15 years from the original idea, through to a full Netflix series.
While the world is going crazy for the Netflix adaptation of Gerard Way‘s comic book The Umbrella Academy, we’re going back in time 15 years to where it all started.
Our first look at what ended up being The Umbrella Academy was back in 2004, in the My Chemical Romance documentary Life On The Murder Scene.
Chatting about his illustrating and passion for comic books on the My Chemical Romance tour bus, Gerard shared “I’m working on a comic. It’s about superheroes because I’ve never done superheroes before…”
He then goes on to describe his original idea for what became The Umbrella Academy, and the character of Klaus “It’s kind of like X-Men… This one I’m working on is called The Séance- and he’s a guy who uses a ouija board to contact dead superheroes. And they get his powers when they possess him.”
He also describes his formation of the character Luther, who ended up being known as Spaceboy (Number One) in the comic book: “And I’ve got this guy called- I think I’m gonna call him The Darwinist or something… Or Dr Darwin. And he’s a guy who got into an accident and they had to put his head on the body of a gorilla. And he has to wear this apparatus to keep himself alive- kind of like an iron lung. But he gets all of the abilities of a super-human gorilla.”
Check out Gerard’s original sketch of Luther below:
He’s also asked about whether he has an outlet to publish his comic books, to which he replied “No, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard now. Even though I was shit on in the comic industry for years, I’m sure I wouldn’t have trouble getting one out now.”
Oh, how times have changed.
Check out Gerard talking about The Umbrella Academy in Life On The Murder Scene below (it starts about 1:40:00):
And check out the trailer for The Umbrella Academy on Netflix, 15 years after that original video was shot: