The Umbrella Academy is returning to comics in July with its first full series in six years. As revealed by Variety yesterday, The Umbrella Academy: Plan B is the fourth full run of the hit book and will reunite the original creative team of co-writers Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, with Bá also illustrating the comic which will be colored by Dave Stewart and lettered by Nate Piekos.
“After the mass release of The City’s greatest foes and the chaos that followed in Hotel Oblivion, the Umbrella Academy faces their most fearsome challenge to date – their other brothers and sisters,” reads the official synopsis for the new book. “Known only as The Sparrows, they share a different connection to Sir Reginald Hargreeves and Mom. No one knows how to hurt each other more than family, and this powerful, ruthless brood will spare no brutality in favor of their sole objective – control and the obedient glare that comes with it.”
The first issue of the new series will come with a whole host of cover options, which you can check out in the gallery below. These are (from left to right) by Gabriel Bá, followed by variants from Bá, Duncan Fegredo, Mike Del Mundo, Fábio Moon, David Aja, Jill Thompson, Dustin Nguyen, and Tula Lotay.
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“Telling this story with Gabriel would become, as it is today, such a special part of my life,” Way told Variety. “This is not only because we would evolve as artists – but because we had the opportunity to grow up over a pretty crazy adventure together. Each chapter of this story seems to form and coalesce into its own organism – sometimes as a screaming baby on a subway car, other times a bird kicked out of its nest – and it’s because of this I am just as excited for Plan B as I was when we went on this trip together with Apocalypse Suite.”
This new run of the comic is not entirely unexpected. In fact, it was first announced way back in 2020, then going under the working title Sparrow Academy (as seen on Gabriel Bá’s variant cover). “We never actually stopped working on the new material,” explained Bá, “but the pandemics were a blow we were not expecting. It took us some time to get back on our feet and work on the new scripts.”
The Plan B storyline sounds like it will share some similarities with the third season of the TV show, which also featured the Sparrows, but Bá confirms that this won’t simply be a retread. “They [Netflix] used ideas we haven’t done yet, but differently than we originally intended for the comics. And that’s the fun of the show, in my opinion. It began very similar, but it grew to become a completely different thing, even though it has some elements that are the same. So we might see things in the comics that have appeared on the show, like the Sparrows, but the reader will soon be reminded what makes our comics so unique and why we love this medium so much.”
The Umbrella Academy Plan B is published by Dark Horse Comics on June 11.
Gerard Way recently published a new series, Paranoid Gardens, with artist Chris Weston.