The Horror has Lovecraftian tentacles that extend from his belly, and he’s dead for most of the series. Number 5 never got name, and goes missing at the beginning of the series, showing up later having never aged. Klaus is telekinetic with a sadistic streak. Allison is called the Rumor, and she can make things happen just by talking about them. Diego is the Batman analog, but he’s more psychotic than Batman ever was. Luther is very strong, but his body was severely injured in the past and he now has the body of a gorilla. Way gives us superheroes with expected powers, but with oddball twists to them. Now, if you think about it, all superhero comics are a bit weird, but we’ve been conditioned over the decades to accept that a billionaire whose parents were killed would of course dress up like a bat or that Mars was once populated with shape-shifting telepaths or that humanoid beings swim all over the ocean. But, as I noted above, the appeal of superhero stories is in the details and the ways it diverges from your regular superhero story, and Way and Bá do that a lot, so The Umbrella Academy stands out and becomes a Comic You Should Own.įirst of all, it’s a bit weird. There are giant monsters, weird villains, time travel, and all sorts of trauma and tragedy, but in both stories, the world is saved, as you might expect. The members of the team have strange powers, and Way doesn’t delve into how they got them – they were part of a group of 43 babies born at exactly the same time on exactly the same day to single women who hadn’t shown any signs of pregnancy, and their mentor was only able to find these seven to adopt and train them. The team is made up of seven heroes, which is a fairly standard number in superhero teams, although, as we’ll see, there aren’t always seven people on the team. World-saving epics can become tedious, but they are part-and-parcel of superhero stories, and it’s not the worst plot in the world. In both stories, the world is in danger and only our heroes can save the day. In many ways, The Umbrella Academy is a stereotypical superhero comic. What I want are superhero comics that try something different, and that’s how we arrive at The Umbrella Academy. I’ve never had any loyalty to a certain character, so it’s easy to go years without reading a new Spider-Man comic, for instance (and I love Spider-Man). So when I want to read superheroes, I tend to look outside those two companies. DC and Marvel, of course, are generally (just generally, as there are exceptions) in the business of simply retelling the same stories, because those stories are comfortable, but I don’t have much time for that anymore and haven’t for decades. Superheroes can be more, and that’s all I want. My point was always that superheroes have been the dominant genre of comics for so long, and I’ve read so many superhero comics, that I would not accept just another standard superhero story in which the good guys and bad guys are vanilla but we accept them because they’re the same characters we knew in childhood. I always had to point out that I love superheroes – I don’t know if you can read comics without at least liking superheroes a little bit, even if you’re the snootiest Art Spiegelman-reading hipster on Earth. Some years ago, when I was writing for another blog and had the time to write about my weekly purchases more, some people got the idea that I hate superheroes because I would often decry the superhero comics that DC and Marvel were publishing. I guess I should put a SPOILERS warning up here, even though I don’t think there’s much that’s spoilery in here. Published by Dark Horse, 12 issues (#1-6 of “Apocalypse Suite” and #1-6 of “Dallas”), cover dated September 2007 – February 2008 (“Apocalypse Suite”) and November 2008 – May 2009 (“Dallas”). The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way (writer), Gabriel Bá (artist), Dave Stewart (colorist), and Nate Piekos (letterer). Let’s take a look at this oddball classic that ended too soon! Who had “the lead singer of My Chemical Romance is a good comics writer” in the pool? ‘Cause I sure didn’t!
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