transcription under the cut:
I don’t have a lot of friends.
I have always been a “quality over quantity” individual, but having said that, I have recently come to the conclusion that I am somewhat “allergic” to them. It’s not that I can’t keep friends. It’s just that I have a hard time meeting them, making them, and connecting with them, and they mostly predate being in a band. They fit on less than one hand, and I hold them all very dear.
Now I see other friends more often than Shaun, but when I see Shaun I tend to do things with him that I don’t do with anyone else I know. As he mentioned in his wonderful afterword, these activities could involve anything from becoming Secret Santas, to giving rotten food full personalities. One time I awoke in a sketchy hotel room the band was barely able to afford on tour, only to find a full suit of handmade armor, fashioned from bits of tinfoil and whatever else was unfortunate enough to be lying on the floor of the room. It has always been this way with Shaun; things happen when we get in the same room.
So it was no surprise that when we ended up spending a few moments together we created a universe, and like he said, this universe was very different than the one we provided for public consumption. Mostly. Somewhat. But not really.
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (and when I use this title I speak of the entire endeavor—liquid idea, rock album concept, live-action vignettes, indie comic miniseries) was the most ambitious and encompassing creative project I have ever been involved in, and it was nearly my last.
To me, in the end, the project was about so much more than the story—it was about the creative process itself, and a final charge up the hill—one last vie for immortality while we still had our youth. But lots of lessons were learned on this journey, and one of them was that you don’t achieve immortality by vying for it; you do it by living a fearless existence while the rest of the world sorts out how it will be remembered.
You also can’t force your creations to behave and achieve like your creations before them, and The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys was more rebellious in that regard than anything I had a hand in creating, as it was designed to be. So it took some time, as Shaun has said, and for me it took some time to fully embrace what this creation was, from the ray guns to the music, through the characters.
Mike is the original Killjoy. His name comes from the nickname I gave Mikey Way during the tracking of The Black Parade, because Mikey had become so calm and collected after his departure from the haunted Paramore [sic] house. He would show up, big black boots on, and do a bass part in one take. The character was the starting point in my brain for the comic, and like Shaun said, very different. In every way the character that would become Party Poison and then Val Velocity would hold inside of him every hope and fear attached to my life at that moment. And more so than Death, the leader of the Black Parade, I fought with Mike to retain my identity.
Despite Killjoys being such a colorful book, one of the things I like about it is that pretty much with the exception of the Girl, everyone is black and white. Mike Milligram stands so diametrically opposed to what my life in the band had become that he was on a suicide mission to destroy it.
Shaun and I had created the character out of our need to express our distaste for homogenization of our youth culture into our thirties, and inside of Mike were the emotions of anger and frustration with a platform to take it out on people. As Mike, and then Party Poison, and then Val fights the omnipresent BL/ind corporation, so I fought with my own corporation. And I’m not talking about record companies; I’m talking about the corporation we become.
When success occurs, you create a machine to sustain it, so the more I became wrapped up in this character, the more I did to sabotage its function.
It started with the basic and most important things, the sound of things. If something sounds like it works in the machine, then find me the thing that is furthest away from it—find me the thing that starts to break apart the machine—find me the sound that breaks things.
Two completed albums later, the sound was there.
Visually, find me thing that is furthest away, find me the color of irritation, give me bright red. I had become again so wrapped up in the character of Mike Milligram/Party Poison that one day, during a fitting for costumes in Hollywood with Colleen Atwood for the video “Na Na Na Na Na Na Na NA Na Na Na Na Na NA Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na…” I was alone, and standing in front of a full-length mirror, I snapped a photo of someone altogether different than who I had been two years before. And the transformation occurred and continued into the next year, touring and jetting all over the glove, making rash decisions and sticking it to “the man” (myself), getting further and further away from my identity at top speed until it felt like all the bolts in the machine were going to slip out of circuit, and everything, including my well being, would break apart.
The crash never occurred, the wreck never came, and out of love for my family and animalistic self-preservation I learned the most important lesson of the saga:
Or find something in the middle, something tangible. Real people don’t have wars with sci-fi dystopian megaconglomerates. They get up and go to work. They show up on time, they live in the minute and not in the fog present.
And that, to me, is how the book was finished, by looking inward, to that inner sixteen-year-old girl—the one that lives in the pages of this book, the one that saves everyone by evolving—by getting up, getting on her feet, and being real.
This book exists because Shaun helped me show up, and Becky stuck with us. Nate gave it “BOOMS”, Dan gave it brilliant color, and Sierra kept us on the tracks (patiently and diligently). The end result is a work that was fabricated by hundreds of individuals, most of them fictional, but in the end the real ones got it done.
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