Gerard Way has opened another curious door into the mythology surrounding his music and comics. The Paper Academy appears in Prelude to The End, a new animated short made by My Chemical Romance with visual artist Lauren Tsai. The name immediately invites comparisons with The Umbrella Academy, although the film does not establish that the two academies share a canon.
Released during My Chemical Romance’s celebration of The Black Parade’s 20th anniversary, the short follows Astrid, a student at a strange New England boarding school. After her sketchbook is discarded by the school’s authorities, she descends through a trash chute and finds herself in a surreal realm populated by forgotten ideas. Tsai voices Astrid and directed the project through her independent studio, UNREAL INC.
The film also expands Tsai’s The Dying World, a visual universe introduced through a short that premiered at the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Its soundtrack is “The End,” the opening song from The Black Parade, making the project less a conventional music video than a crossover between MCR’s album mythology and Tsai’s off-kilter fantasy.
The voice cast gives the short an unusually high-profile geek-culture footprint. Billie Eilish plays Astrid’s friend, Phoebe Bridgers voices her sister, Hideo Kojima appears as a teacher, and John C. McGinley plays the dean. The film was scheduled to screen before My Chemical Romance’s final two Hollywood Bowl shows on October 30 and 31, while the online release makes its Paper Academy mystery available beyond the concert audience.
For Umbrella Academy readers, the terminology is tantalizing because Way’s comic series—created with artist Gabriel Bá—already revolves around a dysfunctional team assembled and trained by the eccentric Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Dark Horse began publishing the comic in 2007, and its first major story, Apocalypse Suite, won the Eisner Award for Best Limited Series.
That history explains why fans are looking for connections, but the stronger confirmed link is thematic: Way has long used schools, teams, discarded identities, and surreal institutions to explore the tension between imagination and authority. The Paper Academy may be a new branch of that creative language rather than a secret continuation of the Hargreeves story. For now, Prelude to The End leaves the door open—and gives fans another beautifully strange world to theorize about while the Umbrella Academy television adaptation remains complete after four seasons.
