reading wednesday

[boxofdelights]

I read The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 1: The Apocalypse Suite, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá. I enjoyed this, but I don't think it would have worked for me if I hadn't already watched the Umbrella Academy tv series. The book puts a lot of cool bits on the page, but leaves it to the reader to provide the connective tissue to make a story.

The tv show used its gradual reveal of their Mom's nature to show things about the kids' characters, their relationships, and their history. In the comic book, as soon as we see the Mom, Diego rips off her clothes to show us that her body is a combination of anatomical model and dressmaker's dummy. Why? Because it's cool! But what motivates him to do that? No idea!

The female characters are crap. As a child, one of the sisters gets to save some children; as an adult, she can't even manage that. The other is -- surprise! -- the most powerful of the seven, but first she is brainwashed and drugged out of being able to use her power, and then she is reprogrammed to use it in service to someone else's evil plan. Both sisters are there to fail, to be shouted at, to be told they're useless, to BE useless, and to be the object of incestuous love. And both sisters finish the book hospitalized and depowered.

Comments

[sovay]

Both sisters are there to fail, to be shouted at, to be told they're useless, to BE useless, and to be the object of incestuous love.

That sounds disconcerting.

And both sisters finish the book hospitalized and depowered.

And that.

[boxofdelights]

It was really not what I expected.

[sovay]

It was really not what I expected.

I take it the TV series is different?

[boxofdelights]

In small but significant ways. All the characters have more agency, and I didn't notice a big difference between the sexes. Not all the characters are White.

One brother-sister pair fall in love in the tv show, which is disturbing, but the tv show doesn't treat it like it's normal. (All seven kids were born on the same day to women who hadn't been pregnant that morning. They were raised together by an alien, a robot, and a sapient chimpanzee, so it's a weird family, but it's a family.)

Vanya still gets brainwashed and drugged by her father, and still tries to destroy the world when she learns that she actually does have power after all, but she has agency in the tv show, which is partly the script and partly that she's played by Ellen Page, who is made of awesome.

[mrissa]

...I noticed a HUGE difference between the male and female characters on the TV series. So you're saying it's even more huge in the print version. Yikes.

[sasha_feather]

me too! though i think it's better in season 2.

[boxofdelights]

Also I was surprised by the sexism because I love My Chemical Romance. They are young and nice and, well, I just wasn't expecting that.