ARTICLE: Gerard Way Shares Unused Art For Unproduced DC-Approved Batman Series

There are quite a few mainstream musicians who have worked or are currently working in comics, but none are as successful as former My Chemical Romance front man Gerard Way. After the first limited series of ‘The Umbrella Academy’ was released in 2007, it won the Eisner for Best Finite Series/Limited Series. He followed that up with a second limited series titled ‘The Umbrella Academy: Dallas’ in 2008 and then plans for a third series were revealed, but no release date was announced. Currently, fans are anxiously awaiting his return to comic book writing after four years when ‘The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys’ #1 from Dark Horse finally hits shelves on June 12^th, but the singer recently revealed that there was another comic project that was supposed to be in the works, but he never got around to writing it. And this project involved a certain Caped Crusader.

According to his Twitter over the past few days, Way had pitched a Batman limited series to DC Comics around the time that he had won his Eisner and they approved it. Titled ‘Batman: Kingdom of the Mad’, the series was meant to be released through the company’s more mature line of books, Vertigo, but it never came to fruition due to the lack of time on the writer’s hands. Along with the revelation of this dream project, he tweeted some concept art from the series featuring Batman, Robin, The Joker, The Riddler, and more. Not much detail accompanied the pictures, but judging by the tweet of the Mr. Freeze artwork, Way had some pretty twisted things in mind for this series:

 

The rest of the art has a very Tim Burton feel to it. In general, it all seems heavily influenced by ‘Edward Scissorhands’. Basically, this might be one of the darkest reimaginings of the Dark Knight I’ve ever seen. For all of the previously unreleased art of Way’s version of Batman, check out the gallery below:

While Way mentioned that he didn’t have time to work on ‘Kingdom of the Mad’ before, he didn’t say that the project is dead, so it’s possible that this story could still see the light of day some time in the future. If I were him, I definitely wouldn’t want to let this one go. After all, who wouldn’t love to write their own version of Batman? And for his to even get the green light from DC is a feat all in itself. Now that MCR has gone their separate ways and Way has reentered the comic book industry, maybe the ball can get rolling on this project once again because this definitely looks like an interesting story that deserves to be told.

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