Netflix recently released it’s trailer for the highly anticipated The Umbrella Academy;
a live action adaptation of the Dark Horse comic series of the same name, created by
Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba.
And the trailer packed quite the punch!
Plus a healthy dose of mystery.
So today, we’re taking a closer look at the source material and it’s history in
the comic book industry with our list of the top 10 umbrella academy shocking facts.
Also note, this list contains some minor spoilers for the comic, which might end up being spoilers
for the show as a whole, so proceed with caution friends!
10 Alternate History The Umbrella Academy takes place in an alternate
timeline of sorts, one in which John F Kennedy was never assassinated.
Kennedy is actually a character who appears in the comics; we see him in flashback in
the second series of The Umbrella Academy comic, titled Dallas, in which he sends the
Academy out on a mission to fight against the animated Lincoln Memorial.
And, funny enough, the team end up defeating the Lincoln statue by using a statue of John
Wilkes Booth.
9 A New Kind of Superhero Family The members of the Umbrella Academy are described
as a dysfunctional family of superheroes, all children who were adopted.
And their leader?
Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who is actually an alien disguised as a famous entrepreneur.
Reginald proves to be a bit of a sh*t father though, considering he doesn’t even give
the kids names, only numbers, and refuses to have them call him dad.
Because of the themes of family, the series has often been compared to both the Fantastic
Four and the X-Men; makeshift families that can often be deemed as rather dysfunctional,
depending on the story arc, of course.
8 43 Children The comic begins with an absurd event; the
instant in which a finishing blow called an atomic flying elbow in a cosmic wrestling
match occurs.
At that same moment, 43 superpowers infants are born to women who were not pregnant, in
a seemingly random and unconnected event.
Sir Reginald Hargreeves goes out and adopts seven of those children, building them into
a team of super powered individuals in order to save the world from an unspecified threat.
The seventh child, Vanya, proves to have no abilities.
In addition to that, we never do find out what happened to the other 36 children that
Reginald didn’t scoop up.
7 The 7th Child Based off the trailer, it may seem that the
seventh child has been left out.
Or rather, #6.
But that’s not quite the case.
According to the official news that has been revealed about the Netflix show, number 6
will be quite present, played by Ethan Hwang.
In the lore of the show, similar to the comics, he’s Ben Hargreeves, known as Number Six,
or The Horror, who was a gullible child with the ability to manifest monsters from other
dimensions through his body.
His death is what caused the team to disband initially.
6 Apocalypse Suite In the trailer for the Netflix show, we learn
that the members of the Umbrella Academy have all be reunited years later, brought together
again by the death of Sir Reginald Hargreeves, the only parental figure they ever really
had, and must face a new threat which could result in the end of the world.
This is plucked straight out of the first volume of the main series in the comics, titled
Apocalypse Suite, which consisted of six issues.
Apocalypse suite is the a piece of music that a group of musicians called the Orchestra
Verdament claim they can play in order to bring about the destruction of the world.
5 The Boy’s Age The Boy, also known as #5, is one of the most
fascinating members of the team.
The Boy looks as if he’s around the age of ten; that’s because his physical appearance
is locked, and he remains in the same body.
In reality, he’s actually 60 years old.
This is due to his powers; he’s able to manipulate time, and during the final battle
that the child version of the team fought, he had travelled through time, which took
him a whole 50 years to rectify, trying to figure out how to travel backwards to what
he considered his present.
This ability to time travel froze his physical state in t’s 10 year old form.
4 MySpace In addition to the main series, several Umbrella
Academy short stories were released, initially debuting on what some who recall the earlier
days of the internet may see as a really strange distribution plan.
These short stories were all released through Dark Horse presents, but one in particular,
the last one, titled Anywhere But Here, was released on the Dark Horse presents Mysapce.
Yup, MySpace.
For those of you who have absolutely no idea what MySpace is, it was the big social media
trend that came before Facebook, and allowed you to add pretty much whatever you wanted
to your page, from music to images to videos to what have you.
It pretty much died out with the popularity of Facebook, but has still managed to tucker
on, with it being made use of in instances like these.
Anywhere But Here was also included in the Dallas collections of the series that were
released in 2009.
3 The Film Before it became a Netflix television show,
The Umbrella Academy was actually in development as a feature film, having been optioned by
Universal Studios.
The screenwriter who was hired to tackle the project was Mark Bomback, who went on to work
on the 2012 remake of Total Recall, the 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and even helped
out on 2017’s Logan.
Bomback was replaced in 2010 on the project by Rawson Marshall Thunder, and after news
of that broke, there was pretty much radio silence as far as the film was concerned,
aside from a comment from creator Gerard Way that the film had been in “good talks”
and had a “really good script” but ultimately the project was “kind of up to the universe.”
Then, in 2015, it was announced that The Umbrella Academy would be developed into a television
series instead of a film, produced by Universal Cable Productions with Netflix on board.
2 Influences Creator Gerard Way and Gabrial Ba spoke to
Nerdist about some of the influences that inspired their work on The Umbrella Academy.
Both of them cited the X-Men as a major influence, with Way noting that he grew up reading Chris
Claremont’s run on X-Men, which he notes is really apparent in the second collection
of the series, Dallas.
Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol also had a whole lot of influence on Way, as well, having
told the online news site that Morrison’s run helped reinvigorate him and pushed him
back into doing comics again.
Both creators also noted that the 60s TV sow The Prisoner was a big influence when it came
to creating a sense of paranoia in the world.
1 The Creator If the name of Umbrella Academy creator Gerard
Way seems familiar to you, it’s because he’s not only famous for writing comic books.
Gerard Way is also the lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance, the rock band that
was quite popular back in the early 2000s, which split in March of 2013.
He had released a solo album called Hesitant Alien a year later, but ended up becoming
more involved in the comics scene, even becoming the co-founder of the DC Imprint Young animal.
The Umbrella Academy is by far his greatest success in the comics industry though, having
won an Eisner, which is pretty darn special, and having originally graduated from New York’s
School of Visual Arts, along with interning at DC Comics.
He had pitched the Umbrella Academy after the release of MCR’s 2007 album The Black
Parade, with Dark Horse publishing the first two series in 2007 and 2008.
And, fun fact, in the beginning events of the comics, in which the Umbrella Academy
are initially active as children, takes place in 1977, which is actually the year that Way
was born.
There we have it friends!
The Umbrella Academy premiere on Netflix this February 15th.
Are you excited?
Give us a shout in those comments below and let us know your thoughts!
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I’ll catch you all in the next video!