10 Years Ago, DC Comics Teamed With the ‘00s Greatest Rock Star for the Weirdest Comics of the 21st Century

DC Comics is the home of the most groundbreaking comics of all time. Now, there’s an argument that Marvel has also broken a lot of new ground in comics, but mostly only in superheroes. The House of Ideas do amazing superhero stories, but that’s all they do. There’s a reason why they don’t have a horror line that can actually be successful, folks. However, DC has followed the example of non-American comics, using the medium to tell any kind of story out there. The House of Ideas helped kick off the maturation of the medium in the early ’80s, but DC took that and ran with it, becoming the home of the most varied lines of comics in history.

DC Comics in the ’80s saw a great expansion of the publisher’s types of stories, bringing in the greatest talent from across the medium. Swamp Thing began the march towards the release of Vertigo, a line of comics that took from every genre to create amazing mature stories. Its success saw DC create numerous publishing imprints throughout the ’90s, like the forgotten Helix line where Transmetropolitan began. Imprints would fall out of favor in the ’00s, and eventually, even the sainted Vertigo line of comics disappeared. However, in 2016, DC would try imprints again, and they’d team up with the 21st century ‘sbiggest rock star to create one. That’s right, it’s time to talk about My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way and the Young Animal imprint.

Young Animal Was the Rebirth of Late ’80s DC

Gerard Way became a rock star, but what he always wanted to be was a comic creator. Way and his brother Mikey loved comics, and in 2001, Way was trying to break into comics while working as an intern at Cartoon Network. He was in New York City, going to work, on September 11th and it changed his life forever (as evidenced by the song “Skylines and Turnstiles”) and the band he started with Mikey became one of the kings of emo. My Chemical Romance was huge (I saw them twice; Gerard sweated on me at a club show and I still have the t-shirt), but the band ended in 2013.

They were known for their “concept albums”, albums that told a story, and their last album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, and would get a comic adaptation (Grant Morrison was also in the videos for the album; the two became friends and talked comics a lot). Way would later team up with Gabriel Ba to create The Umbrella Academy, a comic that got mega-popular. Eventually, he started talking to DC and it led to the Young Animal line.

The Young Animal line was a return to the late ’80s in a lot of ways. Way loved books like Doom Patrol under Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollack, so we got books like that. The first four books were Doom Patrol, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Mother Panic, and Shade the Changing Girl, gathering characters that no one was using and creating new ones to tell the weirdest stories imaginable. Way and Nick Derrington’s Doom Patrol was the flagship, a ten-issue run that is the rebirth of Morrison and Pollack’s run on the team, but the other books were all fantastic.

Fans were hooked. Way recruited creators like Cecil Castellucci and Marley Zarcon on Shade, Jodi Houser and Tommy Lee Edwards on Mother Panic, and Way joined Jon Rivera and Michael Avon Oeming on Cave Carson. These books took the maturity of the late ’80s and added to it the kind of weirdness that you can only get from DC Comics. These first four titles were a success, even getting their own event story “Milk Wars” that crossed over with the DC heroes, and we got books like Bug: The Adventures of Forager, Eternity Girl, Collapser, Far Sector, Shade, the Changing Woman, Cave Carson Has an Interstellar Eye, and Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds. All of these books kept to the strangeness of the others, and introduced readers to Jo Mullein, the current star of Absolute Green Lantern.

Young Animal Was the Perfect Blast from the Past

Gerard Way loved comics, and wanted to work for DC for his entire childhood. Becoming a rock star derailed those ambitions, but he eventually returned to his dream with The Umbrella Academy. That led him back to DC Comics and gave readers Young Animal. I was there when it began (I even still have the ashcan edition that homaged DC’s old Who’s Who books), and it was a breath of fresh air in the ’10s. It felt like a rebirth of the best parts of DC Comics.

Young Animal paid homage to the most important era of modern DC, the late ’80s, before Vertigo. It was a time when creators from outside the US took numerous old DC ideas that no one cared about and took them in weird, mature, new directions. It was exciting to get comics like that again, especially in 2016, and that combined with DC Rebirth #1 showed that DC was truly back (although, that wouldn’t last long). Young Animal was an amazing moment in comic history, reminding everyone why DC was the greatest comic publisher of all time. It was wild, it was weird, it was rock and roll. It was everything you could want comics to be.

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