Gerard Way Has a Thing For Joan of Arc

A really, really weird thing for her. And squids, as well, though they're largely unrelated aside from the fact that he enjoys drawing both. Is he doing well these days? Hard to tell....

When asked by Rolling Stone what he does in his downtime on tour, he went into a rather long-winded rant about how wonderful Joan of Arc is:

How do you like to spend downtime on tour? I write my comic book, which is amazingly fun. And I want to do serious paintings of Joan of Arc and squids.

Joan of Arc is my favorite historical-legendary-whatever figure. Number one, it’s a boyish, waifish girl in a suit of armor on a white horse, and that’s badass. I’ve always been attracted to that character because it was somebody who was willing to die for what they believed in, and they were probably fucking crazy and like, touched by the hand of God, and I believe in that shit. I totally believe in that stuff. I believe that it can happen to anybody.

Like when we started this band, there was a brief amount of time where it felt like you drank gasoline and shit glass, and you were always covered in your own sweat, somebody else’s spit or blood or something. And I felt that, you know what I mean? I would make crazy speeches that made no sense onstage. I would talk about purifying flames being shot out of our cabinets at max volume to destroy evil and shit like that. I was, you know, touched in the head. And really, when you get touched in the head like that, I think your job at that point for the rest of your career is to remember what it was like to be touched in the head, and kind of keep that going. ‘Cause that can’t last forever, you’ll be dead, I think. Like Joan of Arc.

So, yeah, I love Joan of Arc. And squids. Honestly, the shapes, the disgustingness of them, the suckers, the fact that they’re in the ocean. I’m a huge Hellboy fan so I draw lots of squids.