Tie-in comics occupy a weird space in the medium. While the Bionicle comics from the early 2000s that came with my issues of Lego Magazine were the first comics that I consistently read as a kid, there were always other tie-ins hanging around. Either prequels to movies, set-ups for shows or games, or even panel-by-panel re-tellings of one of the Batman movies in the 90s. Tie-in comics have always just been around at the border of our attention. Ten years ago, however, a tie-in comic gave us a little more. Gerard Way, Shaun Simon, Becky Cloonan, Dan Jackson, and Nate Piekos gave us The True Lives of Fabulous Killjoys, the sequel to My Chemical Romance’s final album.

The world of the Killjoys is vast ans strange. Taking place in the far-flung future of 2019, the eponymous group survives through a post-apocalyptic California while being hunted by Draculoids and Korse—the latter played by Grant Morrison—sent by Better Living Industries (also known as BL/ind). But this comic opens after all of that. The Killjoys are dead, the Girl they had rescued at the end of the album wakes up alone in the desert with a black cat, and the youth wandering the wastelands of California outside of BLI’s Battery City are growing restless. But the citizens of the city—androids and people alike—are so heavily monitored that they essentially don’t have a moment of privacy. Every person here is on the precipice of a breakdown, a freak-out, or a suicide mission, and it’s that environment that the story begins to unfold. 

Fabulous Killjoys is a weird anomaly in tie-in comics. Much like the Injustice comics DC put out to expand the lore of their fighting game, this isn’t the cliff-hanger or To Be Continued many other prequel comics end up being. My Chemical Romance created an expansive world inhabited by characters that feel like they’re already from a comic and Way simply kept going with that idea. It helps too that Way was already deep into comics before even starting their band and had created The Umbrella Academy a few years prior, so continuing the story felt more natural than not. And with a world constructed so well from a concept album, it’s an instance where the tie-in helps to expand the world further, giving the audience something they really did want to make sure the story keeps going.

Tie-in comics are still weird creatures. They have to straddle that line between supplemental and essential—how much does the audience need to know in order to pick up the first issue and what can be done for someone who comes in with nothing? Way, Simon, Cloonan, Jackson, and Piekos give us the sequel that can stand on its own. Even if you’ve never heard the Danger Days album or anything from My Chemical Romance, you can still pick up Killjoys for the lore, the world, and every character that the team flesh out to fully stand on their own. 

Get excited. Get tying.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.