This is an essay about The Umbrella Academy.

That’s what I told myself, anyway.

***

It’s 2008, perhaps 2009. I’m either 22 or 23 years old. I don’t have very many memories from this time of my life. These things tend to disappear on me, like bits of thread unspooling until there’s nothing left.

By this point, I’ve had catastrophic oral trauma that cost me six teeth. I’ll need dentures by the time I’m 30 because a health condition costs me all the enamel in my mouth. Only exposed nerves and pits remain. I’m living at home with my family, in a house crowded with people. I spend a lot of time on LiveJournal posting in TV show and movie fan communities. I’m either in or about to be in an emotionally abusive relationship with a girl I met online.

At 22 or 23, I work at a restaurant, maybe a shoe store. My family functions in various shades of gaslighting, guilt-tripping, and emotional manipulation. My father is some kind of narcissist, my mother a massive depressive. I had to take care of my younger brothers when my parents checked out on them as tweens and I have no real friends. The friends I had growing up have outgrown me as surely as I’d outgrown them, but we keep going through the motions anyway. We knew each other our whole lives, knew each other’s ugly secrets. The abuses we’ve suffered at the hands of adults. It felt easier than calling things off, even though all we did was hurt each other at that point.

Fandom is my only outlet. This is often abusive, too, but in ways you don’t really realize when it’s happening with strangers behind a screen.

That, and when all your relationships are painful and fraught, you don’t know anything else is possible.

So, it’s 2008 or 2009. I write fanfiction to gain a sense of creative freedom. I want to write books and short stories, even if they are basically just updated versions of my X-Men original characters I created as a teenager. My most prized possession is a trade paperback copy of Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite. It was published by Dark Horse Comics. The story is by Gerard Way, the art by Gabriel Ba, with colors by Dave Stuart, and letters by Nate Piekos. I don’t remember buying it. It may have been a gift, but I don’t know from whom. I don’t remember a time before Umbrella Academy.

There is no Magen who did not own Umbrella Academy. She didn’t exist. She will never exist.

***

This, the essay you’re reading on your laptop or phone, is not the essay I intended to write. In the proud tradition of Magen Cubed essays, I outlined a very serious treatise on Umbrella Academy that would cover a series of topics before ultimately culminating in a comparison between the themes of the comics and the 2019 Netflix Original Series adaptation. I’ve been slowly working on this essay since the fall of 2019, upon reading Hotel Oblivion, the long-awaited third installment of the series.

That essay didn’t happen. I wrote this essay instead. That essay was like trying to contain an explosion with a butterfly net. This essay is about how I learned to love the series, on the page and on the screen, the same way I could love a bomb.

I know a lot about bombs. A bomb has been going off since as far back as I can remember, in the pieces that I do remember. It continues to explode every day as I move forward and back in time. The explosion exists as an impossibly bright, hot place inside my skull. I see it when I close my eyes. It tastes like ash and liquor and debt, the things that have become the shape of my life during those years I don’t really remember.

We can’t talk about bombs, but sometimes we can write about them.

I’m going to try to do that now.

***

They never tell you that trauma and mental illness affect your memory. My life prior to 2013 is largely a blur. Everything feels very soft or muted, like looking at footage of someone else’s home movies. What I do remember is often painful, embarrassing, or traumatic.

I remember how each one of my dogs died when I was a kid, but I don’t remember what they looked like. They’re all just fluffy shapes moving through grass or snow. But I have vivid flashbacks of how they died, in full color and surround sound, as if I’m there in the moment again. In my mind, they only truly ever lived in those moments, and that’s all I’m allowed to have of them.

They say depression is related to a diminished hippocampus, the area of the brain that deals with learning and memory. If you’re depressed, your hippocampus is too small. It can affect how your brain makes and processes memories. They say telling a child she’s too weak, too frail, too strange to survive in public school will make her believe it. Apparently, if you say keeping her isolation is for her own good, she’ll believe that, too. Telling her that her needs are too great, her feelings too large, and her problems too inconvenient can make her think she’s stupid, weak, and useless.

Strange how that works, isn’t it?

That is, until she does something clever or says something smart, of course. Then she’s just about the most important person in the room. Because she’s your child and isn’t she so much further along than those other kids? Doesn’t she speak just like an adult? That’s what happens when you leave an eight-year-old in her room alone all day! She reads the encyclopedia cover-to-cover and quizzes herself on Greek mythology!

Just don’t look at her when she cries.

That’s what they say, anyway.

***

Upon revisiting all three volumes of the Umbrella Academy for the purposes of both entertainment and research, I feel comfortable in critiquing the flaws in the series. I don’t have anything particularly new or insightful to add to the conversation that has not been said by others, but I would be remiss not to address these issues.

For the sake of convenience, here is a tidy ordered list of what bothered me the most:

1. The books have a race problem, especially in Apocalypse Suite and Dallas, and only white characters have speaking roles prior to Hotel Oblivion. Abhijit is a silent and expressionless colonial stereotype. The Vietnamese vampires featured briefly in Dallas are inexcusable. Klaus having a Vietnamese baby that he doesn’t seem to particularly care about for the sake of what I can only try to parse as a gay joke leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In a world where a chimpanzee is given more pathos than Asian people, the whole thing is frankly ugly and feels even uglier in 2021.

2. Vanya and Allison are barely characters before most of Dallas and the entirety of Hotel Oblivion. They look too similar and have little to no concrete motivations to speak of outside of providing fodder for men, specifically Luther and Diego, to have feelings over. Allison’s early antagonism toward, and outright abuse of, Vanya after Apocalypse Suite feels cruel in a way that I don’t think Way really thought through. When Mom finally gets some story beats of her own in the third installment, it’s welcomed but over a decade too late.

3. The way Klaus’s addiction, self-destructive behaviors, and traumatic exploitation by other characters is played for laughs or a cheap novelty just feels bad in retrospect. The line in Apocalypse Suite when Klaus jokes that he prefers the company of coma patients during his hospitalization implies that he assaults them, judging by Allison’s disgusted reaction of “Jesus, Klaus.” So, here we have a character whose addiction is a joke, whose abuse by others is a joke, and his abuse of others is a joke—but who are we supposed to laugh with? And at? I don’t get the impression that Way had an answer in mind.

4. It’s unclear if Allison rumors Luther in Apocalypse Suite when she says, “I heard a rumor you wanted to kiss me since you were eight years old.” I was always under the impression that it was a coy little line and Luther genuinely felt that way for her. But then why did she say, “you wanted to kiss me,” as if she is not involved in this relationship? And why use her powers to initiate a kiss if both wanted it when we know the crux of her powers is manipulation? I don’t think it’s pointed ambiguity meant to portray a fraught, muddled relationship between adult (if non-biological) siblings. It just reads as sloppy writing.

5. Diego/Vanya hurts everyone involved from a storytelling perspective. I love the idea of his hostility stemming from Vanya abandoning their punk band dreams and leaving town when they were kids because it feels like real sibling/childhood friend baggage, but the romantic component established in Apocalypse Suite kills it. Now his hostility toward her for not dating him when they were teenagers is just weird and bad because they’re adults and he’s still grinding an ax over decades-old hormones. And, par for the course, Vanya is portrayed unsympathetically for not returning his feelings.

6. Five being an absurd little murder man in a child’s body is funny, right until the point that it isn’t. At which point, Five is treated exactly like what he is—a murderer. This makes sense. His siblings being the ones to make that distinction to the audience, however, falls a bit flat when they are so sloppily, needlessly terrible within the context of the story. Yes, Five murders people, but I don’t want to hear one word about it from people who are so ugly in their own ways, with no coherent point or point of view to any of it until the writer gets a decade to reconsider his characterizations.  

And yet.

Here I am.

Sometimes you just must accept what things are rather than make excuses for what they aren’t.

***

It’s 2009. I’m 23 and sitting in the front row of Gerard Way’s panel at San Diego Comic Con. This is the furthest I’ve ever been from home and I went with my best friend. She and I will be in an unhealthy and volatile romantic relationship within a year. Right now, I’m hundreds of miles away from my family. I saved up a few hundred dollars waiting tables to book a cheap flight and an even cheaper room at a dingy hostel in downtown San Diego. My friend and I survive on Wendy’s and Coca-Cola as we rush between panels and events.

I’m listening to Gerard Way talk about Dallas, his plans for Hotel Oblivion, and the future of the Hargreeves family. Someone in the crowd is dressed as the White Violin. She walks up to the mic to ask Way a question. The room is electric. I feel bright inside. A man whose work I love so passionately is right in front of me. Someone who I think loves me is right beside me.

San Diego always felt like home because of that day. At the time, I think it was because I loved Comic Con. It turns out it was the first place I ever felt free.

Hotel Oblivion wouldn’t come out for another 10 years.

***

It’s 2010 and I’m working at a shoe store. The other girl I work with is named Meli. She says she wants to read comic books but doesn’t know where to start. I give her my copies of Apocalypse Suite and Dallas and tell her to keep them. She’s overjoyed by that. She reads a lot, so she understands how personal books can be.

We both live with our respective families and try to take classes at the local community college when we can. I’m going in for a studio art degree, during a misguided love affair with drawing and design. Meli wants to study English, maybe communications. We make $8.00 an hour selling shoes in Downtown Fort Worth, Texas. The poorest parts of our beaten-down old city have been paved over to make way for shopping plazas and gastropubs. The predominantly Black and Mexican population has been displaced by progress and shoved further into poverty beyond the comforts of the new condos overlooking the Trinity River.

Meli’s family lives down the street, in one of those old houses, the skeletal remains of the vanishing neighborhood. The recently paved roads close in around quaint but shabby blue, green, and flamingo pink houses like folding fingers. Any trace of culture or history snuffed out.

Meli devours Apocalypse Suite and Dallas before our next shift together. She adores it. We talk about the comics for hours while stocking shoes and sweeping floors. A haggard mother in scrubs comes in on her break between shifts and goes to the kid’s department. She works at the hospital down the road. I see her steal a pair of girl’s black ballet flats. I don’t say anything. Meli doesn’t, either. These things just happened where we come from.

We talk about so much, Meli and I. We talk about movies, art, history, and now comic books. Umbrella Academy makes her want to read superhero comics.  I feel so excited and grateful to share something I love with someone else. We talk about Hotel Oblivion, but it never comes out.

Within a few months, I get moved to another store by my district manager. Meli gets pregnant by her boyfriend. I drop out of college. I lose track of Meli.

I hope she’s happy.

We never got in trouble for letting people steal shoes.

***

The thing about bad relationships is that they only teach you to have more bad relationships. Being abused by people who love you only teaches you that love and abuse are the same things. It takes a long time to figure out that you deserve better, but nobody tells you that.

My girlfriend from San Diego Comic Con, the one I met on LiveJournal? I used to think that’s what love was. Spending 6-8 hours a day online, communicating constantly through AOL Instant Messenger because my friend-turned-girlfriend will spiral out if I didn’t make myself available. Abandoning anything that didn’t serve her because her trauma and mental health issues were the swords of Damocles hanging over my head.

One false move and she might hurt herself. Living in Texas, hundreds of miles away from her college in California, I was trapped at my computer so she would never find a reason to do it. I wrote the stories that entertained her, watched the shows that entertained her, and rearranged my life around her every need.

I met her older sister once during a trip to Comic Con. The sister seemed sweet and well-adjusted, an odd fit for the family I knew they came from. She thanked me for spending so much time with my friend-turned-girlfriend, and for being there for her. It made me feel like maybe I was important, that I was doing something good for someone else.

The sister didn’t know that my girlfriend consumed every waking hour of my life. If I logged off, I was punished. There was no part of our relationship that didn’t make me feel like a dog on a chain. The problem was all my relationships made me feel that way, so what did I know? My family didn’t even notice that I was living like this, after all.

Then I met someone else in January of 2010. A writer, predictably, through LiveJournal. Her name was Melissa. She lived in Florida with her mother and grandmother. Melissa read one of my stories and asked if we could talk more. We talked every day, through AIM and text messages, about our writing, families, and lives. It was like having a real friend for the first time in my life.

By October of that year, I realized I had feelings for Melissa.

I started to back away from my girlfriend. I told her we should just be friends. I told her that I cared about her, but I needed to work for a living and write other things. I didn’t tell her about Melissa.

Then she found out, blocked me on Facebook, and sent me an email saying that I couldn’t be trusted. That I was two-faced, and I hurt her. She never wanted to hear from me again.

I have no idea what happened to her. All those chat logs are gone, old email accounts purged, hard drives wiped, and LiveJournal usernames lost to time. I don’t think I’ll ever find out because when I search her name on social media, nothing comes up.

It was like she never existed.

Vanished, like so much of my life from those years.

***

It’s 2019. I’m watching the Umbrella Academy on Netflix and thinking about the end of the world. I do that a lot these days.

Australia was just on fire, the Amazon rainforest before that. I can’t shake the feeling that someday soon, koala bears will only exist in children’s shows, where cartoon animals sing songs about forests that have turned to ash. I think about kids shutting off their screen and stepping outside to find a mangled world while Disney remakes Lion King for the fifth time with 3D models of extinct animals. It will only serve as cold comfort to parents who remember when these animals still lived, but within a generation or two, none of it will matter.

The koala bear will be the same as a unicorn, something to put on a sticker or make into a doll.

I don’t tell anyone I’m watching Umbrella Academy. It feels gauche, somehow. Social media is unimpressed every time I check my phone. This comic you liked ten years ago is now a show nobody asked for after the rumored movie fell through and we forgot all about Hotel Oblivion? Embarrassing. It isn’t even anything like the comics, not really, forgoing much of the style and dramatic flair. The characters lose much of Way’s pithy, dismissive edge, their sharpness smoothed down into something that looks more quirky than antagonistic or mean-spirited.

But I watch three episodes without telling anyone because the cast is so charming. The licensed music is catchy. When Five walks amid the rubble of the bomb-ravaged city to find his siblings in the ash to Never Tear Us Apart by Paloma Faith, I burst into tears thinking about koalas and cartoon forests.

When Melissa gets home from work, I start the show over with her. It feels like catharsis to watch the Hargreeves children confront the apocalypse, so I don’t have to for a few hours. When they leave together to fix Vanya and stop the apocalypse (for real, this time), it feels like proof that maybe I can make it, too.

That’s a bit silly, isn’t it? We can’t decide where we find comfort, or what sticks with us when we close the book or shut off the TV.

Everywhere the Hargreeves go, the apocalypse follows them. It’s a mushroom cloud at their backs, the rumble and the flash on the horizon that signals the end of everything. It begins with a meteor strike and concludes with a nuclear bomb dropped on Dallas, Texas. That’s less than an hour from where my family lives, and the house I lived in for 17 years.

In 2020, I watch the second season of the Umbrella Academy, following the outbreak of COVID-19. The apocalypse already came and went for me, they say. In a few weeks, California will be on fire, and the West with it. There will be a derecho that flattens Iowa and floods will ravage India. Hurricane Laura will attack Louisiana, and so many more storms will follow that I will lose track because the climate and corporate policies that allowed a storm like Laura to exist are an ongoing assault on poor, racially segregated communities in the Gulf of Mexico.

But for now, this kinder, gentler version of the Hargreeves children will stop the apocalypse again, because they love each other. No matter how big the explosion, they will find a way to survive it.

***

The apocalypse feels different in 2008. My world ended already, as they say. September 11th, 2001 threw my family into a financial free fall when my father lost his airline job of 20 years. There was illness, bankruptcy, homes nearly lost, and us kids going to work to help our mother pay the bills while our father collapsed under depression and bad health. My fleeting dreams of college vanished. Because my brothers and I were homeschooled, we didn’t have educations to show for ourselves after our parents checked out on our schooling due to stress and strain. I got my GED myself out of my own pocket. My brothers never did.

Then there was the Iraq invasion, and Afghanistan after it. The years between 2001 and 2008 were hell. Bone-crushing, teeth-gnashing, up-all-night-too-worried-to-sleep hell. Bombs going off forever in slow motion, destroying everything in their path. It was so bad, and we lost so much, that my family never recovered enough to lose much of anything in the 2008 housing crash. We didn’t even really feel it, from what I can remember.

With everything going on, I know people were suffering everywhere. The wars, the lost homes, the lost jobs, the hate crimes, the fear. But I’m so far removed from it, so buried in my own daily struggles that I didn’t understand how truly horrifying it was beyond pale statistics casually thrown around on CNN. Every day felt like the end of the world back then.

That was why Apocalypse Suite feels like spitting in the face of your own demise. Klaus deus ex seances the moon chunk with a pithy line about how he never liked Vanya at all. How absurd. How anti-climactic. How hilarious to go through so much death, suffering, and abuse, just to save a world so demonstrably unsalvageable with a convenient one-off about Klaus’s telekinesis from Five.

Maybe that’s why I loved them so much back then.

***

These are the most important comic books anyone ever handed to me:

X-Men Unlimited #3. It was the first comic I ever read. My father gave it to me. I was six years old.

Excalibur #86. It was the first Warren Ellis comic I ever read, and the first appearance of Pete Wisdom, who became my favorite character. I was eight years old.

Deadpool #1. It was the most absurd, shocking, and funny thing I had ever seen. I was nine years old.

And then there’s Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite.

For much of my child, X-Men was my life. I grew up reading the comics, playing the Super Nintendo games, and watching the Saturday morning cartoon. When I was very young, before we moved out to the vast nothing of Wise County, Texas, my family lived in an apartment behind a shopping plaza and a KB Toys. My mother, brothers, and I used to duck through the holes in the wooden fence at the edge of the shopping plaza’s parking lot to make our way to the toy store. There I would plunder the discount bins for X-Men action figures as little as $1 or $2. I copied my favorite comic panels on tracing paper and wrote fanfiction in a notebook before I had the internet and knew what fanfiction was.

So, as a young adult, I had seen my favorite characters die, come back to life, and get their books canceled more times than I could count. I felt that I had outgrown the world of mutants, magic, and time travel that had occupied such a warm space in my life. And then came Umbrella Academy to fill the void.

The series is a pastiche of the X-men’s...language. Its vibe. It understands this about itself and knows that you’re reading it through that lens. At least, this was how it felt for me. If you came up reading DC and other cape books, you probably see something else in it. To me, it pointed to the structure and themes of X-Men books with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek and asked the reader:

What if Charles Xavier didn’t care about these kids?

What if the X-Men were as damaged as they rightfully should have been? Just broken kids becoming scared teens and eventually turning into angry adults?

What if the world wasn’t worth saving?

These aren’t particularly interesting questions today, of course, and they had lost a lot of their novelty value back in 2008, too. But I hadn’t yet fallen down the Alan Moore/Grant Morrison/Warren Ellis rabbit hole of superhero deconstruction just yet. Those big names and their big books were still a few years away for me. I was a little intimidated by their rabid fanbases and their ideas didn’t feel quite so ubiquitous yet.

In this way, Umbrella Academy is more like an idea grenade than a coherent work. Its edges are jagged to the touch, like Ba’s expressive characters are jagged. They compensate for the places where the characterization fails to breathe life into any given scene. Way’s characters are more like sketches than fully developed people. It can be uneven and leave you feeling a little left out of the world. This is true of Apocalypse Suite; Dallas is given more room to breathe. Hotel Oblivion, a full decade later, feels like the series finally hitting its stride.

Umbrella Academy follows the cynical, sharp-tongued disillusionment of the early 2000s media I knew at the time. It took things that I understood and loved and reconfigured their compositions. It threw out aesthetics, themes, and premises in rapid-fire succession, hitting you with a thousand ideas at once and gesturing toward a larger, more coherent story that tied everything together.

This makes complete sense to my brain in 2008, because this is how I experienced comic books.

Growing up, comic books were a luxury, and I didn’t have regular access to a comic book store. My family lived in the country for many years and online shopping didn’t exist like it does today. I would save my allowance earned by doing chores and ask my mother to drive me into the city to buy comics one Wednesday a month. Then I used whatever money I had leftover to buy any back issues the store had on hand. On holidays and special occasions, my mother would buy blind bag specials. Fifty, maybe sixty old comics in a black plastic bag, and I would read whatever I got.

I never had full runs, or even full story arcs, only single issues scattered across time and space. X-Cutioner’s Song. Age of Apocalypse. Onslaught. A Christmas issue with everyone in sweaters. A birth. A death. In one issue, a hero was taken over by the Shadowking, and in the next, they’re on Genosha.

My understanding was reduced to snapshots. The rest of my encyclopedic X-Men knowledge came from hours spent reading old issues of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and eventually browsing fan shrines. Umbrella Academy functioned much the same way. These six issues of Apocalypse Suite and their gestures toward the lives, traumas, and experiences of the Hargreeves children felt like how I got to know Storm, Wolverine, Gambit, and Rogue. Reading them made me feel like I was being invited into this vibrant, audacious world of Eiffel Towers that attack Paris and women made into instruments of death. Whether that world had any substance beyond the bare fibers of characterization didn’t matter, because it just felt right.

It would take a decade and two seasons of television before that world became whole, real, and lived-in. In 2008, seeing Five and Pogo fly over the dirty, violent street below, with its cartoonishly crass portrayals of sex work and poverty, and announce that the world was worth saving anyway, it just…hits.

***

Eventually, in time, I leave Fort Worth. I finally finish college at a state school with an English degree and the highest GPA in the department. I leave restaurants and shoe stores to work in marketing so I can save up money. In 2018, I move from Texas to Florida to be with my girlfriend Melissa of then eight years. My family has mixed responses to this. I won’t see them until February of 2020 when I can finally bring myself to go home. I have a panic attack so bad it puts me in the hospital, but I do it.

Bombs go off in the night.

By March, the world will be over.

***

It’s the fall of 2019 and I’m reading Hotel Oblivion. The book feels strange in my hands. Its weight comes not from the printed materials but from a decade of expectations, projections, hopes, and disappointments. The book that finally arrives is the book that I now realize I always thought the previous installments were.

Hotel Oblivion is a little slower. Softer. A story that spends more time watching these characters try to relate to each other, with all their sharp angles. I find the jokes land better and the twists feel more earned. When the Hargreeves children come together, it reads like a satisfying culmination rather than a plot contrivance to get everyone in the same room.

The second issue of the volume hits me harder than the rest. Allison is building haunted houses. She builds them for her daughter, Claire, and leaves them on her ex-husband Patrick’s doorstep. Over and over again, recounting the conversation that led to her using her powers to convince Patrick that he loved her. Calling herself a haunted house, she repeats this ritual, building new houses piece by piece for Claire, only for Patrick to hide them in a closet.

On the front step, as Allison leaves the latest house, Patrick catches her in the act. They fight. She says they used to love each other. He says she made it up. She screams, “I don’t think I did.” Neither of them can look the other in the eye.

We’ll never know if Allison used her powers to force Patrick to love her. We’ll never know how much of Luther’s affections are real, either. These are uncomfortable ambiguities in haunted rooms where their adult selves endlessly rearrange the furniture to make sense of it all. Because it’s true what Allison says—she is a haunted house, in the same way broken people are, one ritually assembled and assembled and assembled. She remakes herself to present to the family she’s destroyed, because that’s something broken people do, too. Trapped in cycles of abuse and self-destruction.

In this volume, Allison forgives Vanya and helps her in physical therapy. Mom provides Vanya with an escape route from their shared torment. Diego and Luther speak to each other like brothers rather than teammates or rivals. Klaus is visited by Ben’s ghost in the hospital and, in the same issue, Five goes to see Klaus alongside their gathered siblings. Five starts to read a letter he prepared for an intervention. Klaus is appalled and the gesture, however well-meaning, is played for a hearty chuckle.

They feel like a family for the first time.

I’m 33, and this is the book I needed it to be when I was 24.

***

The thing about Netflix’s Umbrella Academy show is that it’s too…nice.

It’s too grounded. It doesn’t have the bombast or the acidity of Ba’s linework and Filardi’s colors. Their world is crunchy and dark and unforgiving. Shapes are carved out of oblique angles and colors burst against deep pools of ominous shadow. The characters are toned down, their extremities muted to better fit the tone of their Vancouver shooting locations. Even Klaus is reined in and given Ben as a full-time Jiminy Cricket on his path to self-actualization and recovery, or something close enough for the show’s mechanics to allow.

They begin repairing the damage done to Vanya’s character by giving her more to do, a story of her own, and a trauma more specific to the realities of growing up in an abusive home. She’s no longer just a vague, White Violin-shaped target of familial rage and Diego’s frustrated romantic feelings. Each of the siblings is hurting because they were hurt by their father. In turn, they hurt themselves and each other. Like little haunted houses, made and remade.

The show has its faults, of course. Allison’s powers are a problem the writers can’t seem to grapple with because she could quite simply rumor away any obstacle in the plot. So, they must find things for her to do. Unfortunately, those things don’t often make a lot of sense, or instead, attempt to grapple with themes as weighty as systemic racism in a funny superhero family soap opera. Klaus still rubs me the wrong way with his addict-as-comedic-relief antics, but less so in season two. Diego suffers from some man pain plot contrivances in season one, as the women around him just keep dying to give him pathos instead of exploring his relationship with either his ex or his mother. And then Luther is, well, Luther.

Somebody on Twitter whose name escapes me now called the show “nicecore” once. I don’t entirely disagree, especially by the warm and fuzzy heights of the second season. But if Gerard Way can take ten years to make the Hargreeves gentler, fuller versions of themselves, I can accept a show that’s willing to be nicer to its subjects and audience. After all, it gave me Vanya resting her head on Diego’s shoulder on the front steps of a Texas farmhouse, after they both just died, came back, and had their hearts broken by loves that couldn’t last.

Perhaps the Magen of 2008 wouldn’t have accepted it, but today I can take it for what it is.

Also, in my mind, they definitely had a punk band in high school and Diego never got over Vanya ditching their dreams to go to music school.

Headcanon accepted.

***

It’s September 2020 and I’m sitting down to write an essay about the Umbrella Academy. We’ve been living with COVID-19 since March. Hurricane season won’t end until early November, and it seems that the fires never end. There have been near-daily protests for months over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many more Black Americans at the hands of the state. Protestors are run down by white supremacist cops and shot by white militants for protesting white supremacist cops and militants.

The bomb is here. The bomb has always been here. It’s been slowly exploding for as long as I’ve been alive, and long before that. I think that’s why I always come back to Umbrella Academy, a story about apocalypses, more so than any other story about apocalypses. I take great comfort in the core ideas of the comics and show, as they stand in 2020. These are stories about traumatized children who grow into traumatized adults. Their lives are fractured and bleak, even if it takes the writing a decade to catch up to the severity of the themes laid out on the page.

The Hargreeves don’t so much save the world as they struggle through it. They try, fail, and sometimes succeed at being there for one another when it falls apart. Because it has always fallen apart, and will always fall apart, forever. The bomb will always be there. Every time I see these characters, they’re better, healthier, and more open versions of themselves.

In living under the shadow of my own bomb, I’m trying to do the same.

***

Do you see literary parallels between myself and Vanya Hargreeves? It would make sense, you know, given the backstory I’ve presented to you. A troubled girl shunned by an uncaring father, constantly reminded that she isn’t special and has no use to him. Only to grow up, find her path, and see that she’s the strongest and most powerful person in her dysfunctional family. To destroy her world and find a way to heal amid the rubble she’s created.

That would make for a poignant personal essay, wouldn’t it?

Five and Klaus were my favorite characters from the comics.

I always thought Vanya was just okay.

Sorry to disappoint you.

***

It’s April 2021, and I’m finally assembling, typing, and revising the essay you’ve just read. I’m 34 years old.

By the time you read this, it will be May. I’ll turn 35. I and most everyone I know will be vaccinated against the coronavirus. The world hasn’t ended, at least not for us. People have died, people that I used to know back in Texas. That will haunt me in ways I probably won’t grasp for a few more months, or years. If ever.

They’re filming the next season of Umbrella Academy.

It looks like I’ll be here to see it.

Who’d have thought?

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