YOU SHOULD BE: Watching Umbrella Academy
In the age of superhero media, many have predicted that the end is nigh on the reign of the likes of Marvel and DC. The burnout has been reportedly just over the horizon for years now, but as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to dominate the box office (when there isn’t a worldwide pandemic, anyway) and countless superhero related TV shows across all streaming services, it’s hard to take that claim seriously.
Along with the influx of more superheroes comes the influx of superhero deconstruction, a trend that started with Alan Moore’s Watchmen back in 1986 and has been carried on in spirit by the likes of Kick Ass and The Boys. The concept of “what if superheroes were assholes?” is starting to dry out almost faster than the concept of superheroes themselves. How do we find new an inventive ways to tell superhero stories, then? Whatever the solution, Netflix’s Umbrella Academy is doing it already.
Umbrella Academy, originally a Dark Horse comic by writer Gerard Way and artist Gabriel Ba, came out in 2007, just before the superhero renaissance ignited by the release of the movie Iron Man in 2008 (perhaps others would argue there was another starting point, but subjectively, this is when it saw the most uptick in the mainstream consciousness.) At the time, Way was best known as the frontman for the ultra-popular band My Chemical Romance, which drew some ire from comic fans at the time. Unbeknownst to many, though, Way was a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in NYC and a former intern at DC Comics. Arguably, music was Way’s second passion. The rest of the world soon came to realize this as Umbrella Academy went on to win an Eisner Award in 2008. Way is still working in comics, spearheading DC Comics’ current Young Animal series.
The concept of Umbrella Academy can only come from someone with a lifelong love of comics, as expressed in both the comic run and the Netflix adaptation, which began in 2019. The story in both follows a strange phenomenon of 43 women around the world all inexplicably giving birth at the same moment—strange, considering none of them had been pregnant at the start of the day. It is soon discovered that these children all have special abilities, which attract the attention of Reginald Hargreeves, an eccentric billionaire who seeks out to adopt seven of the children and start his own academy of superpowered youngsters.
Rather than stick with the traditional superhero conceit, however, the story asks the question, “What if Professor X was a terrible dad?” and runs with it. At the beginning of the story, Hargreeves is dead, and his wayward children all return from their respective troubled lives to bury him. Luther (named Number One by his father) was seen as the golden child by his father in their youth, but has been stationed on the moon almost as a way to keep him out of his father’s hair. Diego (Number Two) has been masquerading as a vigilante, constantly trying to prove himself as more than second fiddle. Allison (Number Three) is fresh out of a heated divorce and is struggling to keep a relationship with her daughter without using her powers of manipulation. Klaus (Number Four) is a lifelong alcoholic and junkie, as a means to drown out the voices of the dead that haunt him. And Vanya (Number Seven) hasn’t spoken to any of them in years, the sole sibling that turned out to not have powers at all. What happened to Five and Six? Well, Ben (Number Six) is dead before it even begins, and it’s Number Five’s showy appearance at Dad’s funeral that sets the story in motion. He has spent the past forty years in an apocalyptic wasteland, yet returns in a child’s body and the instincts of an assassin. And that apocalypse? They only have a week to prevent it—a quest fit for a band of superheroes, if there ever was one.
What sets Umbrella Academy apart from the other entries in its genre, however, is the fact that is blends the favored tropes and the cynical takedown of those tropes into one package. It’s not often that you see the heroes of the story come to grips with their deep-seated emotional trauma, but the series never strays into dark cynicism. The comic tends to have a darker tone than the show, but also never takes itself too seriously by using whimsical, child-like imagery juxtaposed with gruesome and gory situations. It’s highly colorful, both on the page and on the screen, but also treats their characters with the utmost respect and explores them all to the fullest extent.
The show also has the advantage of having entire seasons to explore the different dynamics between the characters. The comic’s three runs only last six issues each, which lead to these characters often being boiled down to their most basic characteristics for time’s sake, but the Netflix show explores them in ways never imagined on the page. For instance, the Ben (Number Six) makes his own appearance and has his own story throughout the show—despite being pretty, well, dead. The menacing assassins Hazel and Cha-Cha, who only ever hid under cartoonish masks in the comics, both have their own distinct personalities and goals in the show, making for more conflict and all around likeability, even though they are meant to be our antagonists. With the sharp writing of the show, it’s hard not to like these characters, even if they may be working for nefarious people.
The show has also taken some of the issues presented in the comics and rectified them. While most of the characters in the comic were drawn as white, the main cast of characters are Black, Latinx, Asian, you name it. Queer issues are also front and center in many of the storylines of our main characters, and while they may suffer from some tropes (Klaus’ relationship in particular suffers from “Bury Your Gays” syndrome,) the representation is far more than was presented on the page over ten years prior.
All this is presented to the audience in such a clear stylized way that it’s impossible not to fall in love with it. The soundtrack is one of the stars of the whole show, with a mix of classic music from the 1950’s and 60’s to more modern hits. If you need any more proof of how out-of-the-box and rip-roaringly fun this show is, let’s just say the second season—which is all set in the early years of the 1960’s—has a fight scene set to “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys. By no stretch of the imagination should that sentence work, but for Umbrella Academy, it’s just another entry for the highlight reel.
While some may lean into the gritty realism of superheroism when going against the grain of the average comic book-inspired offerings of today’s modern media, Umbrella Academy stands out in presenting realism and deconstruction with the fun and energetic framework that’s kept things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe alive and well through the years. With characters you can’t help but relate to and feel for, a strong sense of style and tone, and outstanding writing, it’s a superhero trope takedown for the viewer who still loves superheroes. If Netflix (or any other streaming service, for that matter) keeps putting out this kind of superhero content, the critics are certainly wrong. We won’t be getting superhero fatigue for quite a while.
Let’s Get One Thing Straight
I am thirteen years old, on a youth group retreat that my parents have made me go on. We’re at a new church, so I don’t know any of the girls I am with. We stop at a Wendy’s on the way to our cabins up north, and I sit with them, an awkward, patchy duckling amidst a pack of graceful swans. There’s one girl that’s older—only by a year or so, but at that age, that made a world of difference. She’s round faced, wavy hair hanging around her face in a curtain, not quick to laugh at the other so-so jokes being passed around, and when I offer up one of my own, the fact that she laughs feels like an accomplishment. She says she’s a musician, and I light up. I try to list off the coolest artists I listen to, but unfortunately, I haven’t grown past my Disney Channel phase yet. I feel like an idiot when she tells me Hilary Duff isn’t really “alternative,” but she doesn’t seem to shun me either.
I see her around the campsite the next few days. She plays guitar on a bench near our bunks, and I keep the windows open while I lay in bed, listening to her strum. I try to look impressive, too, taking my notebook outside and sitting in the crunchy grass, writing words that I think are deep and meaningful, not merely the desperate scrawling of a teenager with a two ton chip on her shoulder. As write, I look up to see if she notices me writing away like I notice her playing. Even if she does notice me, I never catch her watching.
The question hits me, as I sit out under the cloudy October sky: why do I care so much? She’s just one girl. There are a dozen other girls around here that I could care less about—twenty years later, I won’t remember their names or faces. But this girl will stick. And I don’t know why.
As we say our goodbyes at the end of the weekend and I see her walk away, guitar strapped to her back, I’ve already determine that that is a question for Future Me to answer.
*****
The thought that I might not be perfectly straight was one that didn’t come to me as naturally as it would others. Often, in queer stories, you hear the person knew as early as five years old. They can trace back their love of Disney princesses to their desires to marry them, not just emulate them, or perhaps it was vice versa. For me, I have very few instances of this. I had always thought that I liked boys, because…well, I have always liked boys. As a prepubescent teen, I plastered my walls with cut outs from magazines of the latest teen heartthrobs, dreamed of marrying my favorite boy band member, all of the normal “boy crazy” tropes you could list. There was no indication that I was anything but straight, even as I went into high school and college. If I liked boys, that was the end of that, right?
Of course, I knew what bisexuality was. I had a small percentage of friends who were gay, though they were always the focus of constant ridicule in our school. The western part of Michigan is often referred to as the “bible belt” of the state, so many of my peers were not very friendly to openly gay classmates. But at least “gay” was a graspable concept—the other option on the wedding reception menu. If you didn’t get the chicken, you got the fish. End of story. Being bisexual, however, was just puzzling. The bi girls were only doing it to be edgy or because they wanted their fathers to pay attention to them. Bi guys were just claiming bi because they didn’t want to be the new target for homophobic harassment. Gay wasn’t good, of course, but bi was just laughable. It was fake, almost like dyeing your hair pink. It was just something you did to seem unique.
I wish this was just high school stuff, of course, but it wasn’t. I have a clear recollection of huddling in my college theatre’s green room, the lead in our fall musical haughtily declaring that another one of our castmates (not present during this conversation) was obviously gay, not bisexual like he was claiming to be. “Bi is just a stop on the way to Gay Town, after all,” he said.
Religion was another factor entirely. I was raised in a Christian household, and while my parents were never ones to preach fire and brimstone, there were still certain things that were silently frowned upon. Sexuality, in general, wasn’t highly regarded, in the first place. When I got my first period, my mother took me on a weekend trip to a hotel, where she talked to me about the dangers of having sex before marriage, how “tainted” you would be if you lost your virginity to someone other than your husband. We put bullion cubes in a glass of water, a signifier that once you had sex, your purity was then clouded and muddy, unable to be cleaned again. The options presented to me were have sex with a man when you’re married, or put whatever you decided was so important to do on your dirty laundry list and expect to answer for it when you died. I stuck with that mentality longer than I should have. I couldn’t even begin to think about what I would be doing with a man later on in my life, much less anyone else.
The thought did creep up on me when I ended up not being really attracted to my first high school boyfriends. They were both merely relationships of convenience, opportunities to say I wasn’t single through my entire high school career. The first was just as scared as I was of physical intimacy. He was too scared to hold my hand, let alone anything else. The second was the exact opposite, hands on me as soon as I would let him. He ended up dumping me because it just wasn’t “working,” but I knew it was because I told him I didn’t feel comfortable making out with him. It was a terrifying thought, even when I found men at college I longed for from afar. Maybe I was just kidding myself. Perhaps the idea of being straight was okay, but when it actually came to practice, maybe I liked women.
That is, until I met my husband.
When you have your first serious relationship, that is when all the doors to self-discovery start to open. The two in high school lasted a few months, collectively. But as soon as I started dating my husband, I knew it was for the long haul. He made me laugh, left little notes outside my dorm when I was stressed, shared an umbrella with me as we walked through the rain, stayed up until three in the morning with me in the student center, talking about absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. It was love. And it still is.
Of course, when it’s your first major relationship, along with romance comes the physical. We were both from Christian households so “waiting” was always the option we would choose. That didn’t mean just about everything else wasn’t on the table. The more we started exploring that part of our relationship together, the more my thoughts would wander. Perhaps it would be to other men, but that’s normal enough, right? But when they would wander to women, that’s when the panic set in. We were already engaged when I really had the conversation with myself: I think some women are attractive. I would watch my friends drunkenly play spin the bottle at house parties, kissing whoever regardless of gender, and I found myself thinking, “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”
But I couldn’t even approach that. Of course not. Why did it even matter? I loved someone—a man. There was no doubt my feelings for him were real. Besides, didn’t every straight woman have those feelings at some point? Women are beautiful. It isn’t gay to think that. I fed myself lie after lie, enough so that I believed them. When I walked down the aisle at my wedding, I believed myself perfectly straight. When my husband and I destroyed all the barriers of our physical relationship, it was invigorating and satisfying. That was proof enough, wasn’t it?
Of course, it wasn’t. At my retail jobs, a gorgeous woman would walk in the door, and I would think to myself, “If I liked women, that would be the kind of woman I’d date.” When we would watch a movie, I would sit in uncomfortable silence during scenes with women being intimate with other women. Everyone would recommend shows like Orange is the New Black to me, and I would say it was on my watch list, but I had no intention of watching it, knowing how many lesbian relationships there were on that show. Every time the thought would creep in, I’d hate myself. If I didn’t watch out, I was going to end up being one of those women that left their husband devastated and for another woman. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want my family to talk. I didn’t want to go to Hell. I had no intention of leaving my husband. We were incredibly happy together, and despite some rough experiences, we only came out of them with a stronger relationship. So why was I so scared of this?
My sister came out to me in the car one day as we went to pick up food for our significant others. She was bisexual, she said, and I said that was great, and that was about the extent of the conversation. Of course, the rest of our family made it a much bigger deal than I did. My mother cried, and to this day, my dad refuses to acknowledge it. My sister ended up marrying a man, anyway. To them, it didn’t matter. They just treat it as if it’s some dirty little secret she has, not that it’s a vital part of her identity. Not a great incentive to express my thoughts about my own fluid sexuality, to be honest.
My sister coming out and the education of the internet were what really helped, however. She was a bi woman in a loving relationship with a man. As the years went on, so many of my friends also came out as queer, their spouses and partners all supportive of them. The online communities I was part of were populated with queer people of all orientations and walks of life, and I saw them flourish in their identities, despite how well or poor the people outside their online life reacted. This and the final disillusion of my Christian faith were the final ingredients needed for my conclusion. I was queer. At first, I thought bisexual. These days, I lean more toward pansexual as a specific label, but queer will do just fine. This identity was not something to be ashamed of and if the people in my life couldn’t accept it, so it goes.
Coming out to my husband was the one I was scared of the most. I took a page from my sister’s book, breaking it to him during a car ride to get food. He was surprised, but so supportive. Even now, I talk to him about the ongoing struggle of being queer in my particular lived experience, and he listens and offers his words of wisdom, as much as he can for a straight man. My friends have all been nothing but supportive, and of course, the people I meet online are wonderful confidants to reach out to in times of insecurity.
I wish I could say that finally opening that part of my life alleviated all of my anxieties around my identity. It hasn’t. My family is still unaware. I have joked for a long time that unless I somehow end up single again and start dating a woman, it’s really none of their business what I identify as. Still, there is part of me that is sad that I can’t share this with them. I know, though, it will only be frustrating—only another thing my mother thinks she’s done wrong, another aspect of life I can’t talk openly about with my father. Part of me wonders if I’m causing myself more or less grief by keeping this to myself. Part of me wonders if they will find this and confront me about it. At this point, though, let them find out. The way they have handled my sister, the microaggressions I see every day from them toward queer people—what evidence have I been given that coming out to them will cause me less suffering than keeping it to myself? I would never want this to be a fact to pity me over, of course. One day, they will know. And whatever way they find out and however they will react, I will need to make peace with it, just as all the queer people before me.
However strange and tangled the journey has been, however long it took me, I’m happy with where I am today. I know myself and more importantly, have accepted myself as not some sinful creature just trying to pass as something demure, but a human being that deals in variables, not absolutes. There are some who may be on either far end of the spectrum, of course, but I am not strange or maladapted or “other.” I have a loving relationship, one where I can be open and honest about every aspect of myself. All in all, that’s what thirteen year old me wanted—someone who cared for her, loved her. Whatever gender they happen to be is of no consequence.
And that’s what we all want in the end, isn’t it?
*****
I am twenty-seven years old, at my first pride celebration. The streets are packed with people of every shade, orientation, life experience I could imagine. My sister waves a rainbow flag in front of her face, perfectly positioned so as to not hide her blue, purple, and pink eyeshadow. I walk with my husband through the crowd, my pink top and blue leggings clinging to me as the sun gets higher in the sky. The yellow hat was probably too much for the weather, but I don’t mind. We gather together to watch drag queens perform on stage, throwing their discarded sashes and gowns into the crowd as they dance to Gloria Gaynor.
Everyone here has their community—their friends, lovers, secret keepers, family. They’re right where they need to be, with who they need to be with.
As I watch them celebrate and do some celebrating of my own, Present Me answers, “Because you think she’s beautiful.”
The Scars That Make Us
It was an absurdly hot night in July, and I was awake in bed, having a panic attack (you know, as one does.)
It had been a rough couple of months, the heat non-withstanding. I had just gotten off of a stint as a student teacher, which ended up being nothing more to me than just eight months of the slow degradation of my already waning mental health—the particular kind of stress when you know the education of over a hundred teenagers is up to you and one move will either leave them with lasting knowledge or a spot on the “These Twitter Users Told Us About Their Worst Teachers Ever, And #8 is a Big WTF?!” Buzzfeed article of the day. It doesn’t help that while I had been teaching high schoolers, I felt like I was back in high school myself, with teachers sitting the home economics room during lunch, gossiping about which teachers were terrible at their jobs, outright calling their students idiots. My mentor teacher was nice enough, but I always felt like she was racking up my flaws in a refined list in her head. I knew when I didn’t join her in the home economics room for lunch, it was me she and her friends ended up complaining about. It was all enough to make me wonder, as I walked into my classroom every day, if the fork I was using for my leftover plain rice for lunch was better suited for stabbing myself in the neck and calling it a day.
Somehow, I had made it through, though I knew even as I filled out applications, finished up tests for my certification and took summer classes, I wasn’t ever going to be a teacher. I spoke to family members and posted on my social media accounts as if I was, but that was all because I knew coming out like the fraud I was would only make things worse. Everyone already thought I was a sham since I had originally gone to school for two useless degrees. The teaching certification was my ticket out of those condescending conversations and pitying looks, for I wouldn’t just be another hopeless snake person lost to the snowflake lie of “follow your dreams.” I’d actually make something of myself, be a productive member of society. So, I kept applying, even though I knew if any of my halfhearted attempts got me an interview (much less a job,) I would probably turn it down. I remember sitting in my bath tub, marinating in lukewarm water, sobbing, wondering exactly what I was going to do, what my future would look like.
It was only a month or so later that I found out I was pregnant.
Most people would view that as yet another stressor on top of the mountain of stressors, but for me, it was the answer. The answer to the looming question that was rattling through my brain at all hours of the day: “what comes next?” Finally, there it was. My husband and I didn’t have a lot of money, but maybe we didn’t need any. Maybe everything would start falling into place now that we had something on the horizon that we needed to take care of.
It’s hard for me to write that now, to think that a child should be used as some sort of saving grace for a sad mid-twenties depressive with nothing in her savings account. I’m glad I’ve grown, to see how selfish and idiotic I was for thinking that. It makes me cringe, though, like pressing on an old bruise. But that’s what I really thought about it. It was a blessing, not just another failure to add to my list.
And almost as fast as I had found out I was pregnant, I wasn’t any more.
That week in my life was a blur. I went back and forth from a summer class to doctor’s offices, nearly every day, hoping that the blood tests they ran were wrong, praying (because I did that still back then) that it would be some kind of miracle situation. It wasn’t. It ended in a hospital room with a needle in my hip. That was the day same sex marriage was made legal. I remember the hospital TV playing footage of the celebrations. I wanted so much to be happy, too, but I knew that day in history—which would hold so much joy for other people—would only hold pain for me.
That night in July—only a few weeks after—was one in a string of nights that I found myself curled up in my sheets, wailing, struggling to take a breath, roiling against what felt like a giant reaching inside me and wrenching at my organs. This unseen assailant would visit at random times—at work when I would see a young couple and their new baby passing on the sidewalk, at a restaurant when the wrong song would play over the radio, and especially at night, when I was alone. My husband was working third shift, leaving me to sit alone in the dark every night, nothing but my thoughts of failure ringing in my ears. I couldn’t hack it as a teacher, as a citizen of the world. My body couldn’t even do the one thing it was supposed to be able to do, at its base level.
So what exactly could I do? Was it even worth it to keep breathing?
These fits would sometimes last five minutes, ten, twenty, thirty. That summer night wasn’t particularly bad. There were worse ones before it and worse ones after. But I got up to use the bathroom, eyes still bleary from tears. When I walked back into my dark bedroom, I wasn’t much paying attention where I was going, and frankly, I wasn’t caring much either. That’s when the sharp pain jabbed into my leg.
I remember falling onto my bed, paralyzed by the sudden jolt running through my shin. As soon as I could right myself, I hobbled over to the light switch and looked down. A ridiculous sized gash sat open on my left shin. My bed frame was too big for the mattress we used, causing the end of it to jut out, uncovered. Every time I warily passed by it, I joked how one night it would get me, and I supposed, while I sat on my floor, my leg exposed to the world, that night was the night.
I stared at it for a bit. It wasn’t bleeding. Maybe a little, but not nearly as much as it should have for as big of a gash as it was. It just sat there, throbbing and inviting. It took me a moment to even have the thought of cleaning it out with disinfectant and bandaging it up. As I crawled back into bed, the wound pulsed, angry and present, but sleep found me so quickly that night that it’s hilarious for me to think about now. The actual pain I felt was so much more bearable than that wrenching feeling in my gut, it was practically a lullaby to me that night.
Five years later, I still have a scar on my leg. It doesn’t hurt any more, of course. Perhaps it itches every now and then, maybe it will get a bit sore if I knock it just right. I don’t even hardly notice it unless my pant leg rides up or I’m shaving my legs. It’s still there, no longer angry and open faced, but dull and grey. Not particularly beautiful, but if I were to wake up tomorrow and realize it was gone, I don’t know if I would be happy about it. It’s part of me now, a reminder of all those nasty thoughts and things that happened back then. It’s strange because when I think of who I was when I got the scar, it doesn’t even feel like me. So much else has happened in the five years that have passed—I moved to a new city, got a new (non-teaching) job, bought a house. All these things that girl in the dark of her empty apartment never thought were possible.
In some ways, I am a wholly different person than I was back then. They say all the cells in your body completely replace themselves every seven years. So perhaps biologically, I am a totally new person, give or take a couple of years. But all those scars—the ones you can see and the ones you can’t—are still there, holding me together, like stitching on a homemade doll. I am an amalgamation of so many different thoughts, experiences, tragedies, comedies, odds and ends. And the ways they were put together and knitted into the person I am now, while painful at times, make all the difference. To think, that person on that summer night, twisting and turning in her bed, didn’t want them.
I have so many more scars in store for me. I know this. And I know eventually, it’s going to be worth getting every single one of them.
Welcome to the Blog!
Hello! If you’re reading this, you have wandered upon my blog! In this, I will be exploring several different topics/subjects, including but not limited to:
Essays on personal experience
Exploration of the writing process and other subjects related to writing
Reviews for books/movies/TV shows/other media properties
Other random writings
I hope to update this every week, day of the week TBD. To check for new updates, please follow me on Twitter at @AMKelleyWrites.
Thank you for joining me on my journey from dreamer to writer!
-AMK