The Umbrella Academy Comics Are Bananas

If you described Netflix's The Umbrella Academy to someone who'd never heard of it, they could reasonably conclude it was a prank: A group of seven adopted siblings born mysteriously on the same day to women who weren't pregnant when they woke up that morning are bought by an eccentric billionaire, grow up with a talking monkey butler and robot mom as they develop their superpowers, and thwart various apocalypses. Well, it turns out that the comics the TV show is based on, written by the guy from My Chemical Romance of all people, are even stranger.

Fun fact: The Eiffel Tower doesn't exist in the Umbrella Academy universe. That's because, in an incident in the Academy's childhood, they found the tower's long-dead designer, Gustave Eiffel, still living in the body of a zombie robot inside the tower, which he had been using to kill people (the tower itself, not the zombie robot body).

He then blasted off into space, because surprise, the Eiffel Tower is secretly a spaceship in addition to a lethal weapon. Considering the mission we saw them go on as youths was a boring bank robbery, it's hard not to feel like we got cheated. There's another flashback where "the young Umbrella Academy battle the now-living statue of Abraham Lincoln as part of a deal between their adoptive father Hargreeves and President John F. Kennedy."

Also, Vanya's orchestra was a death cult intent on destroying the world through music; it wasn't just her doing it accidentally. Also, instead of just Klaus going back in time to Vietnam to fight a normal war, several of them fight the "Viet Cong Vampires" and a mummy the size of a skyscraper alongside chimpanzee soldiers. A lot is going on is what we're saying.

Sure, the CGI budget on a show where people are constantly winking in and out of existence and a man has a talking fish for a head ...

... is probably already stretched pretty thin, but there's solid proof they're not going as hard as they could. Oh, well. There's always next season.

Images: Netflix, Dark Horse Comics