experiences as he leaves the living world. Visually, it was hard to deny the influences. The band took on a different persona in stage performances and music videos. They basically dressed as emo versions of The Beatles in Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Band. In music videos and live performances you could see influences of Queen (especially in how Way strutted on stage), Pink Floyd and the emo genre as a whole with lots of black and darkness used as a way to illustrate the emotional “stuff” that listeners were definitely relating the music to. Gerard Way is an Eisner Award winning writer and is no stranger to comics. In fact, My Chemical Romance’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys got an entire comic book sequel that was written by Way with Becky freaking Cloonan on interiors. It just makes so much sense to maybe one day see this album make the leap. There are three specific ways I could see The Black Parade making the leap to comics.
A Straight Up Adaptation
Obviously the most logical thing to do here would be to adapt the story as it is but tell it in a linear way. The album is clearly a collection of songs that tell a story with lyrics and literal music. You couldn’t quite do that with a comic book. With a comic book, you’d probably have to rearrange the songs and tell a straight forward narrative with some artistic freedom in between. Give us a full graphic novel length edition of The Black Parade and send us down a spiral of feelings about death and what comes next. I don’t think Gerard Way would do something like this on his own but there are a few people I could see writing this. Tini Howard, Kieron Gillen and Magdalene Visaggio come to mind immediately as writers. As for artists, I could see Way’s “Umbrella Academy” partner Gabriel Ba on art and Christian Ward would be a very inspired choice. Becky Cloonan would also be a great artist to tackle this. My really out there choice? Skottie Young writing and drawing the whole thing in his unique style.
A Collection of Stories
Another direction to take this in is to allow the album’s story to exist on its own but take the idea and go a completely original way with different lead characters. The story of the album is this person’s specific journey to the afterlife but in the music video Welcome To The Black Parade, we are introduced to The Black Parade (the band are characters) and all the other people that appear are said to be characters that he will come across. His journey is his own but what if you took this universe and applied it to other kinds of people? These are his memories but these characters are implied to exist in this world so what if they were twisted to other experiences? What if the parade of memories appeared to others? What would it look like? What would they learn about life, death and all that’s in between? This could be a miniseries anthology of sorts and could be opened up to all kinds of creators – mainstream stars and indie darlings alike.
Continued belowSong Interpretation
Instead of going a more conventional route, another option is to leave interpretation up to the creators themselves. Get a team of creators and give them a song and let them interpret it how they want. What does the song mean to them? What are the lyrics saying to these creators? Music is something we can interpret on our own through emotional and experiences. The Black Parade is a concept album but each song stands on its own. Songs were released as singles and exist as their own singular pieces of art and can be interpreted as such. Red Stylo, a smaller independent publisher, put out a few music based anthologies over the last couple of years and they did this. They allowed creative teams to take songs and interpret them to the medium of comic books as they saw fit and I think that’s something that could work here. This too could be open to pretty much anyone and it’s a pipe dream idea but I think a lot of people would be super into this.
I love comic books and I credit comic books and this album with helping me just find myself as a teenager. This album helped me later in life after I went through a deep depression that led to a suicide attempt and hospital stay. The Black Parade is something that transcends a popular genre during a specific time and I credit it with so much on a deeply personal level. The odds of this ever happening are probably slim but there’s so much that could be done with everything that exists in this album. It would absolutely have an audience and by inviting creators in who maybe share the same kind of personal connection I do with the album, magic would happen.
