When this project was announced, everyone and their grandmother were doubting it. What with the plethora of non-comics Big Names wielding their supposed considerable commercial weight, many of our favorite fictional big names went under the surgical knives of these foreign invaders…and suffered. Ultimate Wolverine is still fighting the Hulk in some Tibetan limbo after the co-creator of Lost played his hand at writing a comic, and G*d only knows what went on in the spasmodic fit that Michael Chabon pulled with his million and one Escapist comics. Wonder Woman, who has always managed to get short-changed in spite of her supposed more-powerful-than-Superman-ness, fell before two comics imports—novelist Jodi Picoult, who decided that the best way to write the Amazon princess was as a clueless and un-acclimatized alien who’s scared of gas pumps and doesn’t know what a credit card is; and The O.C.’s Alan Heinberg, who decided, mid-storyline, not to write Wonder Woman at all.

Deep breath.

So: what are we to think when the singer for My Chemical Romance, which is known neither for being clever and twisted (like Lost) nor brilliantly original (like Chabon’s novel Kavlier & Clay) nor…well, without quality music like The O.C.? What we expected was Mark Waid’s wacky and smart and completely-sell-outy Fantastic Four at best, or a spasmodic Spawn clone at worst.

Instead, this is what we get:

Open on a wrestling ring. A purple and green octopus is wrestling someone who looks like a cross between a Cabbage Patch Kid and the governor of Minnesota. Stark, tongue-in-cheek noir narration commences. The disparate, still-noirish panels segue along at a frantic pace, beat-for-beat one of the best openings in recent comics history, culminating in the introduction of the leader of the mysterious Umbrella Academy—a figure with the antisocial tendencies of Professor X and the sense of humor of that bodyless guy who led the Doom Patrol—oh, hell, I’ll just let Way’s narration do its trick: “Enter, Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Olympic Gold Medalist and recipient of the Nobel Prize for his work in the cerebral advancement of the chimpanzee. Space alien.”

I can’t even tell you how the baby-snatching plays into it. Or Gabriel Ba’s brilliant art design that seems to be hovering resolutely in the 1920s and the 1890s at the same time, such a good idea that the need to plagiarize it burns inside my veins. By the end of the first issue, I don’t know exactly where they’re headed—although we get a solid story, with a few good hints—but, also, we don’t care.

Along the way, Way takes tricks from the Joss Whedon toolbox (characters cursing in Asiatic languages), the Grant Morrison toolbox (random-ass plot developments, malapropic deus-ex-machina inventions, and, of course, aliens) and from every postmodern toolbox in general—but when you’re having this much fun, who cares? We thought that Gerard Way would write comics like Avril Lavigne. Instead, he writes like the Book of Revelations. After this, I made sure to hunt down the Umbrella short story given out on Free Comic Book Day. Damn, I hope Dark Horse sends me the second issue.

I think I’ll take a second look at My Chemical Romance now, too.

One Response to “The Umbrella Academy #1”

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