Paranoid Gardens #1 Review: The Broken, the Beaten, and the Bizarre

Gerard Way and Shaun Simon's new series is a surreal, unsettling delight.

By Jenna Anderson

Much like his music with the ubiquitous emo rock band My Chemical Romance, the comics of Gerard Way seem to arrive in my life at exactly the right moments. The first volume of Way and Gabriel Bá's The Umbrella Academy became a sacred text among my adolescent friend group, as we passed around a single dog-eared copy and reveled in the bizarre family drama within. Way and Nick Derington's Doom Patrol revival arrived just before a period of great change in my life, with an explosion of creativity and personal agency that still lingers in my head. Time will only tell exactly how Paranoid Gardens, the newest Dark Horse Comics venture co-written by Way, will encapsulate the current chapter of my life, but the overwhelming promise on display in its debut issue has me thrilled. 

Paranoid Gardens #1 follows an eclectic menagerie of characters at Paradise Gardens, a reclusive care center which appears to be a lot more than literally meets the eye. Amid a mix of superheroes, aliens, and other bizarre creatures is Loo, an orderly beginning to doubt her role in the hierarchy of things, as well as her own memory. 

It is truly impossible to define Paranoid Gardens with a single genre or element, as the first issue already folds in gaps in memory, an untrustworthy superhero, grotesque-but-endearing humanoid monsters, and some sort of massive multimedia conspiracy. This smattering of elements could easily result in a disjointed premise and at first glance, Paranoid Gardens #1 can be read as a disparate series of kooky or unsettling vignettes. But through Way and Shaun Simon's script, nearly all of these elements are strong enough to provoke curiosity as much as confusion. The only weak point, solely in the first issue, are Loo's memory gaps, which are beautiful but unfulfilling when compared to other high-concept subplots.

It will remain to be seen if the lore of Paranoid Gardens becomes as operatic and beloved as Way's work on The Umbrella Academy or The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, but the series certainly has plenty of runway to reach that point. Following the age-old trend of mainstream comics funneling other art forms or cultural touchstones through their work, the multimedia menagerie of Paranoid Gardens seems to convey themes of age, agency, and discomfort. Again, the issue only has so much real estate to effectively establish those themes, but the execution gives each panel or bizarre sequence a surprising amount of narrative weight.

The aesthetic of Paranoid Gardens is inherently ambitious, betraying and baffling a readers' own sense of reality at plenty of turns. Chris Weston's art proves to be well-suited to that challenge, effectively (outside of the occasional overdesigned facial expression) grounding the issue's humanoid characters and overall sense of space. As a result, the surreal elements of Paranoid Gardens #1 are presented for maximum impact, with the pacing and panel design furthering the proverbial punchline. Dave Stewart's colors present nearly every hue imaginable, while once again grounding the ordinary elements in stale greens, grays, and browns. Nate Piekos' blocky all-caps lettering gives weight to every one-liner while creating a kind of timelessness that suits the issue's disparate elements. 

On paper, the miscellaneous elements that compose Paranoid Gardens #1 shouldn't make sense. Luckily, with Gerard Way and Shaun Simon's one-of-a-kind yarn of a script and Chris Weston's gloriously unsettling art, there is an undeniable sense that the series will be something distinct and memorable. While not without a handful of aesthetic flaws, the execution of Paranoid Gardens #1 is a bizarre and beautiful slow burn. 

Published by Dark Horse Comics

On July 17, 2024

Written by Gerard Way and Shaun Simon

Art by Chris Weston

Colors by Dave Stewart

Related:

Letters by Nate Piekos

Cover by Chris Weston

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