#comic review

I met my first girlfriend in 2012. She was a British girl living in London, and I was a Texan girl who didn't yet understand that a girl was what she was. We met on a Pokemon forum where we were both moderators, and we grew close in the staff Skype chat. I was 17. She was 18. In early December, we admitted we had feelings for each other. She told me she loved me on Christmas, three weeks later. In March of 2013, we had our first big fight. She broke up with me. It lasted three days.

In Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (hereafter referred to as Laura Dean), writer Mariko Tamaki and artist Rosemary Valero O'Connell explore formative experiences familiar to anyone who has come of age: struggling to maintain friendships, grasping at a greater understanding of the world around you, trying to figure out the way you want to live your life, and that one partner. You know the one. You can't stay together for more than a few weeks at a time, but every time you're apart you're miserable until you kiss and make up. If you've never had that, then I envy you.

The partner in question is the titular Laura Dean, an androgynous queer and the most popular girl in school. Our protagonist is Freddy Riley, Laura's girlfriend, who writes to an online advice column with a problem: Laura Dean keeps breaking up with her. She's done it three times: once when she decided that she was going to go backpacking in Oregon at some point and so they wouldn't be able to keep in touch, once when she decided she liked boys for a bit, and, at the start of the comic, when Laura cheats on Freddy at the school dance and sends her a noncommital text afterward.

And every time, Freddy comes right on back.

I kissed my first girlfriend for the first time in June of 2013. We had met in person for the first time earlier that day. I'd tried to kiss her then, but she pulled away out of embarrassment. We were in Paris. She kissed me on top of the Arc de Triomphe. It was electric. I'd never been kissed before, and I told myself that I was in love. Two days later, my girlfriend was berating me for being too clingy as we toured the Palace of Versailles. A few minutes after that, she fainted, and I carried her over to a bench. She didn't say thank you when she woke up.

I was mostly familiar with Mariko Tamaki from her work on superhero comics: she had a decent run on Detective Comics, she wrote a Supergirl book I have yet to read (it's on my shelf! I'll read it eventually!), and she created the excellent Zatanna: Bring Down the House with Javier Rodriguez. Here, though, I think Tamaki is operating in her wheelhouse: coming-of-age young adult drama with a rainbow tinge.

That Freddy is a lesbian, and that Laura is also gay (so are most of Freddy's friends!), are facts about those characters. Their realtionship is a gay relationship. The fact that they are gay is important to them as characters, but there's a tension wherein the story seems to resist categorization as a "gay story." It is a story about relationships, and that story happens to have gay themes. There's some value in that, I think - gay people are people, after all, these kinds of stories are and should be considered normal, especially as stories with gay themes come under increasing scrutiny amidst a more general right-wing cultural creep.

I came out as a transgender woman in October of 2017. I can't remember if my first girlfriend and I were together at the time or not. For five years, the cycle was consistent. Get back together, honeymoon, fight, breakup. I can't remember what the fights were about. I'm sure I was an asshole sometimes. It was still my first relationship. I'd still only had one frame of reference for how to be a partner to someone. All I can remember are the times she'd put me down, dismiss me, dismiss my interests, act carelessly or thoughtlessly to me. I remember how blase she'd acted towards me coming out. She was bisexual, so nothing had to change, right? But I knew that something did. I wasn't the same anymore. I knew what I was. I was a lesbian woman now. And this relationship that had existed in fits and starts since I was still an unhappy young man increasingly felt like a pair of clothes that no longer fit.

Tamaki is a skilled character writer, which is a boon in a genre like this. Her characters all feel well-rounded and all speak with a unique voice, and they feel well-layered with virtues and flaws. As protagonist, Freddy naturally gets the most focused, and her foibles - especially her neglect of her friends as she gets drawn more and more into Laura's orbit - are developed and explored well. Freddy becomes less and less connected to her friends as her relationship with Laura progresses, and her neglect of her relationships outside of Laura mean that when her best friend becomes pregnant by her dungeon master, she nearly isn't able to be there for them. This kind of love is like a black hole: it sucks you in, and renders you able to focus on little else. Even having stable, lasting friendships becomes difficult once you're consumed.

As a... well, I don't want to say villain. That's a little too dramatic for this kind of story. Antagonist fits, but doesn't feel dramatic enough. Hm. Ah, there's the word. As an abuser, the titular Laura Dean is almost uncomfortably realistically-written. It's easy to write an abusive character as cartoonish or over-the-top. It can even be cathartic to do so. But abuse takes many forms, some more subtle than others, and a lot of the ways that Laura abuses Freddy in this comic rang true in a way that made me queasy: saying she forgives Freddy after a fight for which Laura was in the wrong and for which Freddy never apologized; sulking when Freddy fails to give her attention and then only extending it in kind when it's convenient to her; and the one that made my stomach drop: using an impulsive mistake Freddy makes to make her own transgressions seem minor and draw Freddy further under her control by saying that "no matter what, we'll always come back to each other."

It made me remember when those words were said to me.

I broke up with my first girlfriend for the last time in March of 2018. It was over Skype video call. The full-circle nature of it all was unintentional on my part. I couldn't do it in person, so I felt that Skype was the closest I could get to giving her the courtesy the act deserved. She was sobbing. She wanted to keep trying to make it work, she said. She wanted to marry me and have my babies, she said. She loved me, she said. I didn't feel anything anymore. Maybe I never had, not really. The week before, she'd implied I was a pedophile for reblogging a picture of an anime girl. I had been talking to a girl who would give me my first lesbian heartbreak later that spring. Two months after that, I would be messaged out of the blue by a girl who isn't a girl anymore. With them I would fall in love, real love, for the first time. Today they are my best friend.

I've spoken a good amount about the writing in this book, and not enough about the composition and artwork, so let's fix that.

Rosemary Valero-O'Connell is not a name I was familiar with, and her mainstream comics work is pretty thin on the ground, but I grew to really appreciate her style in Laura Dean. Her characters are cartoony and expressive while remaining grounded in a realistic physicality. I will need to track down a copy of her own comic Don't Go Without Me, which looks even more interesting and artistic.

I want to draw attention, as well, to Valero-O'Connell's coloring and lettering. The former is effective in its restraint: the book's palette is limited to black, white, grey, and pink, the last of which is used as an accent color or to draw attention to a particular element of a panel.

Meanwhile, the tails of the book's word balloons snake and loop throughout the panels, helping to set the pace of the book's many scenes of conversation between characters, making them more engaging to read. It's a really effective example of how good lettering can enhance an otherwise mundane scene and make it more entertaining to read.

A weakness of art in a lot of standalone indie comics, and especially those illustrated by lesser-known artists, is overly-orthodox - or worse, boring - panel layouts and page composition. It's death by a thousand nine-panel grids. Happily, Laura Dean does not suffer from this malady. Valero-O'Connell's layouts are varied and creative, and in particular she makes great use of the book's limited color palette to guide the reader's eye or use negative space effectively, such as below:

A few years ago, I reconnected with my first girlfriend. She was living on the southern English coast with her boyfriend. It went okay, at first. We chatted. Caught up. But then she said something, one of those little, dismissive, thoughtless things she always used to say, and the thought crossed my mind: the kind of person you are is not the kind of person that fits in my life anymore. I blocked her. I haven't spoken to her since. May you do the same to your own Laura Dean one day. In solidarity with all my lesbian sisters in love and loss.

If young adult fiction wets your whistle - and certainly the audience for it is large - then Laura Dean is for you. If you like messy gay relationship drama, you'll find something here to satisfy you. If you like creative and appealing comic art, this book is worth a look. It's a worthwhile read - even if it doesn't hit as close to home for you as it did for me.

I just love the themes of the absolute universe so far that in spite of the bleak world they live in— It doesn't dampen the heroes' hope and sense of justice, it merely makes it more pronounced.

And GOD THESE PANELS.

I can't remember the exact jumps it took me to get to Quincy. I know the starting point: Randy Milholland's guest appearance on Behind the Bastards for a couple episodes on Dennis the Menace. guests on that show tend to be a bit of a live studio audience, there to go "wow" and "yikes" and "[noise of discomfort]" at the right moments. not Milholland, who knows his comics history. boy, I would listen to a whole podcast of him just talking about newspaper strips! anyway, I don't think he mentions Quincy while talking about integrated casts in newspaper comics, but someone he did mention sent me off on a search and someone else mentioned Ted Shearer's Quincy, and well.

you can see, right, why this comic Got Me so fast? what a cartooning style! I'm not going to dwell on Shearer's history--you can read the Comics Journal article on him just as well as I can summarize it. I want to talk about how Shearer draws.

it's hard to do that without reference to other comic strip artists, in particular, standing as foils for Shearer's style. Ernie Bushmiller of Nancy fame is maybe the paragon of an ultra clean iconic style, where everything is almost like the platonic cartoon of what it is. (I've seen Schultz placed in this tradition as well.) not Ted Shearer's work. everything's got little flourishes and elaborations and bends and variations in outline. his comics jiggle. there are times when I'm not totally sure at a glance what his marks are meant to represent, which is a problem if you think the highest calling of comics is to relay information clearly, and a lot less of a problem if you're in love with the sheer artistry of mark making. look at that snowball fight comic, for example, and the wild mess of lines, or the way Quincy's shoes and socks are sketched, in the last panel of the letter to the president comic, with just a few confident pen blotches and a bunch of negative space. even when it's economical, it somehow feels so unsatisfied with the schematic, always searching for a way to make the objects feel a little off kilter, a little dynamic.

check out that first strip there, the one about where Quincy's granny frets over the neighboring building getting demolished, because it's crucial infrastructure for her clothesline. I just paged through a collection of Bloom County I have cause I was like, well Berkley Breathed has pretty dynamic panels too right? nope! Bloom County has a dynamic brushed style that feels similar to Shearer's style, but the panel compositions and the arrangement of characters and camera and environment are typically much more static. even Calvin and Hobbes, aside from the often completely crazy sunday strips, tends to have compositions that might employ a closeup or a distance shot, but tend to have relatively cohesive shots. this three panel strip starts with a panel where Quincy, instead of standing static, listening into the phone call, seems to pop in from the left, tie fluttering with movement. (also, scope the nice tilt on that lampshade, echoing the angle of Quincy's body!) panel two seems to pull out to an unmotivated ultra long shot, that not only gives us the apartment buildings but the fence partly blocking the view! Quincy's environment is so packed that there's no room for the kind of clear view of a building you might get in a Nancy strip. and then the point of that long shot is revealed in the final panel, a CRAZY dutch angle on the two leaning out the window towards the other building, as Granny reveals the other side of her washing line is going to get torn down. to accentuate this, the sheets on the line billow, again at an angle counter to the window, Granny, and Quincy.

Shearer seems never content to just have a series of characters in situations talking to each other. his viewpoint is always swinging around, his characters always turning to show new angles of themselves. the letter comic here is the most conventional strip of the lot and even this has only two relatively similar poses. all three standing poses are in wildly different positions and angles, front, then spinning to the side, then back, tilting left, tilting right.

he also has this tendency to have characters pop up almost as though they can see the camera. it's not enough that a straightman in Quincy should turn to the audience--they tend to pop towards the foreground. in that clothesline comic, Quincy doesn't look to Granny but to us, as though inviting us to join him in wondering about the phone call that has Granny so worried. in the composition of that circus comic, Shearer finds room for the characters, despite the size of the animals, at the borders of the comic, and is willing to embrace way more pronounced perspective than I'm used to seeing in daily gag strips to do it. look at that kid just sorta peeking over the bottom edge of the frame in that last panel! there's other comics of his where inexplicably another kid in Quincy's class, for example, will just pop their head up in the last panel, somehow accentuating the punchline with their non sequitur appearance. like real kids, Shearer's kids are unruly. like a real poor urban area, the very material of the landscape is unruly.

that TCJ article lays out what Shearer's motivation may have been, for such a vibrant and lived in strip:

"My first idea is to get people to like Quincy, to get them involved with the character, and then they can see for themselves the broken-down home, the torn sneakers, etc. Then perhaps readers will say, ‘Gee, maybe we can help.’ Or even the poor white can say, ‘Gee I went through this same thing myself.’"

that approach can only work because of the detail Shearer's panels overflow with. one more comparison: don't Shearer's landscapes sometimes feel a bit like George Herriman's wobbly, shape-filled landscapes in Krazy Kat? just, less weird cacti and more scrungly fire hydrants and snaggle-toothed fences. the move from panel to panel doesn't always make diegetic sense, much like the landscape moves around Krazy, but it's so lush that in total it creates a place that feels lived in, enough that it still connects with me 40 or 50 years later. that seems a testament to Shearer's strategy, and probably has some lessons for the Clarity of Communication school of comics theory.

it all adds up to a work that should be in the pantheon right alongside someone like Bill Watterson. I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about Shearer, though. the broadest history I have--Harvey's Art of the Comic Book--doesn't cite him; nor Wolk's Reading Comics. like a lot of histories, Gardner's Projections loses track of newspaper strips sometime between the rise of Stan Lee and the rise of Comix With An X. some of that's the way the history's been canonized, but some of the way the history's been canonized is surely due to institutional racism and the pinning of the modern Art History of Comics on white men like R Crumb.

what Quincy deserves is a way of following it now... but that's not an infrastructure I can imagine anyone is interested in building. sites like comics kingdom or gocomics have snubbed rss technology for presumably the same reason social media increasingly gates all content from non-users: gotta juice the numbers and make sure direct access is the only business in town. which is sorta bizarre when it comes to a strip like this because who is signing up for a comicskingdom account, sitting down, and reading through a decade of Quincy strips? if they're already just putting the lot online for free (which, hey, I'm grateful for that, especially from a historical access perspective!!), why not set up a way to cycle through that history in a feed, shipping out the strips in the format they were meant for: something you'd see daily? but, I'm the weirdo who thinks basically the whole internet should be embracing a more broadcast syndication model. at least the comics are readable online, which means that maybe bit by bit Ted Shearer's work can get the wider cultural attention something this virtuosic deserves.

The writing is so disrespectful, condescending and outright wrong when it comes to the WAR kids. And every time one of the "original four" opened their mouths I was genuinely gritting my teeth.

WHEEL OF WEBCOMICS: THE ZINE VOLUME THREE IS OUT NOW!

As always, here's another edition of the super cool webcomic sampling zine & co-op bundle. Check it out, read some comics! Support some artists!

Don't know what Wheel of Webcomics is about? Here are some helpful graphics!

Hi!!! Given popular demand (once again lmao), I figured I should finally sit down and do a proper review of The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys🫩😋🤪.

For context: this was Gerard Way’s third published comic, and is particularly relevant to My Chemical Romance lore, since two of the band’s last music videos—Na Na Na and SING—take place within this universe.

I want to be clear from the start: I read these comics at least three times before writing this. Not because they’re dense or complex, but because I was deeply, genuinely confused. And no—that confusion is not a skill issue on my part, I swear!!!

This comic is hard to read because the story is poorly told.

Narrative Entry Point: Vibes Over Clarity

We’re introduced to the world through Dr. Death Defying’s radio show (yes, that’s Steve Righ from Mindless Self Indulgence 🤢), which acts as our main expositional device. Through him, we’re supposed to understand the current state of this universe.

Our protagonist—referred to only as the girl—tells us it’s been 12 years since “the four men” died fighting BLI. That’s… basically all the information we get.

She then says something genuinely interesting—something I would’ve normally ignored, but which became central to my critique:

“Today the guns don’t sound the same. The colors we buy now, the clothes, they’re the wrong size. Yet we still call ourselves the Killjoys.”

Please remember this. It matters🥴.

She later goes to a motel and meets a group of rebels. They talk about clothes. They discover she’s carrying the original Party Poison mask, and suddenly we’re told those Killjoys were legends (MCR).

Another character, Val Velocity, guilt-trips her by implying she’s responsible for their deaths.

Then: laser fight. Visually loud, narratively empty. We’re shown two sides—Draculoids vs. Killjoys—but we’re never told who these people actually are, what they want, or why they’re fighting.

And that’s a problem.

The book relies heavily on an already initiated audience so people who watched the music videos, read interviews, and listened to Gerard Way talk endlessly about how huge Grant Morrison’s dick is (lol sorry I had to) and lore.

In my opinion, that’s a fundamental storytelling failure. What if I don’t know MCR? What if I just want to read the comic?

The story feels incomplete, while simultaneously teasing information it never delivers. We’re constantly told the OG Killjoys mattered, but we’re never shown why🤷🏽‍♀️.

Red and Blue: How to be racist and sexist 101

Then the comic does a full 180 and introduces Red and Blue.

These characters are literally pornographic droids, explicitly called pornodroids, whose sole purpose is sexual exploitation. The text makes it clear they are sentient!! self-aware and pretty much emotionally complex.

Notably: there are no male pornodroids. Not in the story, not in the in-universe advertisements (which, to be fair, is a clever narrative device). But if you’re going to critique capitalism, overconsumption, the pharmaceutical industry, environmental destruction, and corporate homogenization, you actually have to take a stance🫩.

This book doesn’t. It flirts with critique, then immediately indulges in the spectacle. Surprised?? I warned y’all 😭😭😭

And this is where orientalism becomes unavoidable.

Red and Blue are Asian-coded bodies, hypersexualized, fetishized, and framed as disposable. This directly aligns with what Edward Said defines as orientalism:

the use of “Eastern” bodies as exotic, erotic, passive objects existing for Western consumption.

These characters are not individuals first: they are aesthetic concepts: Sexual availability is baked into their design. Their suffering is aestheticized. Their queerness is aestheticized. Their deaths are aestheticized. Everything about them is aestheticized🫩.

And this trope isn’t isolated, because it’s repeated again later with another Asian-coded female antagonist who remains nameless. Yeah lmao, It gets worse, not better.

And yes everybody: THIS IS RACIST AF 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️ ahhh

And all official BLI material is written in Japanese. Why?

Not for worldbuilding. Not for narrative necessity.

For aesthetic fetishization. Bc you can find a translation right next to it, so what’s the purpose? 🤷🏽‍♀️

Japan is used as shorthand for “futuristic,” “corporate,” and “cool”? I guess?? But lemme be clear that is stripped of cultural specificity. Meanwhile, the Asian-coded women are hypersexualized and disposable, which is fetichistic, it’s plain exoticism y’all🫩, let’s not pretend it isn’t.

(Also this lowkey vital information is not in the actual comic, you had to check this online before reading the comic, otherwise you wouldn’t understand what BLI even is. And that’s a NARRATION FLAW. That’s bad writing!! Bc this isn’t extra lore. This is crucial information to understand the book!!) That page also included a merch section🫩

Queerness as shock value

Red and Blue are in a relationship. One of them is dying because her battery is failing. There’s a brief moment where the comic almost critiques prostitution. Almost. (When Red says: our bodies will belong to each other, you can see the panel in image 3)

Then two pages later, Blue is prostituting herself again, with a man.

And also: they don’t organize. They don’t resist structurally. They don’t care about the thousands of other pornodroids still enslaved.

Their queerness exists as transgression and fetish/novelty for the reader. And that pisses me off.

I have mentioned it before and this is a recurring issue with Gerard’s writing (within MCR) or representation; because homosexuality is treated as an edgy hypersexual performance, not as something commonly human(? or even political.

He doesn’t sing about kissing a man he likes or loving them with dignity. He sings about getting fucked in the ass in prison and that’s very taboo, so he tops it with fan service, and ends up in the tabloids. And he does it bc (according to him!!!) he wants to piss people off 🤷🏽‍♀️.

And sure: at one time, using homosexuality as transgression did mean something. When visibility was radical on itself, (specially in the mainstream rock scene) but… let’s not forget this book came out in 2013. Those days were long past gone.

By then, queerness didn’t need to exist only as provocation. It could have been ordinary. It could have even been political!! in a structural sense (considering the droids we see are only women and their consumers seem to be only men??). There’s no reason to use gayness a narrative accessory (a way to complicate villains, hypersexualize characters, or idk, play woke cards?).

Korse (the fascist/ “cleanser of the desert”, “exterminator” / BLI higher cop / Grant Morrison) survives a fight that frankly makes no sense. But in the next issue, he’s revealed to have a boyfriend. Surprise! He’s gay!

I’m being sarcastic when I say this is framed as a big reveal. Why is this relevant? Oh because it’s used to humanize him.

We are expected to empathize with Korse because:

He says he’s tired of killing

He has a boyfriend

This is the “redeemable fascist” narrative (that he seems to loooove), and it’s gross. If you’ve seen the music videos, and read those Japanese articles🫩 and listen to his own words!!!: you know Korse is complicit in a fascist regime, he has killed thousand!!! Giving him a twink does not absolve him!!! Ahhh!!!

Meanwhile, Val Velocity—who represents rage, grief, after losing a friend (who btw is the first victim and, yes he’s a black character), and the desire to become a hero after all heroes are gone—is framed as dangerous or “morally corrupted” because he shoots a cop/draculoid.

Misogyny: the villain and “the girl”

Let’s talk about the villain. First of all she doesn’t have a name 🤪🥴🫩.

We are never properly introduced to her. She arrives already coded as evil: leather, dominatrix aesthetics, hypersexualized presentation, cruelty framed as personal pathology rather than ideological position.

She is not a political figure, not a corporate strategist, not a symbolic embodiment of BLI, she doesn’t have a purpose other than keeping BLI alive??? Nope. she is a fetishized evil woman.

That’s all she is. There’s no need to over explain, bc there’s nothing to say about her character.

And this matters because the only prominent women in this story fall into three categories:

1. Prostituted bodies (pornodroids),

2. A hypersexualized female villain,

3. “The girl.”

That’s it.

She kills Korse’s boyfriend not because of ideology or storyline logic?? but “because love has weakened him”.

This reduces her role to a jealous, punitive force, not a political agent.

She exists to be defeated, aged (yeah she turns old at the end?? That’s never explained btw!!), stripped of power and left alone to die and rot. So… in other words: she exists to be punished.

Compare her to Korse.

Why is he allowed interiority, doubt, redemption and humanity, but not her? Isn’t she supposed to be the main antagonist? Also according to Gerard if BLI weren’t necessarily the “bad guys”: why is she such a flat character that doesn’t even get a name or a backstory?

Now let’s talk about the girl— because the problem isn’t just that she’s the chosen one. It’s how she’s chosen.

She is the only girl in the group, surrounded exclusively by older men, unnamed!!! narratively passive until the plot needs her not to be.

This is textbook Smurfette Principle: a single female character inserted into a male ensemble, defined not by her relationships with other women (there are none), but by how she moves among men.

And yes: THIS IS MISOGYNISTIC 🫩.

She doesn’t get a name: which is framed as symbolic, but in practice just makes her less human. She is a vessel. The boys have names, histories, costumes, quirks. She only has destiny.

So I have to ask the natural questions:

why is she the only girl?

Why there are no characters with her age?

Why is her community exclusively older—if not adult— men?

Because this is not about representation even when Gerard so desperately wants you to believe that, nananana girl lock tf in bc this is a tale as oooold as time, it’s a fantasy: the exceptional girl who is “cool enough” to run with the boys. And idk about y’all, but for me the “precocious little girl who can hang with robots and men” trope always feels off. And sexist 🫩.

This trope repeats almost every time Gerard creates a female protagonist, imo (Penny Parker, Paradise Gardens, Casey in Doom Patrol and I’m pretty sure it happens in TUA), and it always carries the same implication: femininity/womanhood is isolating!! and irrelevant!!! and the only way to matter is to be singular, desexualized-but-special, and chosen, chosen by a bunch of guys.

And crucially: her rejection of violence at the end doesn’t come from political consciousness, PLOT or character development😭😭. It comes from being special enough to transcend the conflict.

Which is a messianic take on the character!!

(And it’s funny bc Val Velocity mentions this!!!)

Identity: how to buy your inner-self

I’ve said it before, and that’s why it was important to remember that quote from the beginning, because this comic is obsessed with looks. Hair. Makeup. Clothes. Weight. Bodies.

There’s literally a character sheet that lists the girl’s weight😐, and reassures us she’s white—Because if y’all thought that was a poc child? Oh no no no no, she’s CANONICALLY FAIR SKINNED AND HAS AUBURN STRAIGHT HAIR NOW. Lmao😭😭😭 fucking unnecessary😂😂 bc I remember back in the days we used to headcanon her as black or Latin, but whatever. That was a moment to add inclusivity, my guy!! But nope, even when she looks like she could be a poc: we’re reminded she’s not, lmao.

Also the cat being the spy 🥴🥴 ehh 🤨 bro, Scabbers much? Yeah, that’s the big reveal in Harry Potter 3 😂🥴. You’re not gagging anyone, sir 😭😩. And trust me: I WANNA BE GAGGED. I wanna be SURPRISED FOR GOOD. But this is just so disappointing for so many different reasons.

Anyways, back to the story AND THIS IS IMPORTANT BC that’s what ultimately breaks this story forme and it’s its understanding of identity.

In Killjoys, clothing is treated as the primary language of individuality: hair, makeup, color, silhouettes, all that? That’s WHO YOU ARE. Not just an extra, noooo, the way you dress? That’s your whole identity, babes🤨.

And I’ve noticed this logic echoes again and again in Gerard Way’s fandom: the idea that who you are is somewhat inseparable from what you wear. That selfhood is legible through fashion choices. That if you change your look, you’ve changed yourself.

Maybe this hits harder for me because I grew up very aware of what authoritarian regimes actually look like. And that’s why I call bullshit, lmao 🥴.

idk if this is gonna be news to some but dictatorships don’t just regulate clothes— they regulate speech, movement, memory, family, labor, fear.

So the idea that identity could be reduced to color palettes or outfits feels not only shallow, but insulting. If someone tried to define me by my clothes, I’d punch them in the face. Genuinely.

And beyond being politically flimsy, it’s also cruel.

Bc appearance is not permanent: Bodies change. People age. Illness happens. Poverty happens. Violence happens. Transphobic laws happen.

To suggest that identity lives primarily in how you look is to build selfhood on something fragile and disposable.

It turns identity into something you can lose😔— something that can be taken or priced out of reach. And that’s a horrible message to send.

Which brings me back to BLI.

The story implies that BLI strips people of color, fashion, and style as a form of control— but it never explains why.

What does BLI gain from desaturation? From homogenized clothing? From aesthetic repression? How is it related to energy? (That’s seems to be the currency or their main ambition).

The comic doesn’t answer this, because it doesn’t want to interrogate power— it wants the visuals. Sounds familiar? *cough* LLTBP *cough*.

A more meaningful, genuinely anti-capitalist message would have been this:

institutions can strip you of your “colors,” yes— your culture, your language, your creativity— but that identity doesn’t die there.

It lives in memory, ethics, relationships, resistance, and collective action. It persists even when the aesthetics are gone.

That would have been humanist. That would have been political.

Yes, free Palestine 🇵🇸 free Congo 🇨🇩 free Sudan 🇸🇩 🗣️and free everybody who is a victim of these regimes and politics🗣️protect the dolls, protect the people who are protesting🗣️.

Instead, we get slogans like “follow the path, you’ll find the way”— empty mysticism that replaces structural critique with ✨vibes✨. A message that’s easy to merch. And this worldbuilding is cemented in merch.

Bc it turns out that this is what the story was actually about: finding your path even when you feel lost. Self discovery. Ehh 🤨??? huh🤔 what 😮.

The fact that this framework comes from a 30-year-old man makes it even harder to ignore. At some point, reducing identity to fashion, empathizing with fascists and including two pedophiles in a music video that has a little girl as a protagonist? stops being youthful rebellion and starts feeling like arrested development, a refusal to engage with what power actually does to people.

And I, for real was expecting some heartfelt life lesson, since he lowkey talks about that in the promo interviews.

I wanna let y’all with my message: real resistance isn’t cute. Identity doesn’t disappear when the clothes do and just like Harry Potter—and I’m gonna quote Ursula Le Guin— this comic was stylistically ordinary (and confusing), imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.

Bad writing meets questionable ideals and beautiful aesthetics

Not long ago, this fragment of an old interview started circulating again. A lot of people reacted with a collective ehh… yikes 😬, because there is simply no universe in which those two forces operate on the same moral level.

The immediate defense was predictable: that was a long time ago, the comic wasn’t finished yet, things evolved, BLI are obviously the bad guys now. But after re-reading the comic carefully, I don’t think that idea evolved at all. If he was making that on the go, he for sure kept it🤷🏽‍♀️.

Gerard has also said that the Killjoys aren’t rebels — they’re survivalists. And honestly? He’s right.

but!!! That has far more to do with Gerard’s stated intentions and personal opinions than with what the story actually develops on the page.

Within the narrative itself, the Killjoys consistently label themselves as rebels and are presented through the aesthetics/symbolism of rebellion. The text wants us to read them that way. The problem is that they’re not… Bc they’re not organizing, unionizing, they are not building networks, they’re not trying to dismantle BLI structurally. They kill a few draculoids, they glamorize violence, then go play video games, body-shame each other, argue about clothes, and drift from set piece to set piece.

In that sense, Gerard is technically right— they function as survivalists. But that truth only becomes visible when the reader does the analytical work the narrative itself refuses to do.

if the Killjoys were always meant to be survivalists, then the story fails to dramatize that distinction. And if they were meant to be rebels, then the story fails to show rebellion. Either way, the result is the same: a disconnect between authorial intent and textual execution, where meaning has to be retroactively explained in interviews instead of being earned through character development.

I wanna add that punk is framed here as a collection of angry, hedonistic people who celebrate violence for catharsis or pleasure. When historically, music (and punk as a subculture) has been one of the most powerful tools of protest, community-building, and political articulation. Gerard knows this.

And yet here, punk is used to promote and Easter Egg the Mad Gear and Missile Kid EP.

Almost every element of this world is tied back to consumption, and that it’s not a critique on Gerard’s behalf, nope, that’s the structural foundation of the comic. The substance.

The clothes, the masks, the guns, the animal heads, the music itself. The worldbuilding feels like it was designed merchandise-first.

Anyways, back to that original moral framing;

BLI aren’t evil, the Killjoys aren’t good.

First of all: I don’t buy it. And more importantly, the text doesn’t support it.

BLI are a fascistic corporate regime that drugs the population, enforces aesthetic conformity, commodifies bodies, and exploits sentient beings under a sex economy. The Killjoys are sloppy, unserious, and ethically inconsistent — but the idea that these two forces exist on equal moral footing is absurd.

The problem is that the story wants moral ambiguity without doing the political work required to earn it. So instead, we get empathy extended toward obvious bad actors, while structural violence is aestheticized or waved away.

Bc the writers take a remarkable amount of time trying to convince us that Korse is “not actually a bad guy”, simply bc he doesn’t want to kill anymore, he has a twink boyfriend by his side, he spares a pornodroid from death.

We’re meant to read these moments as proof of humanity, as moral depth. Then, to really hammer it in, he’s positioned as a victim: about to be brainwashed by the hypersexualized dominatrix antagonist, whose motivation is apparently that she wants him to stop loving and go back to killing 🤧😈. Because she’s actually evil !!! 😈

The narrative retroactively softens the violence of the regime by revealing that draculoids were once human— their souls removed, their agency stripped. They’re not really responsible: they were forced to kill, to drug people, and, apparently, to participate in the sexual economy of Battery City as well.

There’s also a higher-ranking police force called the scarecrows, and those are the “real” bad guys. Why? Because they still have “agency” aka they’re not brainwashed.

But wait— so does Korse.

The difference is that Korse gets interiority. Korse gets a boyfriend, bc he’s suddenly complex?? and we’re meant to feel sorry for him??

I think it reveals something uncomfortable about how morality works in this universe: redemption is not tied to accountability, or to the harm caused, or to dismantling the system you upheld. It’s tied to relatability. To whether the audience can see themselves in you.

And once you notice it, it starts to feel like a pattern rather than a one-off choice. I don’t even want to bring up Long Live the Black Parade here, but if you’ve read my review, the resemblance in storytelling is impossible to ignore: the same tendency to appropriate real historical violence, real systems of oppression— only to ultimately say nothing meaningful about them.

Which is why none of this feels accidental. It feels like a foretelling of how Gerard conceptualizes the world: systems aren’t the problem, individuals are; violence is tragic but abstract; fascism is bad… except when the soldiers are sad or in love.

The death of MCR: DANGER DAYS, Conventional Weapons and the future.

I’m going to get a little speculative here, and this is entirely my personal opinion, but I think I finally understand why this record inevitably killed the band.

Back then, people used to say that all the time, and I agreed for all the wrong reasons. I was twelve. I believed this record killed the band because it was colorful, because it didn’t look like what My Chemical Romance had done before, because it felt “too different.”

Almost fifteen years later, I still think this record assassinated the band: but for the opposite reason.

It didn’t break away from anything. It trapped them inside yet another Gerard-curated world.

There’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Danger Days: on one hand, it’s supposedly fighting against the way the world tries to label My Chemical Romance, against being boxed in/categorized. On the other, it forces everyone involved (band and audience alike) to wear costumes, adopt personas, and participate in a tightly controlled narrative universe.

And to be clear: Gerard performing in character isn’t the problem. That’s always been part of his artistry, and there’s nothing wrong with needing a persona to perform. But when that persona becomes the entire project, something gets lost.

You can actually see this tension play out in that long 40-minute interview about the Killjoys. Gerard is deeply invested in the lore— explaining it, defending it, expanding it. Meanwhile, whenever Frank or Ray chime in, you can feel the distance. They ride with Gerard, they trust the vision, they like the project, yes, but they don’t treat the worldbuilding as sacred. They keep reminding us this is theme-based, not a rigid concept.

And every time they loosen the grip, Gerard tightens it again.

That’s when it becomes clear: this isn’t really a My Chemical Romance record. It’s a Killjoys soundtrack.

Just like The Black Parade is slowly becoming the soundtrack to DRAAG.

Every song there is tethered— either to the comic, to Gerard’s personal life, and therefore: a strong link to MSI🤢. Not necessarily bc of Summertime, but due to Gerard including Jimmy in the video and Steve Righ as an important character: “Doctor Death Defying.”

I think Conventional Weapons is such an interesting counterpoint— even when I don’t like all of the songs— bc it allegedly didn’t have this strict overarching storyline. And you can feel that freedom immediately. That’s how we got songs like Boy Division— which feels like a more mature, sharpened evolution of something that could’ve existed on Bullets.

The World Is Ugly could’ve fit seamlessly into The Black Parade. The Light Behind Your Eyes works beautifully as a bridge between Three Cheers and TBP.

And I know that Frank and Ray have expressed disdain towards albums that feel “kinda lost” and experimental like Bullets, but I think bullets wasn’t lost in direction or concept: it was their all or nothing moment, and yes: it had experimentation in the sound but bc it was their first big recording. They were literally testing out guitars, pedals, vocals, drums. They didn’t have the freedom that comes with financial stability, a big ass studio, an experienced producer and budget to buy expensive equipment.

Still, Danger Days, by contrast, is something entirely new— and that’s not a bad thing. Not at all. I like Danger Days. But it’s also incredibly limited.

There are barely any full songs. The intro isn’t a song. There are two interludes. And I say this as someone who loves a high-concept album: I genuinely think I loved this record more before I ever read the comics, lmao 😂.

I think the album is too good for that comic.

Given the talent of everyone in MCR, the way they perform these songs gives us far richer emotional textures and more interesting interpretations than anything found on the page.

Which is why I find The Foundations of Decay so exciting. It feels like old MCR— not in the sense that everything needs to sound like Bullets, but in the sense that the band once again sounds like it has something to say. Together.

It’s MCR with a bigger budget, yes— but also with fewer constraints. Less lore. Less costume. More meaning, and yes: experimentation and FUN.

And that, to me, was always the heart of the band.

If you made it so far: THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING😂😂 Hopefully y’all liked this review (it was a bit all over the place at one point), remember to please keep the comment section respectful and you can absolutely share your opinions on the comic or the music!

zoe’s comics wrap-up - march 2026

⤿┆aka a compilation of the comics I read in march, plus some thoughts on them!

⤿┆please, remember that everything is based solely on my personal opinion and preferences. my point here is to have fun and try to share it with you!

be careful, spoilers ahead!

★. BATMAN: SON OF THE DEMON