After nearly a decade out of the spotlight, the flawed heroes of the Umbrella Academy and their enigmatic benefactor Hargreeves return this week in Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion #1 by Gerard Way, Gabriel Bá and Nick Filardi.

The original Umbrella Academy series marked the first foray into comics for Way, who was then the singer for My Chemical Romance, and won the 2008 Eisner Award for Best Limited series. Since then, Bá has also won an Eisner for Daytripper, co-created with his brother Fábio Moon, and Way curated the Young Animal imprint at DC Comics, wrote that imprint's flagship Doom Patrol, and launched a solo music career.

In short, neither creator has been idle.

CBR caught up with Way and Bá to discuss Hotel Oblivion, and we can also share an exclusive preview of the first issue.

CBR: Gabriel and Gerard, it’s been ten years since the last Umbrella Academy series launched. What made you want to return to the book now?

Gabriel Bá: The Umbrella Academy is very important to my career, and I have deep feelings for its characters. Gerard and I always knew we'd come back, but we both had a lot of other opportunities going on after we were done with Dallas in 2009. These other projects helped us grow professionally, and all this time that has passed brought us closer together as friends as well. Around 2015, both of us decided it was time to go back to the Umbrella Academy stories. The comic has a successful shelf life, it's a fan favorite, it has been translated all around the globe and it is for a lot of readers their first comic ever. We've seen lots of kids entering the comics world with Umbrella, and that's a great feeling. It's like that teenage love. Now is time to reconnect with all the characters and see what paths they took.

RELATED: Umbrella Academy Teases Netflix Debut with Gabriel Bá Sketch

Gerard Way: It just felt like it was time. The story really wanted to get out of Gabriel and me. I had wanted to make this book with him years ago, as we announced it 10 years ago like you were saying. A lot of things came up in my life that prevented me from producing scripts. Mainly things involving the band and the dissolving of that band. I didn’t produce any comics for some years. And every time I re-engaged with Hotel Oblivion I had to make it fresh for myself. Some of the ideas are eleven years old, but I had to find new ways to present them. Overall, Gabriel and I were just really eager to get back to that world.

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Gabriel, you’re dealing with a number of fantastic settings here – even the sort of “gritty, street level” scene in Tokyo has futuristic elements. What sort of thought goes into establishing a sense of place, such as the Hotel Oblivion (first seen from a perspective near the chandeliers on page 3) or Doctor Zoo’s workshop? What are you hoping to tell the reader with your designs?

Bá: I always tried to see this comic as an opportunity to mix influences and different styles, because the story is so open that it allows all these specific motifs to work together. We have an amazing and diverse cast of characters, and the settings for the story should be as varied to show readers that there's not one way to draw things, one single world where everyone looks the same, where every place is the same. I think that given Gerard's sensibility, and the fact that he has traveled the world so much touring with the band – I did my share of traveling as well – and that I come from a different country and different culture, helped us bring more plurality to this comic. That is seen in the story, on the characters and on the places we show in the comic.

Since we last saw Umbrella Academy, you’ve done Daytripper and Two Brothers with your twin, Fábio Moon. Daytripper was an original story, while Two Brothers was an adaptation of a novel, but both were fairly grounded, very personal stories. Do you find yourself wanting to do different sorts of stories when it’s just you and Fábio than when you’re working with another writer like Gerard Way, or with Matt Fraction on Casanova?

Bá: I like to inhabit both worlds, or any other worlds I can, because that's the beauty of comics. You can do everything and every genre has its virtues and its charms. It was the personal grounded stories I tell with my brother that helped me bring the personal depth the character on Umbrella Academy ask for, and it was the crazy multi-dimensional action of Casanova that showed Gerard and Scott [Allie, the original series' editor] years ago I could be a good fit for this comic. I like to challenge myself, both story wise and artistically, and Umbrella is definitely one of the biggest challenges I've always had to bring to life visually.

Both Umbrella Academy and Casanova are very dense, complex stories. What are the challenges of portraying all these layers of story visually?

Bá: I think that both these comics share this structure of telling a complex multi-layered story, but disguised by mixing lots of references on top of a very well known genre, but with a deep and powerful core underneath everything. And both Gerard and Matt have a strong visual sense of what they want, they always give visual notes on the scripts, and both stories allow me to expand my repertoire and break the mold in terms of storytelling and page composition. Both these comics made me a better artist by all the challenges they've forced on me.

Umbrella Academy is, at least on the surface, a superhero book – the other series you’ve worked on that’s closest to this would be BPRD, which is usually thought more of in the horror vein. What do you enjoy about drawing these sort of unconventional adventure stories? Is there something about UA, BPRD, etc. that you feel especially suits your style?

Bá: Although I prefer telling more personal and grounded stories myself, I have grown reading super-hero comics in the '80s and '90s, during my teenage years and early 20s. That's a crucial age to form a connection with the reader, and to inspire future artists as well. So even though I have discovered my voice as an author somewhere else, I bring inside of me tones of influences and images from all the super-hero comics I've read, and it's great to use this knowledge occasionally on Umbrella Academy. We are talking about the characters' felling and their struggles as well, but every once in a while they have to fly away and fight villains, smash into walls and run to the camera while there's a huge explosion on the background. It's fun to visit these formulas and play with the genre in the middle of the crazy ride we're putting on.

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Gerard, Umbrella Academy was your first big comics project. With Killjoys, Doom Patrol, and running Young Animal now under your belt, has your approach to UA changed at all?

Way: I still write Umbrella in very much the same way. It’s an easier book to write than let's say Doom Patrol because I created these characters originally, they are part of my DNA, and they kind of write themselves, same with Gabriel and the art, they are like his children too. The only legacy I’m dealing with in writing Umbrella is our legacy. I will say, that all the other projects helped my writing tremendously, and I write with a skill and confidence I didn’t have with the first two volumes. Every time you write a comic, you get a bit better at it, and at this point I have more comics under my belt than I did when I wrote the first two volumes, and Gabriel has drawn many other stories and kept perfecting his craft, so you’re getting the best from both of us. Hotel is my favorite UA story since the first one. I still like Dallas, but that one was very hard for me, and for me personally and creatively, it missed some marks for me.

Though UA sounds like a team book, for much of the series so far the team has been broken up or otherwise in crisis, and that seems to be the case here again. How does this dynamic allow you to explore these characters in a way that is distinct from most superhero comics?

Way: I like treating these characters as the stars of their own vignettes. I see the book as these little glimpses into all of their lives, their personal stories, and the complication of their lives is what seems to keep them apart or drive them apart most of the time.

As a strange purgatory-like dwelling, it’s hard not to see the Hotel Oblivion at least partly through the lens of Hotel California. But it seems like what you’ve got going on here is even a bit more sinister. Who are the guests of the Oblivion, and what stands in the way of their escape?

Way: The guests of the Hotel Oblivion are people and things that the UA has faced off against in some way. Criminals, creatures, experiments gone awry. Characters that ended up on Hargreeves' radar that he deemed too dangerous to exist in our world, so he created this place in a dimension he found to house them all in and used his children to help defeat them. The design of the Hotel is complex, and there are many failsafes in place to prevent them from escaping, twists and turns and exits that lead you right back to the lobby, as well as failsafes preventing them from causing any serious damage. How the occupants treat each other, is a whole other story, and that is left up to them.

Hargreeves’ machinations are again at the center of the conflict here. What can you tell us about the events he has set in motion?

Way: I can’t reveal exactly why he decided to put all these people in this specific place, or why he chose the pocket dimension to build the hotel in, but yes, Hargreeves is the driving force, and his machinations are at the center of the conflict, as they tend to be in UA stories.

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There’s a lot going on in issue one, but Murder Magician feels almost like the central character. And despite the nefarious name, he’s pretty sympathetic! Why focus on the villain from the first UA short? What sort of story does he allow you to tell?

Way: I really wanted to put the focus on seemingly unimportant characters, and dive deep into them. And show that there is a larger world in motion in UA, instead of simply the kids and the heroes. It allows me to share a new perspective and show the ramifications of both the villains' actions and Hargeeves’ actions. Murder Magician was the perfect character to explore further, given that the story he starred in originally was the first real UA story, (there was a 2 page short starring Number 5 and Seance, but that wasn’t really much of a story) and it seems like he is just some run of the mill villain. It allows me to play with the expectations and preconceived notions about that kind of character. He is sympathetic because he shows growth, and growth is important. Parenthood also changes people, time changes people, confinement changes people, and I wanted to explore that.

Catching up with the rest of the Family, it looks like you’re drawing in a number of comic book-y themes – there’s the Deadpool-style action with Number 5, a quest for answers with Diego and Spaceboy, and the story of loss and redemption/recovery with Allison and Vanya. You’ve also got a pretty clear Watchmen reference in there. To what degree is Umbrella Academy a “comic about comics?”

Way: UA being a comic about comics is a fair-sized part of it, though I try not to ever get meta with it. When I first conceived the series, I wanted to create a book that just skipped all the boring origin story things about comics, because we had seen those things a million times before. And as a comic reader, you know these archetypes already, so we can explore deeper, try things that they can’t try in let's say X-men. It plays with the notion of comics, and I love that about UA. Astro City was another big influence on my work, to me, that was the first book I read that felt like it was a comic about comics and all of the things we grew up with while telling its own unique story.

Next year sees the debut of Umbrella Academy on Netflix. So far all we’ve seen is a teaser image, but is there anything else you can share now about the adaptation or your role in it?

Way: I think people are going to like the show. The thing I like the most about it is that they kept a lot of the really weird ideas, and didn’t shy away from them. They go for it in a lot of ways. Gabriel and I are happy with the result while at the same time acknowledging that it is its own thing. It’s not completely our vision, and I think that is what makes it unique. Gabriel and I are both Co-Executive Producers and what that involves from us is reviewing things and then giving notes. Then it is up to the showrunner, Steve Blackman, who makes the final call about what goes into the show. But he has been very respectful to the source material and the vision that Gabriel and I have presented with the book.

Bá: It's been an amazing experience following the whole process of this series and it's jaw-dropping to me the amount of amazing and talented people that are working on this adaptation of a comic that's done by 5 people – writer, artist, colorist, letterer, editor. How something so small can become something so big. We've worked closely with all sorts of professionals, from writers to set designers and costumes, but they are amazing people who are bringing incredible and fresh ideas to our universe. For me, it's just another proof of how amazing comics are, all the possibilities it holds, and I'm sure this show will introduce these characters for a lot of new viewers, and hopefully, lots of new readers as well.