Behind the Scenes is back, and this season, we’re time traveling with the Umbrella Academy. Creator Gerard Way, of My Chemical Romance, illustrator/co-creator Gabriel Ba, and showrunner Steve Blackman walk us through how this dysfunctional family of anti-heroes ended up on our screens.
Behind the Scenes is back, and this season, we’re time traveling with the Umbrella Academy. Creator Gerard Way, of My Chemical Romance, illustrator/co-creator Gabriel Ba, and showrunner Steve Blackman walk us through how this dysfunctional family of anti-heroes ended up on our screens.
In 1953, a 25-year-old director named Phil Tucker had 16 thousand dollars and just four days to make his first sci-fi film. The plot: a creature comes to earth with a death ray and wipes out all of humanity, except for eight people, who are immune to the creature’s weapons.
He called the film, Robot Monster.
Clip: With the swiftness of a deadly cosmic ray, the earth is invaded by indestructible moon monsters. Their ghastly mission: Death to all humans.
The film was so low-budget, Tucker couldn’t even afford a good alien costume, so he had the monster in a gorilla suit with a TV for a head.
Clip: What astounding technical developments are being made to protect mankind?
The release was a disaster … it was widely panned.
Its lasting legacy would have been that it was one of the worst movies of all time. But in the early 2000s, a kid from New Jersey with a knack for drawing comics saw a picture of the RobotMonster. And it stuck with him.
Gerard: I've never even actually seen the film, but I saw pictures of this creature over the years. And they've got like a TV set kind of circular space looking head and they have like a gorilla body. And I was like, I want to make a superhero that's kind of inspired by this.
The kid’s name was Gerard. He’d been writing comics since he was 15… and was on his way to making it as a professional comic book artist.
Gerard: I went to art school and I was an illustration cartooning major. So comics were kind of like my major. I was like this perpetual intern, like I interned at D.C., I pitched a cartoon to Cartoon Network. And then I landed a job as a toy designer at this place called Funhouse in Hoboken. But that's like right when the band took off.
That band… Gerard’s side hustle… would become the massive alt-punk sensation, My Chemical Romance. Seemingly overnight, My Chemical Romance and Gerard were making some of the most popular music in the world. Getting spins on terrestrial radio, dominating music video countdowns, they were even nominated for a Grammy.
But while he traveled across the globe leading a rockstar life, Gerard kept up with his first love. Drawing.
Gerard: So I really missed comics. And we were in Japan and we did a signing at a shop. And one of the fans gave me a little marker set and it was Copic markers. They were like the greatest markers that I'd ever used before. And so I started to create Luther….
Luther—a superhero with a gorilla body and space helmet, who lives on the moon—was the very first character Gerard drew in what would become his hit comic book, The Umbrella Academy.
I’m Brandon Jenkins and this is Behind The Scenes: The Umbrella Academy.
This season, we’re going backstage and inside the making of Season 2. The first season of the show, based on Gerard’s ’s comic of the same name, launched in February of last year and quickly became one of the most beloved series on Netflix.
Now it is back for it’s second season, with bigger effects, bigger characters, and bigger drama.
We’re gonna catch you up on everything that’s gone down in the Umbrella Academy universe so far, and we’ll spend the next five episodes breaking down how the team shot the multi-million dollar superhero production across two countries --- and how in the midst of the global pandemic ... they managed to finish it…from inside their own homes.
But first, we wanted to take a look back and dig into the roots of the Umbrella Academy. So today I’m catching up with the creators of the comic and the guy tasked with making the TV series. We talk about how the graphic novel was adapted for your screens.
Alright -- so, if you haven’t watched Season one GO BACK AND WATCH SEASON ONE ON NETFLIX. But, for those of you who need it, let’s do a quick recap...
At 12pm on October 1st, 1989, a supernatural event occured. 43 babies across the planet were born to mothers who were not pregnant just seconds before. The world was confused, intrigued… And one eccentric billionaire wanted to find those babies and adopt them. He ended up with 7.
Each baby had a superpower. And what do you do when you’re a billionaire with a group of kids with superpowers? You train them to become a crime-fighting family.
Hargreaves: I give you the inaugural class of The Umbrella Academy!
When Gerard Way started creating the members of The Academy, he started with the most fundamental material.
Gerard: I created a list of all the things that interested me. It could be anything from a Ouija board. Fortune teller. Space man, gorilla body, just a list of stuff.
Then he drew from that list and started creating these characters. All in all he would draw seven. The first --- Luther --- the half man, half gorilla — was the team’s de-facto leader. He was also the child closest with their father.
Luther (clip): Just at dad’s favorite spot.
Allison: Dad had a favorite spot?
Luther: yeah, you know, under the old oak tree. We used to sit out here all the time, none of you ever did it?
Next, he created Klaus and Alison. The boy who talks to the dead, and the girl who can make people bend to her will with just a few words.
Gerard: Klaus. He has some pretty serious addiction issues. And addiction is something that I dealt with in my life. He's also a little bit spooky and supernatural and my persona and My Chemical Romance is very similar to that.
Klaus: I can’t just call Dad in the afterlife and be like “dad, could you just stop playing tennis with Hitler for a moment and take a quick call?”
Luther: Since when, that’s your thing?
Klaus: I’m not in the right frame of mind!
Allison: You’re high?
Klaus: Yeah, yeah ! I mean, how are you not, listening to this nonsense?
Gerard: He was like, kind of my version of like Dr. Strange.
Gerard: I find Alison to be the one that is easiest to write. And I put the most of myself into Alison.
Her superpower is that she can make you do pretty much anything she tells you with a few magic words.
Allison: I heard a rumor that you want to be my friend, I heard a rumor that you like me, I heard a rumor that you left me alone, I heard a rumor that you stopped crying.
Gerard: There's a bit of a tragic nature that comes with her power.
Allison, out of all of her superpowered siblings, is the only one grasping for a normal life: career, husband, children. In a way, she’s the most human.
The fourth character Gerard created is Diego. A guy with an uncanny ability to throw knives. He’s also stubborn as hell.
GERARD: I knew early on he was going to be the one that was going to be really difficult with the leader. I figured that.
Diego: You know, you of all people should be on my side here, Number One.
Luther: I am warning you.
Diego: After everything he did to you? He had to ship you a million miles away.
Luther: Diego stop talking.
Diego: That’s how much he couldn’t stand the sight of you!
The fifth character… A kid who can travel through time and space, who simply goes by… “Five.” Despite the other characters growing up into adults, he has remained a teenager… sort of.
Gerard: He was a time traveler who then got stuck in his young body when he traveled back in time, because time travel's complicated.
Klaus: Where are you going?
Five: To get a decent cup of coffee.
Allison: Do you even know how to drive?
Five: I know how to do everything.
Gerard: Then came The Horror.
The Horror...aka Ben...aka the dead sibling who only Klaus can see.
I imagined this character that had all these monsters living under his skin, that came from another dimension. And he was very tortured, to me. It actually hurts him and it's scary to him.
Ben: Do I really have to do this?
Luther: Come on, Ben, there’s more guys in the vault.
Ben: I didn’t sign up for this.
And then finally, number 7, Vanya. Who seemingly has no powers.... besides playing the violin?
Gerard: I was at this cafe in Manhattan when I was living in Brooklyn and it was called the Sidewalk Cafe, I believe. And on the wall, they had a white violin just as decoration. And I remember looking at that and thinking to myself, that would be a cool superhero. And Vanya was always kind of designed to be a character who wasn't special that was going to transform into that.
Vanya: Look, if I was special, I would have been in the Umbrella Academy. I’m so sorry you got stuck with the ordinary one.
These seven adopted siblings, forced together by supernatural events, formed the Umbrella Academy.
Both the original comic and season 1 of the show start at the funeral for the academy’s patriarch… the eccentric Sir Reginald Hargreeves. We learn that while the siblings ventured away from home as teenagers, after years of fighting and a toxic upbringing, they’ve returned home, back together for the first time in years.. And all of their dysfunctions and old conflicts come bubbling to the surface.
Diego (clip): He was a bad person and a worse father. The world’s better off without him.
Allison: Diego…
Diego: My name is Number Two.
When he started writing the comic, Gerard was focused on his own strained relationships. He saw his band as its own dysfunctional family at the time.
Gerard: When you're in a baby band, you know, you're in this van and it's like a submarine, but it's smaller. It's like a closet that you're all living in. And sometimes you're going on like 17 hour drives. And you have very strong personalities. This dynamic starts to develop between all the members. And you really do kind of become a dysfunctional family. Like there’s, there’s times where I felt like I was the mom.
Gabriel: They know each other's weaknesses.
Turns out, family dynamics was a theme with everyone who joined the Umbrella team. Including the illustrator, and Umbrella’s co-creator, a Brazilian artist named Gabriel (GAH-briel) Ba.
Gabriel: And sometimes they say they say it to hurt the other intentionally. And they do that a lot on Umbrella because they're all angry at each other all the time. And even though I have a great relationship with my brother, I have that. We have our younger sister as well. So she’s very opinionated and she’s strong. I wouldn't say we fight a lot, but sometimes we just, I just know how to hurt her if I want to say something.
Family is present in Gabriel’s life... more than for most people ... He works every day with his twin brother, fellow comic book artist Fabio Moon. But his work made him an unconventional choice for Umbrella.
Gabriel: In the mid 90s, we moved away from superheroes. We, My brother and I, uh, we figured the type of stories that we liked to tell and wanted to tell was more real life based stories. Day by day life, relationship. This kind of stuff.
Gabriel grew up in Brazil and now lives in Sao Paolo. He and his brother had been making experimental comics for well over a decade.
Gabriel: But the Umbrella Academy was a superhero book with this day by day life, relationship drama. And that was really interesting for me.
What excited Gerard about Gabriel, was his style. His characters weren’t macho… they didn’t have big, ripped muscles. They’re the kind of comics you could imagine being drawn in the margins of a notebook --- there’s nothing stereotypically super about them.
Gabriel: It was not a straightforward American superhero art style. It was a mix of European and more, uh, fluid and, but also could handle action and crazy stuff.
And, and also I can't deny The Umbrella Academy was my first paid job in the US for the first 10 years of our career. My brother and I were making comics for free just for ourselves. Just getting, you know, royalties in the backend, if there were any.
So when I got the invitation to get involved with The Umbrella Academy, it was this whole package of factors.
Gerard: Gabriel climbing on board was a huge thing for us because he's such a fantastic artist. He brought these characters to life. You know, the interesting thing about Gabriel, he didn't have to make Umbrella Academy. He was doing really well on his own and making really experimental artistic comics. But he liked the idea so much that he said, I'm going to do superheroes.
Gabriel: The superhero aspect of The Umbrella Academy is really just a layer in this story. I liked the development of these characters, their struggles, their relationships. There’s romance, there's deception.
Vanya (clip): You are unbelievable. You’re trying to dig up dirt on a guy that I like? Who does that?
Allison: Look, I’ve had my fair share of stalkers and creeps. I don’t trust him.
Vanya: You mean you don’t trust me.
Gabriel: And it had the fun explosions and, you know, action scenes.
Explosion (clip)
Gabriel: So that's the good mix.
The first book of the comic is called “Apocalypse Suite.” After their father’s death, the Umbrella Academy gets a warning from their time traveling brother that the world is going to end in 10 days.
They don’t know how. They just know that it will.
And now, back together for the first time, they’ve gotta figure out how to save the planet, and learn to work past their differences.
Which sounds dope, right? But when it first published back in 2007, it wasn’t immediately clear that people would dig it.
Gerard: So one of the things I was dealing with when Umbrella Academy came out was a lot of people in the press before the comic came out saying things like, here's a musician, he's writing a comic. And, you know, they didn't really know my background. They didn't know that I written at fifteen. They didn't know. I went to art school. All they knew was I was the singer in this rock band that a lot of teenagers liked. So all I really wanted was kind of like a fair shake. I didn't write The Umbrella Academy to become a TV show or a film. I wrote it to be an amazing comic. But we knew that first issue, and we knew it was good. And we knew that if you didn't get it by the first seven pages, you just weren't going to like it. And I was totally fine with that.
But then it came out….And then the response started to happen. And then reviewers loved it and people loved it.
The comic went on to win an Eisner Award—which is like the Oscar of comics. And pretty quickly… Gerard gets an offer to turn the comic into a full-length movie.
Gerard: I got swept up in the Hollywood thing.
But it doesn’t pan out.
Gerard: And that's actually one of the reasons why there was such a big gap between comics is because I was really you know, at the end of the day, I was trying to be helpful, you know, if this was going to be a movie version of what Gabriel and I had made, I wanted it to be great. So I got put in a lot of time and it kept me away from the comics.
Brandon: But then Netflix hits you up and is interested in making this into a series. I guess I'm curious as someone who just initially wanted to make like just a really good comic. What about turning that project into a television show was interesting?
Gerard: Straight up, I want to make a great comic. And that's all I'm really interested in. If I can write great comics, you'll have great material to make TV shows. So let me focus on that.
In other words, Gerard wanted to focus on the comics and let someone else adapt it.
Gerard: And that's when Steve came in and he changed things and he ran with it, you know.
Steve: I’m Steve Blackman and I’m the showrunner, and I’m an executive producer.
Steve is a master at adapting books, comics, and film to television. Before the Umbrella Academy, he’d worked on shows like Fargo, Legion, and Altered Carbon, all of which originated from other sources. So he knew coming in that adaptation can be tricky work.
Steve: You know, at first I think Gerard and Gabriel, who co-did this within, were very protective of the work like parents of their baby. And I think I had to prove to them initially that I would love and protect this child that they had worked on for so many years. So here I am, an outsider coming in. And they were very nice to me. But I could see there was there was like, is this guy going to totally screw up our baby here?
Brandon: Is it something that you can come to the table with Gerard and be like, hey, here's my arsenal of adaptation, this is why it will work?
Steve: Yeah I worked on the show Fargo for 3 years. Fargo was obviously based on a Joel and Ethan Coen movie from 1996. I don't think Gerard had ever seen my shows. I don't think he watches a lot of television. So for him, it didn't matter what I'd done before, just what I was going to do in the here and now on this show. I wasn't intimidated by the challenge, but I really did sort of have a sense of “I know which direction I’m going”.
Brandon: What was your like first initial reaction where you sort of like, oh, I've maybe I've never done anything like this or this does feel familiar to other work that I've done or I can do this. This is right up my alley.
Steve: Well, what I liked about it from the beginning was it what I saw in the subject matter. I saw a dysfunctional family. But right away, I was very inspired by, you know, Wes Anderson's work. The Royal Tenenbaums is one of those movies that really always something I truly loved.
Brandon: So Good
Steve: Yeah, so I saw that in this show.
Five (clip): An entire square block, 42 bedrooms, 19 bathrooms, but not a single drop of coffee.
Allison: Dad hated caffeine.
Klaus: He hated children too, and he had plenty of us.
Steve: it was a family show. It was a very relatable, dysfunctional family show that I wanted to tell.
Gerard: Steve's a great collaborator, Steve Blackman, the showrunner. He had a vision. I respected him and his vision. I realized it was gonna be different from the comic and I let him run with it, you know, because he cared deeply about it.
Steve: My first conversation with Gerard over the phone, I said to him, I told him, you know, one of the words was subversive. We wanted to subvert the expectation of what a superhero show could be because there were so many other shows either on the air or coming down the pipe to be next. And we wanted this to stand out. And that was sort of the first hurdle with me is to say to Gerard that I could do that and I could definitely make this thing feel special. And right away he said, okay, yeah, you get it.
Brandon: You know, you've adapted something like Fargo, which is a unique adaptation. Right. Like you're adapting from a different medium, like a feature film. Does that change the way you understand adaptation?
Steve: At a story point of view, no, I don't think they're that different. I think adapting story, whether it's graphic novel or source material, comes from a movie, a book. There's a lot of care into doing it. The tricky thing is, you. I need to put in my creative spin on it. You know, I had Gerard and Gabriel, who lived with this for 10 years. And then I have to come in and say, look, I'm going to honor you at the same time, what is this Steve Blackman part of this show? How can I add my spin to it?
For fans of the comic who’ve seen season one of the show -- you’ll recognize some of the ”Steve Blackman spin.” For example --- the group who govern the laws of time in the comics, The Temp Aternail-e-us, in the TV show --- they become The Commission, an entire bureaucratic system running and adjusting linear time. Steve made some other changes too...
Gerard: One of the things that I thought was an ingenious idea was making Ben a ghost that Klaus could communicate with. I was most impressed by that change.
Ben (clip): You know what the worst part of being dead is? You’re stuck, nowhere to go, nowhere to change. That’s the real torture if you wanna know. Watching your brother take for granted everything you lost, and pissing it all away.
Perhaps the biggest change from the comic to the show --- is the diversity of the characters—diverse in race, diverse in region, diverse in sexual orientation. These characters on screen look a lot more like what the world actually looks like.
Gerard: It's built into it. You know, they're all from different places. They're all from different countries. So I think that's really the biggest improvement on the source material is how diverse it is.
Steve felt the pressure of both fan expectations and Gerard and Gabriel’s trust in him.
Steve: There's nothing worse than having pre-existing source material, and having the fans dislike it. You want to make the fans feel honored and respected. At the same time, I felt incredibly it was incredibly important that Gerard and Gabriel walked out of this thinking he did a good job. If they hated it, I would have been crushed. The fans hated it. I think I'd also be crushed. I knew I could make everybody happy, but I wasn't doing a page for page translation. My adaptation wasn't gonna be that.
The adaptation worked. Season one was a massive success…
In the finale of the first season, the Academy thinks they’ve managed to stop the end of the world from happening. But, unintentionally, they’ve actually just initiated it. The moon has been destroyed, and it’s remnants are now heading directly for earth.
Five: We might as well accept our fate because in less than a minute, we’re gonna be vaporized.
Diego: What’s your idea then?
Five: We use my ability to time travel. But this time, I’ll take you with me.
Diego: You can do that?
The family, latching on to their time traveling brother Five, manage to escape the chaos. But we’re left to wonder where … And when… they’ll turn up. And that's where season two begins.
Five: We brought the end of the world back here with us.
Klaus: Oh my god, again?
Steve: it's a pretty crazy journey this year. And I think people’ll be hooked. I hope they binge the hell out of it and love every second of it.
Coming up on this season of Behind The Scenes, we’ll be taking you on that crazy journey with the people who make it happen:
Steve Blackman: We hire meteorologists, we knew that snow was gonna come, but we planned it...We went away for a day, we came back and there was four feet of snow on the ground.
Aeryn Michelle Williams: The 60s, Dallas, okay, so that’s a very different story for Allison. We have to talk about this somehow, like her experience is just different from her siblings.
Emmy Raver-Lampman: And a lot of people would come up to me and like, apologize for doing their jobs. And I was like, please stop apologizing.
Rick Forsayeth: That was a wish list fight scene that Steve had always wanted to do.
Natasha Peschlow: So we actually had our guys throwing plates up in the air and taking photos of them to try and get the UFO imageries.
Jason Neese: You know, we have a new point in our resume: can produce and deliver show during a pandemic.
Behind The Scenes of The Umbrella Academy is a Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios production. I’m your host, Brandon Jenkins. Make sure to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. It really does help other people find it. Thanks for listening.