Gerard Way American Singer Born 1977 in Summit

Early life

Gerard Way was born on 9 April 1977 in Summit, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Belleville. He finished at Belleville High School in 1995 and then went to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts, where he completed a degree in 1999. His plan at that point was a career in comics rather than music, and illustration remained a strong thread in his later work. He sang in public for the first time as a child in a school musical, and in his teens he played in a few short-lived bands without settling on music as a career.

Career

Way is best known as the lead singer and a co-founder of My Chemical Romance. By his own account, he began working in music in earnest after the events of September 2001, when he wrote the lyrics to "Skylines and Turnstiles", the first song the group made. The band went on to release four studio albums, among them The Black Parade in 2006, and announced its break-up in March 2013. In late 2019 the group said it would reunite, and it later announced a tour built around The Black Parade for 2025.

Between the band's two periods, Way started a solo career. In 2014 he released his debut album, Hesitant Alien, and played his first solo shows at festivals that year. A run of singles followed in 2018, including "Baby You're a Haunted House" and "Getting Down the Germs", the latter co-written with his former bandmate Ray Toro. In 2019 and 2020 he recorded songs connected to the television adaptation of The Umbrella Academy, such as a cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" and the original "Here Comes the End". He has also lent vocals to other artists' recordings, including a vocal mix of the deadmau5 track "Professional Griefers" in 2012, and in 2025 he announced a new project called The Mock-Ups with members of The Interrupters.

Comics have run alongside the music for most of his adult life. His first attempt, a series called On Raven's Wings, appeared in 1993 when he was sixteen and was cancelled after two issues. In 2007 he began The Umbrella Academy with the artist Gabriel Bá, published by Dark Horse Comics. Its first collection, Apocalypse Suite, was followed by Dallas in 2008 and Hotel Oblivion in 2018 and 2019. With Shaun Simon and Becky Cloonan he co-created The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, a comic that extended the ideas of the My Chemical Romance album Danger Days. He wrote Doom Patrol for DC, where he also founded the Young Animal imprint, and he created the Marvel character Peni Parker, who later appeared in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. A new series, Paranoid Gardens, was announced in 2024.

His comics also reached television. Way served as a co-executive producer on the Netflix series based on The Umbrella Academy for its whole run from 2019 to 2024. Earlier, in 2013, he made his television directing debut by co-directing and co-writing an episode of The Aquabats! Super Show!

Recognition

Apocalypse Suite won the 2008 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series, an honour that recognised his work as a writer before his solo music career began. My Chemical Romance, the band he fronts, is widely counted among the major rock acts of the 2000s.

Personal life

Way married Lindsey Ballato, a bassist in Mindless Self Indulgence, on 3 September 2007, in a small ceremony held backstage after a concert in Colorado at the end of a tour. The couple live in Los Angeles. He is a second cousin of the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, a connection Way first mentioned online in 2015 and Rogan later confirmed on his own show.