Raising Umbrellas

forth time is the charm

This is happening, and now I can share it: a forth season of Umbrella Academy is in production, and it will be the final season of the show. If you click here, you can read a small interview with Steve Blackman, Umbrella’s showrunner, about what can we expect.

I was telling Bá on Friday that we should find a way to let people know that, if they like our work adapted into another medium and want to catch up on what’s next, they should start reading our CASANOVA series with Matt Fraction. Not because it’s in production on anything (it isn’t), but because it’s clearly the easiest thing we’ve done to adapt: it’s very visual, dynamic and pulpy (among many other more layered qualities), and because we’ve ourselves adapted novels (Two Brothers) and short stories (How to Talk to Girls at Parties) to comics, and the original material of our adaptations have already been turned into movies or tv series.

Remind me: is there an expression in English about lies having short legs? It’s an expression in Portuguese, and it was the starting point of the drawing above. Basically, it means you can’t get away with lies for long, and eventually you’ll be caught.

I make my living by making stuff up. It’s not easy to explain how made up stories aren’t lies, because it’s not easy defining what’s true. The stories you tell aren’t real, but they can be true, they can carry a true feeling, a true knowledge. Sometimes we can’t identify these truths and we can end up creating a story that rings false and reads like a lie you can get caught on.

I had to go to the beach over the weekend and I tried to use my mental space to search for a story that I don’t yet know, but that is humming nearby around me. I can feel the story is there, somewhere, but I think this is the kind of story that starts out not as a sentence, a line of dialogue, or as an image I saw online on Pinterest, neither does it start as a tall tale I heard on a cold night by the fire with friends; this story bursts from a feeling, silent but intense.

I feel this story may carry the kind of truth I haven’t found in a very long time.

Be safe. Be kind. Be curious.
Pa-ZOW!

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
August 29th, 2022