Umbrella Academy
© Grant Morrison 2008
UMBRELLA ACADEMY: APOCALYPSE SUITE - Gerard Way/Gabriel Ba (Dark Horse Comics, 2008)
INTRODUCTION by Grant Morrison
It begins, in the best way possible, with an atomic flying elbow...
I met Gerard Way in Glasgow at the end of 2006, not long after the release of The Black Parade by his band, My Chemical Romance.
The video for the single “Welcome To The Black Parade” had seemed to me a perfect articulation of a kind of, let’s call it, “necrodelic” current I was hoping might show up in popular culture, so I was eager to catch up with him, Those punk, post-apocalyptic echoes of Sgt. Pepper, the elegiac chiming guitars and doomed young soldiers, the Freddie Mercury bravado that compressed the polar extremes of emo and military macho together into a perfect synthesis: the blend was thrilling and showed a pop group with an ambition, a vision, and a reach that immediately attracted my attention.
The Black Parade played relentlessly while I was writing psychotic Joker prose for the 663rd issue of the Batman comic, and on all through the endless, cold, dark nights and cigarette-burn days of the miserable Scottish winter.
So by the time Gerard and I sat down together it was already a mutual admiration party. He had the iconic silver crop then but the dye was making his scalp crawl and he’d started talking about ditching the look. We got on like old pals and spent the afternoon before the band’s sound check talking about comics, travel, rock ‘n’ roll, life, death, Malcolm McDowell, and all that.
He’d told me he’d been writing a comic of his own, called The Umbrella Academy, and now that I knew a bit more about him and his influences I felt confident in saying I’d love to read it before it came out. There’s nothing worse than feigning enthusiasm to avoid hurting a friend’s feelings, but Gerard wasn’t a celebrity tourist in the world of comics – he knew them and loved them, and had clear ideas about where he wanted to take them.
Even so, I had no real idea of what to expect, except maybe some continuation of The Black Parade themes; cancer, cabaret and chaos.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle regular deadlines writing in a tour bus between shows. It’s hard enough to do this kind of thing from the comfort of home, but I reckoned without his work ethic and so, with its loving nods to The Prisoner, French surrealism and music history, its strange unconscious echoes of old British-television shows and favourite films, The Umbrella Academy arrived perfectly formed, one issue after the other, and quite unlike anything I’d imagined.
The breezy, confident pace; the humour and invention; the clipped, sardonic narrative captions that cross-cut with the dialogue to blackly ironic effect, read like the words of a veteran master of the form. Combined with the bendy, spiky, chiaroscuric gory of Gabriel Ba’s art, with its compact, expressive lines and Dave Stewart’s evocative colouring, Gerard’s story and characters come to incredible life and explode across page after page, issue after issue, conjuring a fully realised world that refuses to sit still as its heroes and villains experience betrayal, carnage, humiliation, joy, failure, heartbreak and death.
Add James Jean’s brilliant, atmospheric covers, stir over a blue fever heat, and serve as one of the great new comic books this decade.
The Umbrella Academy has a sound and a beat unlike Gerard makes with his band and his voice, but listen close and you’ll hear it just as clearly.
Collected here are the first six issues of The Umbrella Academy, comprising the Apocalypse Suite storyline.
It begins with an elbow and ends witha sandwich...
And in between you will hear music of a very different kind.
Grant Morrison
Los Angeles, March 2008
