The Umbrella Academy [cb]

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There aren't that many really great superhero comics for grown-ups. Stories that embody the joy and anarchy, the adventure and the fantasy, that a world of absurd powers and battles between good and evil should play host to; while offering an edge of sophistication and strangeness to make it appealing to a more adult readership. The Umbrella Academy, which made its print debut in Dark Horse's Free Comic Book Day offering this year, is the newest title to join those slim ranks of books which capture that difficult mix. The Book "It's one of them offbeat superhero books you hear so much about," The Umbrella Academy editor Scott Allie explains. "It's a perfect Dark Horse superhero book — the high concept is more the point of view of the book, the mood of it, than the characters' powers. We're still working out what their powers are. What matters is the tone, and the sort of psychedelic perspective. And the characters. All the damn character drama, with a team of foster brothers and sisters who hate each other as much as any real family."Some of the reviews of the Free Comic Book Day Umbrella Academy story have indeed noted that it appeals to the same sensibility as Mike Mignola's Hellboy, another Dark Horse title. There's also a thread of the unbridled creativity previously found in the work of Grant Morrison; even the most minor and throwaway moments are infused with gleeful strangeness. The Umbrella Academy's writer, Gerard Way, is happy to acknowledge the influence of the books he grew up reading on his own work."I started reading X-Men when I was about eight years old," he says. "By the time I was a teenager, books like The Doom Patrol appealed to me. Obviously there are some story elements that are similar to those two books, the team and the head of the team, but that's where the similarities end. As I matured, the quirkiness of a book like The Doom Patrol, the experimental nature appealed to me."I have a real love for superheroes, but I don't read any current mainstream books, I have more of a nostalgia for them. I like the idea of a superhero. I think I chose the genre to experiment with because it was probably the furthest thing people expected me to write. I tried to figure out how I would handle superheroes. It's been very rewarding to write and see them the way I want."The Writer Though The Umbrella Academy is Gerard Way's debut as a comics writer, expectations and fan demand were at fever pitch leading up to Free Comic Book Day. This is because Gerard's 'day job' is as the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. Hugely popular worldwide, the band's passionate, theatrical style plays with the same heightened emotional states that comics often seek to tap into."Writing comics is a very different process than song writing, but both start at the same point — inspiration," says Gerard. "A character, a title, a phrase, or an image will come into my head and I'll live in its world for some time. Then I use a lot of notebook paper making notes and scribbles, tweak things along the way before going to a computer and writing a traditional script. I also have lots of phone conversations with my editor, Scott."Scott admits that he initially approached Gerard's pitch for The Umbrella Academy with misgivings, because of the writer's fame as a singer."Lots of people in Hollywood and in music think there's something chic about saying, 'Oh, I'm a comics guy from way back,'" Scott explains. "Every movie producer I've ever spoken to is a 'real comics guy.' But you realize all they know is Frank Miller and Mike Mignola and Stan Lee — guys who've had movies made of their stuff, and been written about in Entertainment Weekly. You can drop those names without ever having read a comic. So that's become what I expect from people outside of comics — saying that they're actually coming from inside it. It's so weird that comics has taken on this aspect these days. It certainly benefits the bottom line, but what it really says about the art form eludes me."However, in Gerard's case, a career in comics actually pre-dated his rock stardom. Interning at DC Comics during his time at art school, he went on to draw for Cartoon Network. On his way to work one morning, he witnessed the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. That experience brought on a personal and creative epiphany, and My Chemical Romance was born soon after."Before I quit drawing to tour full time with the band, I had a strong desire to do my own black and white book for a small publisher," Gerard recalls. "I just didn't find the right one to gel with the project I was working on at the time, which was a pretty kooky idea, but inhabited the same world as The Umbrella Academy."I began creating the story [of The Umbrella Academy] about three years ago, on a long summer tour through the U.S. I had been wanting to do something off-beat for years, even before starting the band, when I'd hit the pavement with my portfolio."I'd say it's changed quite a bit ... especially the characters and the plot. I would basically sit down with a sketchpad, a blue pencil, a brush pen, and some colored markers and just draw the craziest or most interesting-looking characters that came into my head. I wanted it to be a character-driven book, so I let the plot evolve around their advantages, but more importantly their disadvantages."The Characters "What you get is a small group of heroes seen at a couple distinct stages in their lives," says Scott. "We did a little two-page strip on the Dark Horse web site a few months back, which showed two of the heroes, Seance and The Boy Who Disappeared, in contemporary times."All the characters in the group are the exact same age — born at the same moment, spontaneously, from women who'd previously shown no signs of pregnancy, but if you look back at that strip, you'll see that The Boy and Seance appear to be at very different ages — that won't get explained until a couple issues into the series. In the Free Comic Book Day story, The Boy is not there — you just have Seance, Spaceboy, The Horror, Rumor, and The Kraken, and it's actually a much earlier stage in their career. Where's The Boy? He's missing, been missing a while. "When issue one rolls out in September, you'll get the origin of the team, how these kids were rounded up by Reginald Hargreeves, a billionaire genius entrepreneur who happens to be a space alien. Children were born all over the world, spontaneously and simultaneously, and he rounded up seven of them, and formed a superhero team. There's a seventh child, Vanya, not mentioned above. After the introductory scene in issue one, you see an early adventure of the team, when they were little kids, wearing matching uniforms."Spaceboy is the leader of the team. As a child he had super strength, and he was the one kid on the team that Hargreeves was positive about. He was a real terrible father, Hargreeves, and his bad parenting and his sort of abusive treatment of the kids contributes to the fact that they don't stick together as they grow up. But Space was Hargreeves's favorite, and when he was nearly killed, Hargreeves performed an emergency transplant operation that saved Space's life, but effectively robbed him of his super strength. Fortunately he was so good at everything else, he was still a pretty effective superhero."The Rumor, the only female actively on the team, has the bizarre power of being able to convince anyone of anything—not only that, but whatever she says turns out to be true, in a real Jorge Luis Borges kind of way."You know, one of the comments I read about our Free Comic Book Day offering was that the teamwork was real good in the story, and without Gerard and I having talked about that too specifically, I realize that's a big thing for him, figuring that out. In issue one, we see the very young version of the team going after a pretty unusual foe, and their teamwork is even more coordinated than it was in Free Comic Book Day. I don't read any superhero team books right now, but I don't remember them being all that brilliant about the teamwork factor."I know on B.P.R.D., a team book I edit, that getting them to work as a team is a challenge. Usually it's more a case where at any given time, one of their powers or skills comes in handy, and the rest give that one room to do their thing. But in Umbrella Academy, Space calls the shots for the most part, and they're pretty strategic."Free Comic Book Day Even with only fourteen pages currently available — the two-page online preview and the twelve-page Free Comic Book Day story — The Umbrella Academy has already proven itself to be entertaining, clever, and quirky, and the excitement which filled journal and message board communities — both comics-oriented groups and My Chemical Romance-focused ones — after the free book's drop shows that the optimism surrounding the release was justified."We think this is going to be a huge book for us this year, and we were planning Free Comic Book Day right around the time that we were beginning work on this book," says Scott. "Gerard was holing up in a Portland hotel for a week to write the book, and the question of Free Comic Book Day came up right before he got here."While he was in town, we wanted to present him with our marketing plan, and I thought there was no better way to get this book out to people than that. We were able to use that week to focus on Free Comic Book Day, and get Gabriel [Ba, the book's artist] a script right away."Also, I love Free Comic Book Day, Dirk, the Marketing Director loves it, so we felt that this would give the event a shot in the arm. The Spider-Man movie is gonna bring a lot of people into stores, by taking something from the comics world and putting it into the popular culture. With Gerard, we'll be bringing in another contingent, by bringing someone from the pop culture into the comic shops. And he'll bring a lot of his fans with him."The Audience These days, a lot of commentators spend a lot of time talking about how to make comics available to a wider audience, usually by suggesting that the monthly-issue format should be abandoned in favour of bookstore-ready trade paperbacks.Dark Horse is arguably the comics publisher most adept at cross-pollinating with other media, and therefore with other fanbases: as well as the aforementioned Hellboy, their titles include Frank Miller's 300 and Sin City; Star Wars; Serenity; and Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, currently one of the biggest buzz-books in the industry. Are these non-comics-reading readers only interested in trades?"No, we see huge increases in the comics," Scott says. "Buffy was outrageously successful, Serenity too. Serenity has become one of our single most profitable graphic novels, but the single issues were among the highest sellers of the year that year."With Buffy, I have no idea how well we're gonna do with the trades, but the single issues are selling tremendously well. Way beyond anything else we have going. While your average Buffy fan may never have set foot in a comic shop before Joss's #1 came out, they aren't familiar enough with the industry to say, 'Oh, I'll wait for the trade'. That phrase is something only a comics reader would utter."So if you're a Buffy fan, or a My Chem fan, and you hear about this new book, you'll find that comics shop, or figure out how to order it online. I think the lasting power of the trades is going to be as massive for Buffy and Umbrella Academy as it's been for Serenity, but that doesn't come at the expense of the pamphlets at all."But for all that The Umbrella Academy comes with a built-in audience of My Chemical Romance fans, it's still a brand new voice in an industry heavily populated by creators whose ultimate goal is to work on the same books they themselves grew up reading. This self-referential, overly reverent system often can often lead to stagnation, but titles such as The Umbrella Academy offer respite from the repetition."When I first set out I had a strong desire to go to a company like DC/Vertigo and do something interesting with the characters, mainly as a writer, but then as an interior artist," says Gerard. "After a while I became more interested in working on my own stories ... I found it more rewarding."Scrollbox Code from KillerKiwi.net