Why are The Umbrella Academy and the X-Men so similar?

I know what you think. "Is not it just the plot of X-Men? The leader of the Doom Patrol even uses a wheelchair, just like Professor X! Academy of Umbrellas and Doom Patrol are both tearing the X-Men!

The confusion around the superficial similarity between Doom Patrol and X-Men has been swirling since 1963, the year of the first appearance of the two superteams on the comics page. And one could easily assume that, as the most popular of the two, the X-Men are the injured party. But do not worry, Doom Patrol came first.

If anything, the X-Men could be a scam of Doom Patrol

Maybe I should explain who the Doom Patrol are. They form a team of tragic superheroes from DC Comics, each endowed with a strange power in a terrible accident that left them separated and ostracized from human society. The most loyal member is Cliff Steele, Robotman, a man whose body was so destroyed during a car accident that it only exists as a brain in an insensitive robotic body.

The DC Universe version also includes several other characters from Doom Patrol history, namely the negative man, an air force pilot whose being has been merged with a negative spatial entity; Elasti-Girl (no relationship with the The Incredibles character), which initially can not control the elasticity of his body; and Crazy Jane, whose 64 different personalities each have a different superpower. The leader and creator of Doom Patrol is Dr. Niles Caulder, an academic who uses wheelchairs. Together, they are trying to do the same kind of things that other super-teams do: doing good and saving lives.

Co-created by writers Arnold Drake and Bob Haney with artist Bruno Premiani, the Doom patrol made its debut in the spring of 1963, a turning point in American comics. The early sixties were defined by the skyrocketing partnership between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at Marvel Comics. The main idea behind the Fantastic Four and many other Marvel Comics hits was the realization that the audience might be interested in more than heroes who always did what they needed without thinking about it. In fact, the public could have more excited about heroes who struggled in their non-costumed lives.

And at the same time Doom Patrol Lee and Kirby reacted to this trend and were looking to outdo themselves again. Just months after the first appearance of Doom Patrol, Marvel published The X-Men # 1 (to rename later Uncanny X-Men), a cartoon about ostracized superheroes, some of whose powers were tragically uncontrollable until they got help from their own university professor, Professor Xavier, who uses wheelchairs.

But the X-Men really to scam Doom Patrol?

Doom Patrol and X Men seems to be just one of those cases of convergent comic book evolution, not a pure and simple scam.

Arnold Drake, however, has laid charges in the manner of Lee. In 2007, he told Newsarama that, over time, he would become "more and more convinced that [Stan Lee] knowingly stole The X-Men of The accursed patrol:

I did not believe it at first because the delay was so short […] Over the years, I have learned that many writers and artists worked surreptitiously between [Marvel and DC]. Therefore, from the moment I introduced the idea into [DC editor] In Murray Boltinoff's office, it would have been easy for someone to walk around and hear that guy, Drake, was working on the story of a band of reluctant superheroes headed by a man in Wheelchair. So, over the years, I started to think that Stan had more time than I had imagined. It may have been four, five or even six months.

But the same year, he also gave Michael Browning of Old numbers! magazine a much more relaxed take. "Since [Lee and I] were working in the same vineyards and if you do enough, sooner or later you'll feel like you're imitating each other, "said Drake.

Since their inception, X-Men and Doom Patrol have only diverged

Both books were successful for some time, but were exhausted by the end of the decade. Doom Patrol was canceled in 1968 and in 1970, Uncanny X-Men has gone to reprints of old stories instead of publishing new ones. Basically, it was canceled too.

The two books would not return until the late 1970s, the X-Men becoming for the first time a real popularity under the pen of the writer Chris Claremont and his collaborators. Inspired by this popularity, writer Paul Kupperberg tried to revive Doom Patrol in 1977, but the book did not exceed three numbers. He retried in 1987, moving to 18 issues before the book skated again.

"[I was] missing the purpose of the cursed patrol, "said Kupperberg Old numbers! magazine in 2007. "The original band was made up of strangers and monsters, while my new guys were just comic superheroes. I was young, inexperienced and new in writing, with about two years under my belt before getting the job. "

With Doom Patrol # 19, a young writer with big ideas took over; you may have heard of him. Grant Morrison pushed the "bizarre" team's mandate to the extreme, so that few other superhero concepts were matched without sinking into pure parody.

Under Morrison, Doom Patrol has become a completely surrealistic comic, but has never lost control of his characters. While Robotman, Negative Man and Crazy Jane were struggling against the real emotional scars of their original stories, they were fighting with villains like the Scissormen, who were talking about cut-up poems and could "cut" people out of reality, and the Brotherhood of Dada, a reincarnated incarnation of their former enemies, the Brotherhood of Evil, led by the ugly Mr. Nobody. They became friends with people like Danny the Street, a sensitive place, and Dorothy Spinner, a little girl with a face of monkey and imaginary friends capable of affecting reality.

Morrison's Doom Patrol is now considered the quintessence of Doom Patrol – and clearly has a major influence on the tone of the DC Universe Doom Patrol show. But that's not the only thing he has a great influence on.

Which brings us to …

The Umbrellas Academy creator Gerard Way is a huge Doom Patrol fan

The screenwriter (and the leader of My Chemical Romance) Gerard Way was clearly influenced by many things during the creation The Umbrellas Academy: the X-Men; adventure stories of boys like Johnny Quest; the work of H. P. Lovecraft and the kind of cosmic horror that he engendered. But nothing more than Grant Morrison Doom Patrol.

"When I was in high school, working in a comic book store, I discovered [Morrison’s] work on the Doom Patrol, Way told the New York Times in 2007, a month after the first issue of The Umbrellas Academy knocking stands. "I realized that there was another way to tell comics about superheroes, comics almost anti-superheroes."

The conceptual superpowers of adopted children of Sir Reginald Hargreeves – a girl whose lies can change the reality, a man whose head has been transplanted to the body of a gorilla, a 10-year-old boy lost in the l? future for 60 years – was Way's attempt to propose characters as strange and "non-traditional" as those of Morrison.

In 2016, Way even took the reins of DC Doom Patrol title, bringing back Robotman, Negative Man, Jane Crazy, Danny the Street, and more.

So, if you wonder why The Umbrellas Academy and Doom Patrol seem so similar, it's a very good reason: Gerard Way is a giant Doom Patrol fan. And if anyone around you observes that Doom Patrol looks a lot like the X-Men, you can tell them it's more likely that the X-Men are really like Doom Patrol.

Just do not say "well, actually" while you do it; believe me.