My comic book romance: why Gerard Way ditched emo for ink

It’s perhaps an exaggeration to say that comic books saved Gerard Way’s life, but they certainly played their part. “I was often quite a depressed teenager,” says the former My Chemical Romance frontman. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing as group therapy until I read about it in a Doom Patrol comic.”

As a teen, New Jersey-born Way worked in a comic shop, and that particular DC comic was just finishing up its four-year run under the stewardship of writer . It embodied the quirky, often grotesque feeling that a lot of early 90s comic books embraced, especially those under the “mature readers” Vertigo imprint later published by DC. Morrison’s Doom Patrol