Going deeper into my unread pile, we find—wait, Gerard Way just released a new comic, so we’re shifting a bit this week. While we haven’t seen a new comic from the My Chemical Romance singer since 2020’s The True Lives of Fabulous Killjoys sequel, we are immediately entering into more bizarre territory in their new series with Shaun Simon, Chris Weston, Dave Stewart, and Nate Piekos, Paranoid Gardens.

Paradise Gardens is a medical care center in close proximity to a vast cliff overlooking an ocean. Loo is one of the most accomplished orderlies in attendance despite having lost all of her memories before working there—all she seems to know is her name and her work in the center. And yet she’s seen as relatively normal in Paradise Gardens as many of the other residents seem to have come from the pages of classic comics—everything from aliens to spies to superheroes seem to find their way into this facility for treatment. But several specters loom over the orderlies in residents as the head doctor is a member of a cartoon monkey-obsessed cult and the building itself has something in its walls that the head nurse needs to pacify.

While this is a first issue, it doesn’t actually feel like a beginning. With all of the lived-in locations in the facility, the inter-personal relationships we’re seeing quick glimpses of, the ways the residents all live with one another, we feel as though this is a world that has existed long before we’ve arrived to it. We’re seamlessly placed in the world and are trusted to find our way in it—much in the same way Loo has since her own memory loss four months prior. And it’s in this feeling that many of the odder aspects of the world stand out not as oddities, but as just another piece of the story mechanism moving forward. We’re fully committed to what the creative team is showing us as, with Loo, we’re able to fully suspend our disbelief and simply accept things as they are. That is until we’re presented something like the living walls of the building in a way that’s meant to be kept secret from the other characters. We as readers know what’s normal due to how it is being shown to us and then we’re given the twist.

As I’ve always mentioned in these articles, the balancing act a first issue must maintain is a delicate one. We need new characters, settings, dynamics, lore, and everything else in just a few pages to keep us interested in how the story will play out over an unknown number of issues. But Paranoid Gardens works with us. It slowly builds and reveals before our final hook that acts as an immediate call-back to the first page of the issue and shows us the inklings of a mystery within this facility. And it’s why we keep coming back to it. 

Get excited. Get paranoid.

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