If you haven’t had a chance to check out Umbrella Academy, you gotta! Imagine a twisted take on the superhero genre, with a passel of brilliant kids born to mostly single women who had shown no signs of pregnancy. Since then, the kids have (mostly) grown up into relatively confused and extremely dangerous superbeings. One of the kids can travel through time, and another can make rumors true. The White Violin, ostensibly the least powerful sibling, actually possesses apocalyptic powers.
Written by My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bà, the series is fascinatingly original, darkly comic and filled with surprises and absurdities. It can be unsettling at times, and also hilarious. You’ll have a hard time figuring out what will come next.
Earlier this year the comic concluded its second volume, Dallas after making a huge splash in ‘07 with its first volume Apocalypse Suite. Now, as the run continues with another arc, Dark Horse is sweetening the deal — for a limited time, they’re giving away issue 1 of volume 3 as a free iPhone app (download here). Now you can find out what the fuss is about without spending a cent.
After almost a year, I have finally got my scanner working again! So, better late than never, I have added scans from Gerard’s cover of NME back in February, as well as adding the first teaser promo for the Umbrella Academy‘s third series, ‘Hotel Oblivion’ – enjoy!
Gallery Links
Magazines & Scans – NME [Feb 21 09]
Other Projects – The Umbrella Academy – “Hotel Oblivion” – Promotional
“I like the titles from The Umbrella Academy issues better than my song titles now,” Gerard Way announced at his Saturday afternoon panel at Comic-Con International. “They’ve leveled up. There’s nothing better than titling an issue of Umbrella Academy.” The frontman of My Chemical Romance, Way is also a longtime comics fan — he mentioned that he’d freaked out about seeing Jeff (Bone) Smith the night before, and rhapsodized over Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead (“After The Walking Dead, I don’t know that you can touch zombies. It’ll be a good five or 10 years before somebody else can do a zombie comic”).
Of course, Way has also become an award-winning comics writer himself in the last few years. At the overflowing panel that’s now an annual Comic-Con tradition, he announced two new comic books he’s working on: the third Umbrella Academy miniseries, subtitled Hotel Oblivion and drawn by the Brazilian artist Gabriel Bá, and a new series called The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, drawn by Becky Cloonan (Demo). Way talked to Rolling Stone about the new comics, as well as the MCR record that’s in progress right now.
Gerard Way has enjoyed such success with his Dark Horse series “The Umbrella Academy” that it’s almost no longer necessary to mention that he also happens to be a rock star. Together with artist Gabriel Ba, the My Chemical Romance frontman won an Eisner Award for Best Limited Series in 2008 for their first miniseries, subtitled “Apocalypse Suite,” and the follow up “Dallas” has been enthusiastically received by fans and critics. Dark Horse announced Friday at Comic-Con International that Way and Ba are now working on a third series, titled “Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion,” and Way will announce another project at Saturday’s panel. CBR News caught up with Way to discuss both projects. Our discussion of “Umbrella Academy” series 3 is right here, and be sure to check back tomorrow for part two of the interview.
“Like series 2, series 3 of ‘Umbrella Academy’ is going to pick up a bit after we left off,” Way said. “But it’s going to start off with a flashback and we’re going to get to see one of the old characters from the Free Comic Book Day story, Murder Magician. Basically, we’re going to see what Hargreeves did with all these villains over the years.
“I really like this series, I’ve had this one in my head for a long time,” the writer continued. Though Way noted that his stories often shift in the telling, he does have a strong sense of how the events in “Hotel Oblivion” play out. “This time, I’m thinking it is going to deal with other characters than the Umbrella Academy, at least for half of it. You’re going to see the other side of things,” Way told CBR. The core cast, however, will continue on with their lives. “Obviously, Spaceboy’s left again, we’ll deal with that, and everybody’s in kind of a whole different state of disrepair. Although I’d like to see the family get a little bit functional at this point. You’re going to see Rumor take a very different attitude toward Vanya now, for a lot of reasons, number one being her own guilt. That story is now going to develop.”
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