TELL ME WHERE WE GO FROM HERE: Thoughts from Adult Emo Kids (An MCR Zine)

contents 4 ...................... editor’s essay amanda k, 25, san francisco 8 ...................... face it jaeson, 19, georgia 10 .................... here comes the sound! amanda k, 25, san francisco 12 .................... nice pictures part 1 (all contributors) 14 .................... “how that picture of gerard way makes me feel” script by dylan | art by annika | layout by amanda k

24 ................... nice pictures part 2 (all contributors) 26 ................... untitled dylan, 19, washington 27 ................... untitled (okay) art by annika @ spiderblush , 18, the suburbs | lettering by amanda k

28 ................... this is an essay about my chemical romance and me dylan, 19, washington

30 .................. notes on my chemical romance (all contributors) 33 ................... self-portrait while listening to tomorrow’s money amanda k, 25, san francisco

34 ................... three cheers for fucking hell loki, 20, france 35 ................... keep it ugly loki, 20, france 36 ................... what happens in my brain when listening to MCR loki, 20, france

38 .................. black parade group portrait annika @ spiderblush , 18, the suburbs

40 ................... and i won’t drown in the fear

truax (@skeletonmelodies), 18, the california desert

42 ................... thank you for the venom (part 1) sinja, 20 germany 44 ................... cubicles dylan, 19, washington 46 ................... thank you for the venom (part 2) sinja, 20 germany 48 ................... dust: a killjoy story barry, 18, boston 50 ................... hold on tight and don’t look back jaeson, 19, georgia 51 .................... sticker page! (not really) (all contributors; images taken

from the emoji library of the adult emo kids discord server)

52 ................... a grim procession c. (@mychemicalraymance, @mcraymance on redbubble)

54 ................... the first nine seconds of fashion statement annika @ spiderblush , 18, the suburbs

56 ................... red ones make me fly oliver/zero, 19, maryland 56 ................... thanks! amanda k, 25, san francisco

about this zine: notes from your humble editor

Sometime at the beginning of this thing called “quarantine” I had the idea of bringing a few people together and keeping our minds & hands occupied with a creative project. The fact that I hadn’t thought about much else other than My Chemical Romance–enough that I made a discord server for fans over 18– for the weeks preceding our lock-down seemed downright lucky. Suddenly I had something I never wanted to stop talking about and several people to talk about it with. The zine idea has been marinating for about a month, and I hope you like what we’ve made. I also hope (in between skipping through all the wonderful little pictures) you’ll take a moment to read my personal thoughts on why this is a project I wanted to see through to fruition.

When we all went inside I hadn’t been into MCR for more than a month or so, but it had been a quick love affair. I started the Adult Emo Kids server after realizing I had worn out my girlfriend, with whom I had been buzzing about the band for weeks, ever since she convinced me to shell out for the reunion tour, despite the fact that at the time I knew next to nothing about MCR. “Play a song,” I said, in an effort to connect with something I’d never spared more than a few passing thoughts about. “Maybe I’ll get into it.”

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I attributed the nose-dive into obsession which followed as just another one of those things. My girlfriend has good taste. We’re together for a reason. I fucking love My Chemical Romance now. When the world started really paying attention to COVID-19, I was certainly paying attention as well, but it didn’t hit me until a few weeks later how significant it was that the fascination I’d decided to pack into my metaphorical apocalypse kit, the thing I would spend all my free time thinking about in between stressful Zoom calls and hours of entropy, was My Chemical Romance.

The day before the Bay Area made shelter-in-place a mandate, I went out for drinks with some coworkers at a little hotel bar in the financial district. At least one person made a Shaun of the Dead joke. Later, after a few old fashioneds, one of the guys from a big data company mentioned that he had MCR tickets, and we exchanged a few bouts of mutual teasing, followed with a highfive and a very nervous “Guess I’ll see you in the pit!”

I almost certainly will not be seeing him in the pit, at least not if things go as they’re going. The thing that started this for me– MCR’s reunion tour–is now one of many future events that seems to be permanently uncertain. Suddenly the discussions I was having with other fans took on a note of anxiety, not just about what would happen to the tour, but about how any next moves the band made right now would be part of their legacy forever. If the tour is canceled and never happens, the last thing we’d have collectively experienced as fans would have been a lot of very sad people getting fucked over by Ticketmaster. In some ways I guess this zine was a way of distracting myself from that idea. More pointedly, I couldn’t handle the notion that if MCR breaks up again, bringing on another flood of retrospective pieces, the world they’d be leaving behind would be kind of a shitty one. Moreover, they’d be leaving us right when I think people are on the verge of “getting” them, really GETTING them, for the first time ever.

But what does it mean to be gotten? And what do you get out of it? The longer I spend thinking about MCR’s legacy, and the longer I spend talking about the meaning their music has to people, the more convinced I become that this is the only way to talk about them right now–in something that can’t be searchengine optimized, serialized, tweeted, or even downloaded without making the commitment to squint at a black & white PDF. I do not want any more thinkpieces about anything. At some point when things change again (I’m not going to say they will go back to normal after COVID-19, or that there will even be an “after”, but I do believe things will change), I’m not sure how our relationship to art and popular media will adapt. Right now almost everyone is inside with their internet connection, trawling through the endless sea of content, the biggest library ever made, and if they’re like me, most of their time is spent anxiously refreshing the same three websites. Once that stops being the case, people who make a living being writers are going to have to write about it, and because it’s very difficult to make a living as a writer at the moment without being reactionary, ahistorical, and generally under-edited, most of the writing–especially about art that’s made during this time–will be of that ilk.

That’s not a condemnation–just an assessment. But the reason I don’t want MCR to break up again is because I’m not ready for their legacy to be flattened into a narrative with a start and a finish again. I need it to be alive. MCR is the first thing I’ve ever been interested in as an adult that I just missed being contemporary to–I would have been maybe 12 or 13 during their most active years–and looking back at something from a time I remember but wasn’t part of is certainly a trip. MCR isn’t history yet. I lived it, even though I didn’t, because like many MCR fans in their 20s, 5

the band’s first collective “memory,” September 11th, was the first significant world event I remember witnessing. In some ways you could say that MCR became a band on the same day I became a living, breathing, history-experiencing person.

The point of this zine isn’t to reclaim the legacy of My Chemical Romance, or draw some kind of narrative thread between anything the band talks about in their music and what’s going on now. It’s to celebrate something that goes beyond any of that; to celebrate, capture, and express the feeling of why MCR was what we brought inside with us when the world got sick.

At first I thought it was just the music. I mean, I’ve never gotten excited about a band before. But the thing that’s kept MCR alive for me during this time is how the band made me believe in that magic alchemy of making something with your friends. I didn’t realize people still did that. I had all kinds of lofty goals for own personal contribution to this zine, but ultimately they kept falling through. In the end I thought I’d stick to this essay and help come up with the title–a line from “Skylines and Turnstiles,” off Bullets, that seems to encapsulate how it feels to live in intersting times.

Where the hell DO we go from here? No idea, but I’m along for the ride. It’s been my pleasure to edit this zine. In it, you’ll find comics about soccer jocks falling in love with Gerard Way, more collages than you can shake a stick at, a thrilling re-imagining of the Black Parade album art, and some really nice pictures of Ray Toro. My only hope for this zine is that it lives on the internet and on our bookshelves for as long as it can, a quiet little testemant to what we wanted to do for the band we love.

So, back to where we started, then. Why did we bring MCR inside with us? For me, the answer is simple: There’s something about how the band approached their nearholy mission to create something, in spite of each and every one of their personal hangups, that makes me wonder if maybe the best way to live through history is to make some of your own.

Enjoy the zine.

– Amanda K

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OH BABY HERE CO

7.

Fail at this and ge

a year.

8.

Stop repressing 9.

Get a shitty job y 10.

Quit that job.

11.

Fall in love with s away.

12.

Like, really in love 1.

Be born.

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Like, really far aw 2.

Grow up repressing your latent 14.

Wear the same c homosexuality.

since you were in 3.

Over-invest your personality in 15.

Get a new job yo schoolwork.

16.

Get fired from th 4.

Listen to your jazz musician dad when 17.

Weep for a week

he tells you that rock music sucks.

couch for 4 week 5.

Go to college.

18.

Look at yourself.

6.

Graduate a week after getting 19.

Cast a spell.

dumped, and collect the pieces of Get on a plane.

your life in order to try and figure out 20.

what kind of person you are.

OR: HOW TO LISTEN TO YOUR FAVORITE BAND FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YOUR 20s: A USER GUIDE _____________________________

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OMES THE SOUND!

et high every night for 21.

Move across the country to be with the one

you love. g your homosexuality. 22.

Realize that you can move across the you hate.

country and be the same, repressed person

you’ve always been, because you take someone who lives far yourself with you wherever you go, and

moving to a bigger city only means that the e.

buildings are taller until you decide to make it way.

mean something bigger. clothes you’ve worn 23.

Listen to My Chemical Romance for the first n high school.

time ever, at age 25. ou hate.

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Reach through time and meet a sad, hat job.

closeted, oh-so-self-aware teenage version k, then sit on your

of yourself who had never really grown out ks.

of trying to be someone she wasn’t. .

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Give her a hug.

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Tell her she doesn’t have to try so hard.

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NICE PICTURES OF

...

RAY TORO

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MIKEY WAY

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I live in a small town in california in a big white house with my mom and my dad, who does some kind of dumb stocks thing.

he was in the army. he wants me to go too, he said even the air force would be okay, but i don’t really want to.

i’m a senior this year.

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i’m going to a state college in the fall with a soccer scholarship. i think i might major in science or something.

I like soccer but i probably won’t try to play professionally or anything.

i have a girlfriend. i love her.

she’s a pretty cheerleader.

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my sister is into this freak band,

my chemical romance.

Normally, our parents hate her music and won’t let her listen to it or anything. it’s not the kind of thing i could show to my friends, but actually, its not bad. when our parents aren’t home she plays her cds in her room and sometimes i listen through the wall.

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she won tickets in a radio contest- my parents made me take her to the concert. i’m in the crowd, kind of slouching, hoping nobody sees me with my hat on.

the frontman comes on stage.

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He looks like

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This.

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I see him.

I’m not looking at her, though. i spend the rest of the concert watching him. my sister is dancing next to me.

THE END!

“How that photo of Gerard Way Makes me Feel” a short comic about love

script by dylan art by annika editing by amanda

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NICE PICTURES OF ...

FRANK IERO

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GERARD WAY

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Susan Sontag? Notes On Camp.

You ever heard of

Well, in 1964 she published an essay called

In it, she defined camp as a “sensibility”, ns, in order not to pin down the affiliatio loose and s by way of an ambling list of citation a stab (ha!) at it, but with things that, to take we’d thought We that. ephemeral concept. We like doc one afternoon and us, evoke the rare sensibility of all things MCR. We all dove into a google put our heads together and this is what happened. So, without further

ado, have some

Notes On

l a c i m My Che e c n a m Ro When you realize you’re not straight The first time you felt the feeling of betrayal when your friends hung out without you The first cigarette you had when you were 11 The black vest and converse every lesbian wore to prom in high school The last track on Ziggy Stardust The first Mad Max movie (desolate snuff-film vibes)

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Suburban halloween (safe, the smell of damp leaves, seeing the occasional car, everything lit by the orange glow of streetlights) Cars with colored upholstery Old postcards of women in upscale attire from the 20s, 30s, & 40s which you can buy in thrift stores for $5 How it feels to remember seeing blade runner (not how it feels to watch it) Multiple rings Walking down the street in clothing that feels like armor

Finding something that fits the itch you have in your brain at the thrift store

A whooshing feeling of selfrecognition in your stomach

Feather Boas

Church Basements

Bad kisses with a girl after seeing a horror movie together Taking an overnight greyhound into New York & waking up to the smell of Penn Station The euphoria of genderfluidity Long slow drives at night with your friends when you run out of things to say & have to listen to music in silence Screaming alone in your car Fishnets 2 value village prom dresses at the same time

The comic Sin City Smoking pot in a graveyard Feeling like you were punk at 13 and like you could change the world but really you were just a 13 y.o little shit who wore too much eyeshadow Buffalo Plaid jackets Hand-sewn knee patches Discovering gender is more complicated than you thought it was and realising your gender may not be the one you thought it was but at the same time what the hell is gender(!)

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

That realisation you have about how being uncool is okay and can feel better

Phantom of the paradise

Fake leather jacket

Every female protagonist of a David Lynch movie

Drawing on your hands with sharpie

The scuffing sound of a CD stopping in a CD player

Empty bleachers

The way a Spirit Halloween arises in the skeleton of an empty building Novelty belt buckles Diners The feeling of exhilarated tiredness after staying up to play a halftime show as a member of your high school marching band

Sitting in the park at night Cosplay but in the preinstagram era Cigarette outside a basement show 100% by sonic youth Your high school bedroom covered in pictures of things you were obsessed with

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The weird hiss in the background of a shitty cd player Cracked cds Sitting in your car to listen to music Printing word documents of google images of bands you liked on the school printer during computer class

Wearing the same black hoodie all the time/being the hoodie kid in school Coffee that’s gotten cold Stalking someone’s myspace page

Listening to the same thing over and over and over

Coffee at ungodly hours

Waking up and it’s still dark out/ you fell asleep in the afternoon and slept until night

Not being friends with the people you were friends with in high school anymore

Dipping fries in your milkshake

Playing guitar in front of a mirror in your bedroom

Being out at night just like, walking around

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Striped tights

Public library comic book section

Being out all day because you dont want to be at home

The subway

Smoking out your bedroom window

Late summer night air on your skin/ the smell of hot pavement

Staying up all night watching horror movies and being really weird the next day

Bullets (I mean this)

IF WE CRASH THIS TIME

THEY’VE GOT MACHINES

TO KEEP US ALIVE

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I remember being l5 and finally clicking on the video Youtube had been recommending to me for days: Teenagers by My Chemical Romance.

I listened to it and thought ™These guys really get it.∫ After that all I would listen to was MCR. It made me feel special and cool.

No one else would listen to them, except for her. (It's been six fucking years since I've been seeing your face) Now I'¬m 2O and I cry when I listen to Kids from Yesterday. But I want to take this as an opportunity to thank these guys.

I already have it written on my arm forever.

Thank you for being the soundtrack to so many parties, for being with me through late night crying sessions, for everytime you made me laugh with the things you said years ago.

Thank you guys, really.

Thank you for the Venom S.

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DUST

a killjoys story

Dust

Coughing, hacking dust on every inch of her tongue.

Ever since she crossed city lines and collapsed into the sand of the zones, there’s been nothing but dust heaved into her lungs and trapped underneath her nails Sometimes, she wishes she could just succumb to the dust, lie down and let it chip away at her skin and bones until she is nothing but dust herself, but most days she can drag herself along with the knowledge that she’s getting farther and farther away from them. Every inch she moves, every second she breathes, the burning of her scars remains.

Her brain races, searching desperately for something to think about that isn’t the beating sun or burning sand. She scans the flat desert.

Rocks, sand, sun, more sand, a lizard, more fucking sand, a house of some sort, more s– Wait.

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She gasps, which quickly turns into a hacking

c t c a h s w a s s b

cough, and drags herself towards the building, towards the first sign of civilization she’s seen in days. As she approaches, a strange, rotten stench hits her nose, causing her to stumble slightly as she approaches the shack, with its rotting wood walls, covered in unreadable posters and spray paint graffiti. The only readable signs were huge, plastered over what she assumed were once windows, now barricaded with steel.

Well, she thought, I guess that explains the smell. She took as deep of a breath as she could, and pushed open the beat up screen door, stumbling her way into the shop.

The shop was like nothing she had ever seen before. Every inch of the small room had something on it. A product, a tag, a name carved into the wood. There were paint stains, bleach stains, and stains she couldn’t place if she tried (and she suspects that’s for the best). Tables were organized in a dizzying, maze like order, all of them covered in strange knick knacks. Bright painted masks and guns showed up most often, though there was no shortage of other strange accessories. There were two or three dim, bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, but enough sun leaking in from the boarded up windows that she could see every bit of dust in the air. She almost wanted to laugh, the dust is almost worse in this strange new place than it was on any of the flat, desolate plains she dragged herself across.

“Hey you, buy something or fuck off” She looked up, shocked out of her stupor by the rough, haggard voice coming from beside her. She turned to see a charmingly unpleasant looking man,

loosely holding what she assumed to be a cigarette full of the aforementioned plant.

This man, who she assumed to be Tommy, tapped his dirty, half painted nails on the register.

“You heard me kid, pay up or get out.”

Finally, she felt her legs move towards the man, stumbling over a large, colorful radio with DIE ANOTHER DAY!!! Plastered on the front in scratchy, bright pink lettering. The man who may be Tommy scowled as she clambered to fix the now bent antennae on top and finally approached the register.

If the store was messy and crowded, then the register was a war zone of shapes and color. She swears she’s never seen so many things in her life. It ranged from damaged but official looking BLI first aid kits to drawings that look like they were made by a five year old. Her eye just caught the stacks upon stacks of damaged, dusted tapes with strange names written on the sides when she remembered the disgruntled shop owner in front of her, and refocused on the man (Is he a man? Can men have such long hair in the zones?

Jewelry? What else is allowed out here?).

She opened her mouth, and choked out her first word in the weeks since she ran.

Dry, dusty, painfully, she utters out the word water.

Tommy sighed.

“You better hope someone comes in feelin’ generous, or else you’ll be working this off for the next week.”

FIN 49

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sticker page*

*NONE OF THESE ARE STICKERS BUT IT WOULD BE COOL IF THEY WERE, WOULDN’T IT

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TELL ME WHERE WE GO FROM HERE: THOUGHTS FROM ADULT EMO KIDS CREATED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE ADULT EMO KIDS DISCORD SERVER

COMPLETED APRIL 20, 2020