The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California

by Gerard Way

[inlibrisveritas]

3.5 Stars.

Some may recognize the authors name, others may not, but he is the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. He’s had one other comic series before this but I love the idea of comics that follow a storyline on an album. Only one other band that I know of does this and that’s Coheed and Cambria, but it’s a great idea and I’m very open to the idea. I listened to their album Danger Days, which is ‘set’ in the world of Killjoys and is actually a prequel to the story. The whole album has the same feel as the story but the two music videos you might want to watch ahead time is Na Na Na and SING which will give the prequel’s story so you understand what’s going on right from the beginning.

When True Lives start the Girl from the music videos has grown into a teenager and is still raw over the deaths of her friends. The world is both a post apocalyptic waste land and a spotless dystopian, and they clash frequently under the overly hot sun. Everyone is living in the shadow of the Killjoys who are both revered and considered failures, so of course they’re going to have imitators who want even more glory. The Girl falls into these wannabes circle and works to help them strike back against BLI so that she might avenge the deaths of the Killjoys. The world is both simple and complicated and I loved seeing the huge difference between the desert and Battery City. However I had trouble following in the beginning because there is little to no timely world building and I was stuck trying to piece together just exactly what sort of world this was. I did like the incredibly odd starkness of Battery City which contains both normal humans and droids which look human, and at times the lines are blurred between who is and is not a droid. The whole idea is fantastic and I loved the amount of angst in each of the young characters, but it took me a while to get to that point due to the rather abrupt beginning.

The storytelling is very much like some sort of anthem song and in some cases lines from the cd are used, which only furthers that. It’s incredibly strong writing in most of the story, excluding both the beginning and the end of issue 6 which left me somewhat confused. I’m not really sure occurs after the Girl does what she wanted to do, and it brought down my enjoyment a bit because I wasn’t sure if it made a difference or not. However I did enjoy the overall adventure, rebellion and oddness of the whole story. I’m not sure if this will be continued or if this is the only volume, but if they do continue I’ll definitely check it out.