Supermen Explain Things To Me

A Review of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy

The Umbrella Academy is about a dysfunctional family, but more than that, it’s a very direct critique of the superhero genre in general. The central question of the show: “What would happen if you actually raised superpowered children to fight crime?” is answered with a resounding “Well, they would be fucked up.” This rare and refreshing critique, however, is firmly rooted in the pain of the series’ straight, male characters at the expense of the few female characters that have screen time. It’s a tradeoff we should be wary of, and is an example of a show being right in one area and so thoroughly wrong in another.

The conceit of the series is that in 1989, 47 women around the world spontaneously conceived and gave birth on the same day. An eccentric rich billionaire swooped up seven of these miracle children, who later turned out to have powers, and then raised them to be super-powered and super famous crime fighters of The Umbrella Academy (they have a line of lunchboxes).

Think Professor X. If Professor X also owned the merchandising rights for the X-Men.

Unlike in most of comicbookdom, however, The Umbrella Academy portrays this eccentric billionaire realistically, which is to say he’s portrayed as an asshole whose abusive childrearing led to his estrangement from all of…