The Umbrella Academy

So, I am a sucker for comic book based minis and Mantic in general. So I resisted this for awhile then caved and backed it anyway.

This is firmly based on the comic book IP so has a different aesthetic and details to the TV show. Which is fine because I like painting the comic book look!

For this project I am going to try playing with mixing army painter speedpaints (V2) and conventional acrylics. I tried a couple of contrast paints and didn’t particularly like them, but have batch painting projects in my future so want to experiment with a few short cuts.

This is not a huge game with about 50 minis in it total so let’s see how long it takes me and if/when I get distracted.

What is The Umbrella Academy?

This is a co-operative game for up to 5 players based on The Umbrella Academy comics that inspired the Netflix TV show.

The story is about a mysterious generation of kids all born all over the world at the exact same time on the exact same day. The twist being that their mothers were not pregnant when the day began, then went through a pregnancy lasting a few minutes only to give birth having no idea what was happening to them.

Noted philanthropist and eccentric Sir Reginald Hargreaves set out to adopt as many of these children as possible believing that they would be of great importance in the future. Of the dozens born, he managed to ‘acquire’ seven.

Being a practical man he largely delegated the parenting part of it all to a robot mother he designed, along with the house butler Pogo, an intelligent talking Chimpanzee. For some reason, to here are many talking chimps living among the humans of this comic book world. I don’t think it has ever been explained why if even alluded to.

As Hargreaves is a stern and distant father figure, the children learn to compete for his favour growing up as he trains them into a team of superheroes, unlocking their innate powers.

The game features both a set of young heroes from the days of a tight nit, disciplined team and the adult heroes after years of collective childhood trauma have led to deep seated feuds and dysfunction. There are alternative game modes to reflect this and mix things up.

A common theme of The Umbrella Academy is the impending apocalypse that the team must fend off to save the world. Only every time they do, the threat seems to change and shift into something else. So there are of course a bunch of adversaries to overcome and crises to avert!

The game is about moving around the board to overcome hazard cards that can devastate locations, as the clock (a deck of cards) runs down towards the finale.

Starting with player characters, we of course star with ‘Number 2’, A.K.A ‘The Kraken. Or Diego.

Each the heroes come with a young and adult sculpt so I have painted them together.

Going from Number 2 to Number 3, A.KA. Rumour, or Alison. I quite like the whispering poses of this pair, it captures her ability to influence others (and reality itself) quite well.

I was scratching my head over colours a bit, as the comic varies a little between red and purple on her suit, and purple or blue for her hair. So I used a violet purple and split the difference.

Following Number 3, is of course Number 5! Also known as, well, number 5.

You may notice that Number 5 comes in young and still young options. This is because 5’s power is teleportation. Quite accurately over short spaces, but not so reliable when moving through time! Number 5 travelled into the future and got stuck for fifty years or so before eventually travelling back but ending up inside a teenagers body. With the lifetime experience of an assassin.

Despite the name, not a villain!

Number 6, A.K.A ‘The Horror’, otherwise answers to Ben. Young Ben has the ability to summon murderous inter-dimensional tentacles, which is certainly not at all a traumatic experience for a young lad.

Number 7, A.K.A. Vanya. Vanya has no superhero name because Vanya was raised to think that she has no powers.

Yes, Vanya is both the least and most powerful member of the Umbrella Academy! Her powers are so volatile that Sir Hargreaves decided it was just  better not to mess around with them at all.

From Number 7 we backtrack to Number 4, Séance, A.K.A. Klaus. Séance sees dead people. All of the time, even as child when he really didn’t want to.

As he learned to use his powers he was able to both allow a spirit to possess his body and to project himself into possessing others.

The rest of the time he prefers to stay intoxicated and well medicated.

The school badge! I decided to get this done while working on other minis and it was a fun little piece to do.

With only one hero left to paint, I have of course decided to paint the villains for the first scenario instead.

Here we have Hazel & Cha Cha, a pair of psychotic time travelling assassins. In the TV show they were depicted with blue suits and I decided to go with that because there is a lot of black and white schemes in this already.

I am getting very close to playing the first scenario fully painted now!

Finally completing the heroes, I left Number One, Space Boy, until last as he is the biggest and I was trying to figure out his colours

Dad himself. Sir Hargreaves enters play either as an ally or as a marker in the more challenging ‘Hargreaves mode’, where the heroes must not only save the world, but save it in the way Dad expects of them!

Mom, a robotic surrogate built by Hargreaves so that he could delegate the annoying inconvenience of parenting his adopted children.

Unlike most of the characters Mantic have sculpted, I couldn’t quite find the scene that this sculpt is based on. None of the art quite lines up with this outfit!

Every family needs the intelligent Chimpanzee…butler? Assistant? Stand-in father figure for seven adopted super kids? Pogo has a strange roll in the family!

Number Five gets around a bit chronologically. After disappearing as a child into the post-apocalyptic future, and spending decades there, he travels back only to be intercepted by the time ‘police’ and turned into an assassin. Because murder is always more effective than incarceration! Well, the re-offending rate is lower….

And with that, the allies are complete and we are down to all villains from here on out.

The White Violin, also known as Vanya, Number 7. Fed up with being the black sheep of the family, Vanya is recruited by a doomsday cult seeking to unleash her repressed powers and destroy the world! She undergoes surgical alteration and goes quite, quite mad.

Yes, it is the Lincoln Memorial statue. And yes he is rather irate and shooting death rays from his eyes!

There is a little tradition of the Umbrella Academy battling animated monuments, sadly the Eiffel tower did not make it into the game

What game is truly complete without a death cult?

The answer is none. So here we have The Conductor and his orchestra, out to create the Apocalypse Suite and destroy the world!

I kept the painting simple on these guys, I’m not sure where else I might use an orchestra but they are fun to have.

The Murder Magician and his Murder Bot. I think the Murder Bot is my favourite mini in the box! There is such a nice retro vibe about it.

Time travelling robots sent to destroy the pesky Umbrella Academy! Because why not? They are pretty much floating death rays with a historical naming convention.

With the Terminauts done, I’m down to one last batch to paint and the game is done!

The Temps Aeternalis are the sort of time cops who take a more permanent approach to anomalies in the time line.

By killing them, obviously.

The speedpaints are growing on me, the red and yellow on these is just straight from the pot and looks pretty good to me. They give a nice coverage and enough highlights that I’m not going to worry about going back in on batch painting like this.

They are also the last batch of minis finished off in the box! Hope you all enjoyed browsing through and thanks to the OTT team for the Golden Button I was awarded a few weeks back. Always nice to hear that others like what I am doing! So, project complete and on to the next thing!