The Umbrella Academy is the story of seven adopted superhuman misfits and their super-rich father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves (AKA the Monocle). If you have watched the television adaptation, which is barrelling into its last season, you will already be fans of the mix of conspiracy, US ephemera and choreographed ultraviolence as well as the more domestic aspects of a long-form drama.
The comics, written by Gerard Way (yes, of My Chemical Romance) and illustrated by Gabriel Bá, work slightly differently and are a pastiche of literary influences. It is a rethinking of the stories of Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras (1953), which follows a group of children with superhuman intelligence, seen through a lens of DC’s Doom Patrol (1963-2023) comics about a group of superpowered misfits who were experiments and accidents, and classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
