wait, did the umbrella academy have a step sibling romance subplot?

under a cut for discussions of the above content and also mild comics spoilers if you care about that lol

yep, the comics are very textually about reactions to extreme trauma (familial trauma but with the extra layer of being famous and under scrutiny from the public eye since childhood - its own kind of isolation) and the characters are intentionally flawed and do fucked up things. the whole point is that it's a dark subversion of the superhero team genre, which was a lot more original/groundbreaking in 2007 than it appears now (definitely not the first one ofc - gerard was inspired by watchmen and doom patrol, and the boys came out not long before etc, but it did win an eisner back then for a reason). in the comics, rumor goes through a divorce and loses custody of her child, then reacquaints with her step-siblings who she hasn't seen in years after hargreeves's death. because she feels incapable of giving or receiving real love or human connection, has been taught from infancy that her power and her physical beauty are the only worthwhile things about her, and has nobody else in the world, she uses her power to make spaceboy fall in love with her. it's textually a non-consensual relationship right from the start and is acknowledged as a fucked up & harmful trauma response and treated as such. these aren't comics for kids lol.

imo the fundamental issue with the show that makes it unpalatable to me is that it tries to water down the content for a netflix (and preteen) audience, but then they still left in parts of the allison/luther plot, only they took out the whole 'rumor' aspect and ended up portraying as. romantic. and not tragic and disturbing lol. so the show had to backpedal and didn't textually denounce it as anything more than harmlessly cringey until like season 3. a similar thing happens to the seance's addiction storyline, which is a big deal and has very real consequences in the comics but kinda got played for laughs in later episodes of the show, and with portrayals of genuine disability, almost all of which are erased in the netflix adaptation (spaceboy requires a full-body mechanised assistive device to move, rumor is missing an arm and the kraken an eye, and vanya acquires a traumatic brain injury which impairs her motor and cognitive functioning etc.)

i'm certainly not saying the comics are perfect - their biggest issue is how white they are (which gerard has acknowledged and said he regrets) and some (presumably) unintentional racist imagery/stereotypes (e.g. the bodyguard abhijat who feels tokenised, and most other characters of colour being background non-speaking roles etc). those are things the comics can, should, and have been criticised for, but i don't see the step-sibling incest as it's portrayed in the comics as ~problematic - it's definitely supposed to be uncomfortable, at least in my reading of it. much more than it is in the show, in any case.

so overall like. the comics are super not for everyone, even beyond gerard's unconventional pacing/writing style that i know some people don't vibe with. they weren't meant for a wide audience. they're very dark and are primarily about fucked up trauma responses more than anything else - luther and allison's relationship is just one of these. i personally love the comics but it's totally understandable if other people find them unpalatable - but yk, dark media isn't immoral when it knows what it's doing. imo if the show was going to leave some of those darker plot points in they should have made the entire tone of the show darker and raised the rating; otherwise, they should have left out aspects like the step-sibling incest.

but yeah, tl;dr yes there's step-sibling incest in both versions, but it's treated very differently in both and imo is so much grosser in the show becuase they tried to make it palatable at first for some fkn reason lmao.

and beyond your question and just in general, the tv show being attributed to gerard when it's not his artistic content bothers me so so so much skdkffk. even if i totally loved the show, i can't staaaand things being miscredited, especially creative things. gerard's given steve blackman his blessing to make the show his own vision, and says he considers the comics and the netflix version entirely separate entities and has made a conscious effort to distance himself from the latter.