Cbr16bingo Earth Day, bingo
I really enjoyed The Umbrella Academy series on Netflix and just did a binge of the first three seasons before watching the fourth and final season. Overall, I thought it was excellent. The resolution to the series was great and made sense of a lot of stuff that had been unresolved. I knew it was based on a graphic novel series and decided to pick it up and see how the the TV series compares to the original, and surprisingly for me, the TV series is WAY better than the original comic. The original comic by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba was critically acclaimed and even won an Eisner for its first volume, and for the life of me I just don’t get it. Its story lines are a confusing mess, and thankfully the TV creators just used them as a general guideline, leaving out tons of unnecessary and uninteresting stuff and then adding in plenty of better plot lines and characters. Although I got the graphic novel series as part of a 3-volume set, it seems to me that the written story is unresolved and that perhaps a fourth volume will be coming.
Like the TV series, the original book’s premise is that an eccentric scientist/billionaire named Reginald Hargreeves adopted 7 children all born under unusual circumstances at the same time on the same day. They have superpowers and Hargreeves turns them into a crime fighting team to “save the world.” The seventh child, Vanya, is led to believe she is not special and is left out of the family business, which leads her to feel unloved and useless in her own family. As in the TV show, brother Ben has died young in unexplained circumstances and Five was MIA for years (due to time travel snafus) and returns as an experienced 60-something assassin in an adolescent’s body. The siblings, now grown up and away from each other, come together when their father dies, but this unleashes some secret booby trap laid by one of their old enemies.
Volume 1’s premise is that this old supervillain has unleashed the destruction of the world as revenge against Hargreeves, and another supervillain who knows that Vanya is way more powerful than her siblings is going to use her to also end the world. I’m not sure why everyone wants to end the world when it means they die, too, but there you are. The ending of Volume 1 was kind of silly (spoiler alert, the world doesn’t end), especially compared to how it was handled in the TV series, which was cool.
Volume 2, Dallas, had a good start. Allison and Vanya are both recovering from injuries sustained in Volume 1, and Five finds himself the object of Temps Aeternalis’ attention. Temps Aeternalis is called The Commission in the TV show and its job is to preserve the timeline. Five has gone rogue and now they want him back under their control. When Five manages to single-handedly murder the scores of bots sent to bring him down, Hazel and Cha Cha are called in to deal with him. I was pretty excited to see them come up in the book since they were outstanding in the TV series, but while they are fierce and crazy, they get very little page-time. The TV creators were smart to beef up their roles. Anyway, like the TV show, Five and his sibs end up having to get involved in the Kennedy assassination and make sure it happens. This was what season 2 of the TV show was about, and it involved several interesting plot lines and characters who are absent from the book: Lila, the Handler, Ray, Sissy, Dave and so on. By the way, Ben’s ghost does not factor at all in the books either.
Volume 3 is very hard to make sense of in my opinion. The siblings seem to be going their separate ways. Vanya is still recovering from injuries sustained in volume 1, and the sibs’ “mom,” who is a robot created by Hargreeves, is cajoling her into getting better. The reveal about Vanya at the end of this volume is weird and unexplained but I will tell you it involves the Sparrows (which was season 3 of the TV show but the plot is absent from this book). Allison and Five are working together gathering information on the Perseus Corporation, which seems to be involved in all kinds of suspicious and possibly illegal and world-threatening activity (I couldn’t explain it if you put a gun to my head). Klaus is Klaus, doing drugs and drinking and running afoul of the Mothers of Agony (again, not as well developed as the TV series, and Klaus’ powers and trips to the afterlife are not well developed in the books). Diego and Luther have somehow gotten involved with another scientist who wants to explore “after space” which is somehow related to stuff that Hargreeves was doing? Whatever, not clear but guess what? All roads lead to the Hotel Oblivion. All the sibs end up at this place that their dad developed as a prison for supervillains. There has been a breakout, with all kinds of weird shit happening (one of the old villains is carrying a baby around for some reason). It’s at this point that the Sparrows show up and help save the day. And the story ends.
Reading these volumes really made me appreciate the work that the show runners did. How they read these books and came up with superior plots and character development is truly impressive because I found it to be a weird and frustrating mess. I also appreciate that the show runners added a lot of diversity to their casting. In the comics, everybody is white and frankly it was hard sometimes to distinguish one character from another. Anyway, I recommend the Netflix series but not the books, and that brings me no joy.