The Umbrella Academy Officially Returns In Less Than 3 Months

The Umbrella Academy is set to make a major comeback in just less than three months. After the divisive ending of season 4, it appears as though the incredibly popular superhero drama series, The Umbrella Academy, is not over yet. However, the series may not be coming back in the way fans would expect.

Netflix found an unexpected hit with The Umbrella Academy when the series debuted on the platform back in 2019. With the quirky superhero series providing a welcome shake-up from traditional stories in the genre, the series gained a lot of attention and quickly became one of the most popular shows on Netflix.

Originally, the idea for this story came from none other than My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way, with the illustrations being drawn by Gabriel Bá. While the first two volumes of the story were first published in 2007 and 2008, it wasn’t until 2018 that the third volume in the saga was released, a decade after the story began.

The Umbrella Academy Plan B Will Continue The Story

The Umbrella Academy Officially Returns In Less Than 3 Months — The Umbrella Academy Plan B #5 cover

Now, several years after the release of Volume 3, and two years on from the conclusion of the Netflix series, Volume 4 is well underway, and the fifth issue in this sequence will debut September 2. As far as how much the current comic book run and the Netflix series align, both stories have moved in very different directions for some time now.

While Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy tried to loosely adapt the storyline from Volume 3, also known as Hotel Oblivion, in the show during season 3, the series took some serious liberties with the narrative. Rather than a space prison where the greatest rivals of The Umbrella Academy were kept, the show saw this Hotel converted into a reality-warping engine.

Evidently, season 4 built more on that concept and saw all of reality altered, which led to an ending that sparked a great deal of online debate and more than a little disappointment from the fanbase. However, the comics have continued to move in another direction, with the characters still mostly intact, and an incredible story to dive into for anyone who is missing the misfit heroes.

The Umbrella Academy: Plan B #5 is the latest issue in the series, and it promises to take the characters on an incredible adventure unlike anything else that appeared in the show, which is incredibly promising compared to what audiences had to watch play out in the final season.

The Umbrella Academy’s Plan B Arc Is Already Better Than Netflix’s Season 4

Obviously, a lot of people were very disappointed with how the story ended in The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. Season 4 had to follow its own narrative with no clear direction from the comics, and while it swung big, hoping for a hit, the finale was a miss that resulted in the show getting its lowest rating from both critics and audiences from the entire run, with a disappointing 55% from critics and an abysmal 19% from audiences.

Season	RT Critics Score	RT Audience Score
1	77%	85%
2	91%	87%
3	91%	54%
4	55%	19%

Thankfully, the comics have moved in a different direction, and creator Gerard Way appears to continue to have a deep, abiding passion for the project, which has grown to have a life of its own. But when trying to compare what is to come in the latest comic book and the final season of the show, it’s hardly a fair fight considering just how much went wrong in the episodes leading up to the end.

The Umbrella Academy’s final season made bizarre character choices that caused unnecessary friction, such as the uncomfortable romance between Five and Lila; many of the characters who fans had come to love appeared to reverse all of their progress, and the ending literally erased them from existence, meaning everything that came before was meaningless and hollow.

Assuming Gerard Way has avoided these catastrophic pitfalls and opted to actually progress the story and characters in a worthwhile way, it may be worth it for fans of the show to go check out the graphic novels and see the vision as it was intended by the creator. Hopefully, this new era of The Umbrella Academy can go some way to erasing the awful ending of the Netflix series.