While The Umbrella Academy series has a lot of strange and fantastical elements - superheroes, time travel, the Eiffel Tower being a secret spaceship - among all the craziness it can sometimes be forgotten that it takes place in a society of humans and chimps. They so rarely affect the plot that they seem pointless, but that's not the case at all. In fact, their inclusion speaks directly to the emotional depth and dysfunction at the heart of the comics, and serves to highlight the differences between two pivotal father figures.

The Umbrella Academy #1 introduces Sir Reginald Hargreeves, an alien who founds the Umbrella Academy after taking in seven super-powered children. An adventurer, explorer, and scientist, one of his accomplishments is elevating chimps to human intelligence. He wins a Nobel Prize for the breakthrough, and sentient chimpanzees can be glimpsed throughout The Umbrella Academy as citizens, police chiefs, drug dealers, and even vampires. The most prominent is Dr. Phineas Pogo. He is Hargreeves' butler, assistant, and confidant. In glimpses given of his past, it's shown he was originally a laboratory animal, though it is left ambiguous who was experimenting on him. He helped Hargreeves for years, and was present during the children's upbringing. Whereas Hargreeves is cold and clinical to the children, Pogo is a loving influence in their lives.

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The inclusion of intelligent primates may seem random, but there is an emotional and symbolic meaning behind it. Hargreeves is not human, and he treats his children as lab animals. He conducts experiments on them, trains them to complete tasks, and forces them into roles he has chosen for them. In contrast, Pogo is also not human but shows genuine affection for the Umbrella Academy children in a way that the alien Hargreeves never could. This juxtaposition is not an accident. The Umbrella Academy is about damaged people doing their best in a strange world, and making choices about how to treat one another. By making a comparison between chimps and humans, creators Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá are showing that everyone deserves to have their humanity recognized, no matter how outside the norm.

umbrella academy five and a chimp dressed like marilyn monroe

Throughout The Umbrella Academy readers are given glimpses of chimpanzees living mundane lives. At first this is odd, and that initial feeling for readers mimics how Hargreeves looks at humans. He recognizes their intelligence, and he has some affection for them, but they're not the same as him, just "smart monkeys." However, the reader eventually adjusts and the chimps and humans become indistinguishable. This is similar to Pogo's point of view, where the children's humanity is simply assumed.

umbrella academy pogo comforts

These ideas are brought together in Luther Hargreaves AKA Number One AKA Spaceboy. Luther is the archetypical hero, and is also Reginald Hargreeves' most loyal and willing child. However, when Luther is severely injured, his father replaces his damaged body with that of a gorilla. Once again, to an alien the differences between a gorilla and a human are minuscule, but to Luther there is a big difference. Spaceboy suffers body image issues and even rejects the love of Allison AKA Rumor because he feels so different. This melding of monkey and man illustrates the consequences of treating people like objects, even as the reader still sees him as a sympathetic hero.

The idea that humans are just smart-ish chimps doing their best is very in-line with the series' presentation of damaged and limited people doing their best as heroes. By literally making the world of The Umbrella Academy filled with interchangeable humans and monkeys, Way and Bá underscore that message, and draw a comparison between the point of view of the children's two father figures. Regardless of what some TV fans think of Pogo, he understands that everyone owes each other consideration. The people who don't realize that in Umbrella Academy's world are represented in Hargreeves as literal and metaphorical aliens.

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