Paranoid Gardens

Reviews

Tegan O'Neil | May 29, 2025

So what’s up with that Gerard Way? Are they doing alright? I worry, you know. There was a My Chemical Romance reunion a couple years ago, or so I heard. I’d hate to hear they were back to bagging groceries at the local ShopRite!

They’ve got a bit of a sideline in comic books. If memory serves me well — and why wouldn’t it? — I wrote the Journal’s review for that first collection of Umbrella Academy stories, with art by Gabriel Ba, all the way back in the dawning months of the Obama Administration. Were we ever so young? As I recall it was a fine shot across the bow for an enthusiastic rookie, a dollop of Claremont and a bit more than a dollop of Morrison, mixed up into a fine paste and spread with trowel across the page. Apparently someone was paying attention to my review, because not only were there more Umbrella Academy adventures. They even made a TV show.

The career of Gerard Way attests to one simple, incontrovertible truth: comic books are better than rock & roll. You just can’t make a living singing to sold-out stadiums full of adoring fans, especially not with the government crackdown on Emo. If you want that steady payday, well friend, it’s comics for the win. Sure enough: since My Chemical Romance was outlawed in 2013, Way didn’t just return to comics, they even had their own vanity imprint for DC. It was called Young Animal and it put out a lot of good comics from 2016 to 2021. Enough good comics to make you wonder why they ever stopped!  

All of which is to say, comics is now and always stricken by a plague of wealthy parvenues. The most famous such parvenue — the ur-parvenue for the industry, if you will — is Kevin Smith, who back in the '90s bartered small notoriety in the large world of movies into large notoriety in the small world of comics. See how that works? Big fish, small pond. Did you know that Keanu Reaves has his own comics franchise? It’s called BRZRKR, written with Matt Kindt and drawn by Ron Garney. I just this week learned that Post Malone has his own comic book, but I steadfastly refuse to add a single scintilla of information to that knowledge. He’s a musician, right? The question that confronts any such fugitive creator: are you willing to stick around long enough to be more than just a celebrity carpetbagger hawking a wannabe franchise? Smith, for his sins, bleeds India ink. We’ve tried to throw him out, repeatedly, but he just keeps sneaking back when no one is looking.

And Gerard Way? They wrote a Cave Carson story. Rock stars have options, you know. No one was putting a gun to Way’s head to force them to write a Cave Carson story. Our twenty-first century world is specifically constructed in such a way that no one has to write about Cave Carson unless they really want to. As I was saying: comic books are better than rock & roll, QED.

All of which brings us up to speed with 2024 and the release of Paranoid Gardens, Way’s latest comics project, six issues serialized from Dark Horse across the middle of last year. The story is credited to Way and Shaun Simon. Simon has worked alongside Way for decades, first in his capacity as a touring keyboardist for My Chemical Romance, and later as a co-writer with Way for The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, among other projects alongside both Way and Way’s brother, Mikey.

Paranoid Gardens is drawn by Chris Weston, incidentally. I’ve written about Chris Weston before. He’s pretty swell! He worked with Grant Morrison on The Filth, in 2002, a fact I am absolutely, 100% certain Gerard Way knows. Weston is well-chosen for the present assignment. He draws deadpan detail well, superb point-blank verisimilitude in the same vein as so many other artists to come up through the trenches in 2000 AD. Paranoid Gardens is set in a residential hospital facility for the aging and the ailing. Not a lot of heroic foreshortening, lots of nurses pushing around carts larded down with medical supplies. Everyone’s wearing a different uniform. Dave Stewart provides colors, and the palette is suitably grounded, except for when it very much isn’t. I like Nate Piekos’ letters — a computer font, sure, but one that counterfeits the human touch with a pleasing roundness.  

Anyway, yes, yes, it’s about hospital and features ambulances, get out your Gerard Way bingo card, “all just a sad song with nothing to say / about a lifelong wait for a hospital stay,” etc. Of course I’m down. Friend, I try not to brag, but it is incumbent to remind you: I didn’t just listen to My Chemical Romance, I blogged about listening to My Chemical Romance. No fronting! We’re all about love, up here in The Comics Journal. 

So yeah, I’m happy to see Way stuck around in comics. They’ve got themes and motifs strung across a bunch of different kinds of stories in multiple mediums and genres. Good work with a lot of good people. Finding fame and fortune in the world of rock & roll as a back door to building a significant side career in comics — as I said, no fronting. You would if you could, too. 

What’s it all about, then? As I said, we’re in a hospital, on first glance a rather desultory place to set a comic book. It’s a weird hospital serving a weird client population of space aliens and superheroes. The head of the facility is dying of a real disease and wants to sell out to a strange cult built around a cartoon character named Cheeky Monkey, presented as an analogue to Mickey Mouse. Evil monks with dollar sign necklaces offer the Gardens’ director eternal life — including a cure for his terminal disease — in exchange for aiding a hostile takeover of the facility. The Cheeky Monkeys don’t actually want to own a hospital facility, no, what they want is the magic grounds. Of course, as the story unfolds, it turns out that the attempt might just kill the strange magic in the hospital’s foundations, but when has that ever stopped a corporation from doing anything?

Our heroine is a new staff counselor at the facility, a woman named Loo with an unfortunate bit of amnesia, carrying a rather large chunk of tragedy in her background. Because yes, friend, there is much ado about the treatment and recovery of trauma herein, that great shibboleth of post-Millennial artwork. Of course it must be said, trauma is one of the great thematic preoccupation of human expression since the dawn of recorded art. It sticks out now only inasmuch as recent decades have spread so much in the way of the cod-technical language of therapy-speak across society as a whole, along with a wider understanding of just how much human behavior is influenced by trauma. It was there all along in your Homer and your Hemingway, they just didn’t talk about it like they grew up watching Dr. Phil.

Because what is life in the post-Millennium but constant aggravated trauma? Loo’s background, as it is eventually revealed, is tragic and numbing in the same way as so much real life in our modern age, a series of unimaginably sad events leading to . . . more unimaginably sad events, and on down the line. A lifelong wait for a hospital stay, as they say. And we’re all just supposed to live with it! Get up and go back to work because clearly the landlord doesn’t accept payment in trauma dollars. Loo has magic powers, of course, but that’s not really important. Her figuring out how to use those powers complicates the plot, but it’s a sideline to the matter of her coming to terms with what she’s done. 

The fantasy at the heart of Paranoid Gardens is less magic powers and more a fantasy of caring and wholeness, the story of an outpost of rehabilitation in a world that just keeps swinging the hammer. At first it seems like the facility might have a sinister secret. There’s meat in the walls, just like in a Tool video. Only, as it plays out, the meat in the walls is actually our friend. The meat in the walls is uniquely vulnerable. The real menace, of course, is money. People who have so much money that other people are no longer real, just inanimate obstacles. People who would think nothing of emptying a hospital to make room for a resort. 

Nostalgia is part of the calculation, certainly. The present is so terrible that people are happy to forget it completely, and that’s precisely the kind of dislocation money can buy. There’s certainly something to the Disney-like corporation strip-mining every facet of the world for the private edification of a small group of ultra-rich. Hardly a novel setup, only obvious because it’s a ubiquitous feature of all our daily lives. The story is wise not to put too much weight on this part, because it’s really the least interesting facet in the story. It’s not supposed to be interesting. The grody plutocrat dudes who live their life around the contours of weird old cartoons are not worthy of our respect or our interest. The interesting part is the people who live and work at the facility, whose lives are threatened by the great big banality of the Cheeky Monkey industrial complex.

I’ll extend a rare compliment to Paranoid Gardens: its a book that demands to be reread immediately. As soon as I finished the series, and all the final mysteries unfurled, I picked up the first issue and went right back through. It reads substantively different the second time, a remarkable trick for anyone. I hope Way sticks around in comics for the long haul. (I’m fairly certain Chris Weston is in it for the long haul.) The way the world is going there’s better money in franchise-friendly fantasy stories than rock & roll, if you’ve got the audience. Paranoid Gardens isn’t a franchise in waiting, it’s just one story, and a sad one. But it’s a good story, nonetheless, and told well. Maybe it’ll be a movie some day. That’s hardly a barometer for anything but it could even be a good movie. It is definitely a good comic.

It rather seemed to fly under the radar, which is just the way the world works now. It’ll probably find a much bigger audience in collected edition, which is just the way the world works now. But I’m glad I got the chance to read it in monthly serial, and these are some very nice looking pamphlets. The first issue even has a die-cut cover — I know, just like the 90s! Honestly, fantastic. Bravo. It’s a gorgeous die-cut cover. No fronting! We’re all about love, up here in The Comics Journal.