CC – The “Umbrella Academy” has this kind of dark humor and this danse macabre feel. The time-traveling kid is the grim reaper leading everyone to the end of the world … Is that just your sensibilities as an artist?
Way: I think it is. I think ultimately it has this kind of dark sense of humor first and foremost.
I don’t have a bleak outlook on the world. I’m a happy person.
But black humor has always been my favorite. I wanted that to be in the series along with that sense of family and a really bad childhood. Just kind of have a laugh about how apocalyptic the world is whether it’s this comic or the real world. To me it’s a commentary on the real world anyway. We live in these times that it’s really dark, and it gets darker and I think that’s obviously what my band plugs into in the same way. So it makes sense that it kind of gets into the comics.
CC – In times of war … I did a story last year and talked to several creators about how comics and movies and art in general the public gravitates more to it.
Way: And I’ve always felt very plugged into that, I don’t know why.
Even when my band started, most of the music out there was very pop and glossy and baggy shorts.
CC – The “American Pie” soundtrack.
Way: Yeah, totally. The “American Pie” soundtrack.
I had wanted something different out of music. I wanted to be that. Something that plugged into that type of nihilism that’s out there. Not in a way that I wanted to bring doom and gloom to the world, either, but maybe in a way that said “Hey, we can all get through this.” And we should directly address this stuff rather than like, everybody’s going surfing.
So I applied the same things to the comic. In a lot of ways, “Umbrella Academy” is a direct response to superhero drama in the way the band was a direct response to popular music.
I’d become so bored with origin stories and all this nonsense about backstories. If you picked up a comic you had to know it from the beginning. I also didn’t like the re-booting and telling the origin story all over again. So I said “I’m gonna do an origin in three pages for this entire superhero team and this entire world.” I figured if I could do that in three pages and the reader likes the way I did that then the reader and I are on the same page and we can tell a story together.
CC – In the future, are we going to see more flashbacks of the “Umbrella Academy” and how they were as a young team together?
Way: In series 2, I just finished the first issue, you’re going to see them as children again. I think it’s really a fun way to start each series with them as children. Then throughout, when they’re older, you can see some flashbacks.
As far as the series goes, I think the only flashbacks go, I think the only one you’re going to see (in this one) is in the first issue. I’m starting the second issue now and I just don’t see any room for flashbacks at all.
CC – I’ve read the first series now a couple of times and it’s like a “Simpsons” episode. I don’t want to compare it to anything, really, but the second or third time you read it, you pick up on little things in the background. Like the bulletin board Spaceboy had and different little things like that.
Are those little things something you and Gabriel (Ba) intentionally put in?
Way: Yeah, everything that’s in there is very intentional. Gabriel is very good and you can ask those things of him. You can say “Hey, in the background really small I need this to be in there.” And he’ll make sure it happens.
Some of it is stuff that is not for the current situation. Some of it is stuff that may appear later, or may not. That’s another one of beauties of the series. It’s not about throwing red herrings out there, but it’s about throwing ideas out there that if we want to do something with them later we can. If not, it’s no big deal.
CC – Are we ever going to see what happens to the Horror?
Way: You actually eventually are. I don’t think it’s going to be for a long time, but you will definitely see what happened to the Horror. The Jennifer Incident, it was created to just be alluded to in the story. I named it the Jennifer incident because I have no idea what Jennifer is. I have no idea what it even refers to. I just came up with something that sounded interesting and could be thought-provoking. And that’s the Jennifer Incident.
It doesn’t even matter what it is. It’s this event that happened that nobody even really remembers that caused the team to break up.
CC – When you finally get to it it had better either live up to all the expectations and be completely awesome or be completely cheesy and a one-day fill.
Way: Right! The Jennifer Incident will appear again. And it will explain a lot. But I can’t really say when. I would like to say that initially, it was never intended to be explained. That’s kind of the beauty of it. You had no idea what it was.
CC – Where’d you get the idea for these characters?
Way: In some ways they’re responses to previous characters. But in a lot of ways I really just wanted to tap into that energy of the Silver Age and see what I could make work that other people couldn’t make work.
Like Kraken, for example. He’s basically Aquaman, yet he’s a character in the series that people love and he’s useful. Whereas Aquaman, people make jokes about how useless he is. I just wanted to take Aquaman and make him so popular he was like the Wolverine of the group.
He has a very type of dark attitude and it doesn’t matter that his only power is holding his breath. In the end it shouldn’t matter what your power is, or what your moniker is or what your costume is like.
The character’s attitude is there and that’s what it’s about.
I really wanted these characters to be a study of personality, see if I could accomplish things with them that others couldn’t. They were really inspired by the Silver Age and that excitement where the character was everything. Where it wasn’t just a guy in a costume.
I’d say 90-percent of the team doesn’t even have a costume. Yet they’re not a group of plain-clothed superheroes, either. That’s another thing that’s slightly irritating.
When somebody’s trying to do a grim, realistic superhero thing and have them in plain clothes. That doesn’t really work for me, either.
It was inspired a lot by “Doom Patrol,” too. They had to look cool together. I had to have a group that was bizarre but looked cool together. If you look at Grant Morrison’s “Doom Patrol,” they just look incredible together.
CC – You have some interesting powers. Like the Rumor. They’re powers people really haven’t seen before or they’re powers that have failed miserably last time they were tried.
Way: Right. Jim Lee’s favorite character is the Rumor and we talk a lot about the character. His opinion was that we’ve never heard of that superpower. He thought it was so cool because it was a new thing no one had ever heard of.
It is. I don’t remember someone ever coming up with it, either. But it’s just something that naturally occurred to me.
The Seance is really something that I guess we have seen before, but I wanted someone very much like Dr. Strange, kind of based on the occult and things like that.
Definitely a little more humorous and definitely a complete jerk.
Very full of himself and self-absorbed, too.
But that’s another thing. What if, in creating these characters, instead of giving them high-school problems, made them really not very good people? How much more interesting would that make them?
CC – It doesn’t help that they had an ass of a guardian growing up, either.
Way: That was the main thing. You’ve got this group of kids, first and foremost, don’t even have identities. They’re different than other kids. They can’t play with other kids. Then they have a really lousy father who has no idea how to be a father. He’s an alien. You’re going to end up a really messed up individual.
CC – He’s the anti-Professor X.
Way: There’s an opening scene in series 2 that I wrote that you could do with Hargreeves that you could never do with Professor X.
It’s one of those things that really makes me love the book, because it’s like you could never f—ing do that (in X-Men). Just certain things these characters can say and just be so lousy that you could never do in a superhero book.
CC – Were you surprised at the attention it got after Free Comic Book Day?
Way: I think I was more surprised at the reception after the first issue.
The Free Comic Book Day thing made me very nervous, actually. It was a great idea on Scott’s part but from my standpoint because it wasn’t the story I had written. It was before the story I had written.
I’m not a fan of wanting to do origin stories. So it had to be a slice of their lives when they were a team that had no consequence on the story I had written for the main series. I wanted to make sure it was.
That proved to be just as difficult as writing the entire series. I think that eight-page story took me a month and a half. I also knew it was going to be people’s first taste of “The Umbrella Academy” and I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted their first taste to be. I wanted it to be that first issue.
So, in the end, it all worked out great, but it was very stressful.
CC – And then people had to wait five or six months to see them again.
Way: Exactly. Now people had a definite opinion about what the series was and it might not be what they were getting.
When issue 1 came out, the way that it was received, that’s what I was really excited about.
Free Comic Day definitely did what it was supposed to do as far as getting publicity for it, because we didn’t want to rely on me being in a band to do that.
That’s why I originally agreed to do that, because we were staying so far away from me being in this band. We needed some kind of push.
But I was very happy with the reception of the first issue.
CC – Has the comic brought more fans, or a different type of fan from the music?
Way: Yeah, in fact it seems to me like a lot of them are Joss’ (Whedon) fans. I’m getting a lot of “Buffy” fans, which is very cool. And straight superhero fans. Occasionally I’ll be signing a book for a guy in a Superman shirt, and that’s very cool, too.
The coolest thing is getting guys, I’m starting to get fans of the old (Chris) Claremont “X-Men,” and that’s what I grew up on and that was a direct influence on the series.
It’s kind of like I’m getting these guys who are now in their 30s and this is kind of like the “X-Men” for their age. It’s like speaking to the same kind of reader that I was.
CC – I told a friend it reminded me of the old “Inferno” crossover series in the ’80s. Maybe a little more darkly humorous.
Way: Completely. “Inferno” was probably the first or second crossover I was able to read all the issues of.
CC – I still have all the old issues and the new trade. I think it’s probably my favorite series ever.
Way: Me, too. I have that trade they came out with a few years ago and all the original issues. I have the fight between X-Men and X-Factor and all that s—.
