Comic-Con attendees from 2009 might remember Gerard Way (otherwise known for The Umbrella Academy and some band called My Chemical Romance) talking about a comic he had in the works called The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. And then … nothing. Well, there was the MCR album Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys and the trippy accompanying music videos that featured Grant Morrison as the Killjoys’ antagonist Korse, but the comic seemed to have slipped into the ether.
Until now….
In her panel today, artist Becky Cloonan said that she would shortly be leaving Conan the Barbarian (her latest collaboration with frequent co-creator Brian Wood) to work on the Fabulous Killjoys comic. “What we’re doing is a little different [from the videos],” she said. “We’re changing it up a bit; it’s going to be different from how we originally envisioned it, and it’s more mature now. If we’d done it two years ago, it wouldn’t be as good as it will be now.” The comic will run for six issues and be published by Dark Horse; Cloonan says there should be more information announced later this year at New York Comic-Con.
Cloonan is probably best known for her collaborations with Brian Wood—Demo, “The Girl in the Ice” for Northlanders, and most recently Conan the Barbarian: Queen of the Black Coast for Dark Horse. Before comics, she studied animation at the School for Visual Arts, but left that field—and school—when the bottom fell out of the 2D animation business in the late 1990s.
Since then, she’s combined a career of commercial work and steady comics work; her minicomics got her noticed by Brian Wood and led to their collaboration on Demo. Since then she’s also worked on East Coast Rising for Tokyopop and American Virgin for Vertigo, and in August, DC will publish Batman #12, which Scott Snyder asked her to illustrate after meeting her at Ka-Pow in London. A pretty good track record for someone who says, “Back when I did portfolio reviews, editors used to tell me I’d never get work in mainstream comics.”
Cloonan is also continuing work on her own creator-owned material, like the short comics story “Wolves,” and the forthcoming “The Mire.” You’ll be able to listen to this entire interview in the next few weeks at comicnewsinsider.com—be sure to check it out if you want the whole story about Cloonan’s tattoos, her work on “Super Troopers,” and why the day she got asked to do Batman was the greatest day ever.
Karin Kross is at her fifth San Diego Comic-Con this year. She and her co-conspirators are blogging the experience at nerdpromnomnom on Tumblr.
