Comics After Watchmen: The Umbrella Academy

The Umbrella Academy, Volume 1
"Apocalypse Suite"
Gerard Way (Story), Gabriel Ba (Art), Dave Stewart (Colors), Nate Piekos (Letters), James Jean (Covers)

We have reached a point in fiction where there are no new stories. The bones of every tale have been cast already, with new works being almost entirely informed by the works it’s drawn from. We talk about Quentin Tarantino films almost exclusively through the movies and plots he’s expropriated to create a celluloid Frankenstein. So many new pop bands fail because they’re constantly compared to The Beatles, and most new comics are run through a subconscious litmus test against Alan Moore’s bibliography.

Which brings us to “The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite”, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba. “The Umbrella Academy” has been an unqualified success, at least in the microcosm of comics criticism. Throw a stone into a room of comic fans, and you’ll find someone who thought “The Umbrella Academy” is the most important debut of the last five years, and Way is the next Grant Morrison (if only he’d stop messing with that band of his).

His future's so bright... something, something

Taken alone, “The Umbrella Academy” isn’t particularly revolutionary. It is, to damn it with faint praise, simply a mechanically perfect comic. Way’s script is tight to a ridiculous degree, without wasted space and brimming with clever foreshadowing, Gabriel Ba is as good as the hype that precedes him, like a dog barking before an earthquake. He manages to couple an inventive sense of design with rock solid storytelling, he doesn’t experiment much, but that just means he never fails. Dave Stewart is, as always, the unsung hero. So much of what makes the book work depends on a meticulously crafted mood, and Stewart deftly moves between classic comic book colors and a more realistic palate, absorbing the reader.

It is not, however, a game changer. The story has been told before – the titular academy is the basis for a dysfunctional family drama that plays out after the death of their father. All the characters are drawn from other sources – Spaceboy, the taciturn self-appointed leader. Kraken, the black sheep loner. Rumor, the eldest girl, trying to keep her family together while her life is falling apart.

They’re boring alone, but the story backs them up. Even if Spaceboy’s character is a bit boring, he’s still a human head on an ape’s body. When Kraken disrupts the funeral (which happens in every one of these stories), its because he lashes out as his “mother”… by tearing away her shall to shame her as a plastic, limbless android created by her father. If we’re all telling the same, finite, number of stories, then it’s the angels in the details that make a tale sing.

“The Umbrella Academy” works because it is a comic book, something that has been lost in the transition towards a more cinematic approach to storytelling. Every single inch of the page works in concert to not only create an effective mood, but actually move the story forward. Things like the titles of the issue are used as lines of dialogue, which turns out to be a shockingly efficient segue technique when used sparingly. The marriage of text and pictures is something that only comics has really been able to master, but it’s been de-emphasized in lieu of making comics seem more “real”.

I blame you for the Mary Jane semen-cancer, Moore.

In a lot of ways, the success of “Umbrella Academy” is in direct opposition to modern mainstream comics. This is a new style of post-“Watchmen” aesthetic in almost every way; “Watchmen” deconstructed not only superheroes but the mechanics of the genre and repaired it in such a way that almost everything printed since owes something small to Moore and Gibbons’ opus. “The Umbrella Academy” is where we’d be now if “Watchmen” hadn’t been the atomic bomb that destroyed the Silver Age of Comics.

If the Silver Age was defined by bombast and imagination, then “Umbrella Academy” is its lovechild. This is a comic and it loves every second, playing it perfectly straight. It seems to be the threshold by which we’ll reach the co-existence of “Watchmen” style realism and unapologetic Superhero Comics -- rather than dramas with superheroes in them.