Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá's Eisner award-winning comic book series, Umbrella Academy, is full of quirky characters: aliens, superhumans, time-travelers, and chimpanzees, just to name a few. Each of the seven adopted Hargreeves siblings possess a unique superpower. The children were raised by their alien father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, and the robot he built to be their mother. However, the children really had three parents.
The third figure who helped raise them, and perhaps was more of a father to them than Reginald Hargreeves, was Pogo the chimpanzee. Pogo functioned as Reginald's friend, butler, occasional confidant, and former test subject. While the TV adaption of Pogo in Netflix's Umbrella Academy did the character justice, there are many colorful parts of Pogo's character that the show did not include.
Pogo Is Not The Only Super Intelligent Chimpanzee
There are a significant amount of enhanced chimpanzees in the world of the Umbrella Academy. Reginald Hargreeves is the one responsible for many of the sentient chimpanzees; he won a Nobel Prize "for his work in [their] cerebral enhancement."
Pogo is one of the many, but he seems to be the only one who is friends with Reginald. The show depicts Reginald as raising Pogo like his own child, even more than Reginald's actual adopted children, and possibly makes Pogo Reginald's oldest living friend.
He Was Cruelly Experimented On
While the show portrays Reginald Hargreeves as being surprisingly affectionate towards a young Pogo, the comic paints a different picture. The story of Pogo's early life is one of exploitation and abuse. He was trapped in a lab and experimented on repeatedly.
Number Five discovers this when he puts on Reginald's monocle and sees what may be a memory or recording of Reginald's. It is unclear if that information was contained within the monocle because Reginald had discovered Pogo in the lab and rescued him, or if it had been Reginald himself who had subjected Pogo to this cruel treatment.
Pogo Wasn't Reginald's Only Assistant
The Netflix Umbrella Academy show included most of the comic books' major characters, except for Abhijat. Abhijat was Reginald's personal bodyguard and Pogo's friend. They were actually two of Reginald's closest allies.
As Reginald is capable of defending himself and does not really need protection from a bodyguard, Abhijat often serves a similar function to Pogo as a butler and assistant. Pogo and Abhijat both continue to help the Hargreeves siblings after Reginald dies.
Pogo Has A Doctorate
Pogo examines Number Five after the latter completes his time jump just in time to attend his father's funeral. Pogo informs Five that he is somehow "a sixty-year-old man trapped in the shell of a ten-year-old child." As he gives further test results and communicates his conclusions about what is happening to Five's cells, Number Five refers to him as "doctor."
It is unclear if Pogo is a medical doctor or a scientist like Reginald. It is evident, though, that he is incredibly intelligent in addition to being a wise counsel for the children.
He Was The First To See Number Five When He Returned
After being missing for twenty years, Number Five returns to the Umbrella Academy the day before Reginald Hargreeves' funeral. Pogo is the first to encounter him and hear his tale of the impending apocalypse. While Five is now older than Pogo, he confides in him about the terrible things he saw.
At first, Pogo is one of the only ones to take Five's threat of the end of the world seriously. Unfortunately, he is also one of the first victims of the apocalypse as Vanya kills him at the Academy shortly after she transforms into the White Violin.
Pogo Helped The Academy In Vietnam
In season one of The Umbrella Academy, Klaus accidentally time travels himself to the middle of the Vietnam War and spends a little less than a year there. In volume two of the comics, Dallas, the comic book versions of Klaus, Diego, and Luther all find themselves stuck in Vietnam in 1963 while they wait for President Kennedy's assassination.
The Hargreeves siblings encounter a younger version of Pogo in Dallas, Texas in 1963 on the show, but as they were strangers, he felt threatened by them. He was young and just learning to communicate, so he ran away before they could really talk to him. The Pogo they meet in the comics is fully capable of communicating. He even helps the three siblings transport themselves to Texas from Vietnam before Kennedy is killed by building one of their father's "televator" devices with Klaus.
Pogo Saw Number Five In Action
Number Five worked as an assassin for many years. He was a highly skilled, time-traveling operative that went rogue when he returned to his family to warn them of the apocalypse. Pogo and Five go to a diner to discuss what Five knows about the end of the world and how the others don't believe him.
While they are there, multiple agents from Five's old employers show up to apprehend him. Rather than letting them take him, and with Pogo as a witness, he kills all of them single-handedly, wrecking the diner. This makes Pogo the only member of the Hargreeves family to truly see Five's unhinged, murderous skills.
Klaus Communicated With Him From Beyond The Grave
When the Academy, as per usual, starts fighting with each other and threatens to fall apart, Klaus seeks Pogo for advice. Klaus uses a Ouija board to communicate with Pogo that, surprisingly, he really misses him. While he is there, he gets drunk and throws up on Pogo's grave, but Pogo has the chance to reveal some interesting information about Number Five.
Klaus had been unaware of most of Five's activities as an assassin, but considering the plot of Kennedy's assassination in the rest of the Dallas volume, Pogo probably told him that Five had been the one to originally kill Kennedy.
Pogo Told Vanya She Was Special
Vanya never felt like she fit in with the other children. All of her siblings had powers and were allowed to go on team missions, but she displayed no helpful, superhuman abilities. She was often ignored and removed from family activities. One day when she had had enough, she yells and storms off into her room.
Pogo arrives to comfort her and assure her that she is indeed special, even if her specialties are not like the others' gifts. He tells her she is "more special than [she'll] ever know." Unfortunately, this connection between the two does not save Pogo when Vanya becomes the White Violin and exacts vengeance on her family for the way they treated her.