Is there an afterlife is a question that has haunted mankind ever since we grasped the concept of life and death, and our imagination has lead to countless interpretations of what may be once we die. In the Umbrella Academy series by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba, we’re introduced to a group of adopted children who were trained from childhood to be the world’s superheroes. One of those children, Number Four aka the Séance whose powers include communicating with the dead got to peek behind that celestial curtain when he died, coming across a manifestation of God itself in the afterlife.
Klaus Hargreeves was one of the more complicated members of the Umbrella Academy, whose pale skin and outlandish fashion matches his abilities to commune with the dead, possess people, broadcast his consciousness through alternative platforms, and eventually telekinesis. Unable to deal with the intense psychological trauma of his powers, Klaus took to drugs, regularly pumping himself with whatever he could find as a way to cope. In the ‘Dallas’ story-line, Klaus is kidnapped by the infamous Temporal Assassins’ Hazel and Cha-Cha, who brutally torture and interrogate him regarding his brother Number Five before shooting him in the head, killing him.
In Umbrella Academy: Dallas #3, Klaus wakes up in Heaven, a colorless desert that Klaus almost blends with perfectly which a mysterious cowboy says as he rides in on top of a horse, looking like an old mix of John Wayne and Bob Dylan. Although he doesn’t say it out loud, it implied that the cowboy is God, despite Klaus’ declaration that he is agnostic. Klaus and the cowboy briefly talk about the impression of God everyone has versus what they get but their conversation is cut short when the cowboy states that Klaus is going back because he doesn’t like him very much. Klaus argues that as their creator, he’s supposed to love everyone, in which case their supposed creator states that since he made everything, he doesn’t have to like it all. Knowing that the devil isn’t taking him, he prepares to send Klaus back before he gives him some cryptic advice. When Klaus can’t stand the ambiguity and asks what he means, the almighty cowboy insults him and tells him to not only kill Hazel and Cha-Cha but also to stay off the drugs.
This meeting was almost the same when Klaus visited the afterlife in the Umbrella Academy television series, hitting his head during an incident involving his brother Luther in a nightclub. Instead of a desert, this version of the afterlife was a drab-colored forest with an accordion background music giving it a Parisian feel. Klaus meets his creator, this time in the form of a young girl riding a bicycle with a basket full of flowers. Their conversation remains essentially the same, discussing her status as his creator, that she doesn’t like him nor have to like everything she creates, and that Klaus is running out of time. The major difference in the series is that Klaus meets his deceased father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves aka The Monocle, who gives him both a lecture and a shave before Number Four is sent back, just as his father was about to give important information.
In the comics, Klaus returns to the living world in the next issue, using his powers to possess Cha-Cha to shoot Hazel and then later himself, both in the head. With their threat to him and his family ended, Klaus returns to his body, yelling if that was good enough for his cowboy creator who told him to man up as he rode off. As the shocked Spaceboy can’t believe what he just saw, Klaus smiles, his face covered in blood, stating that a shot to the head can’t stop one member of the Umbrella Academy, why should it kill him? Although it wouldn’t be the first time Klaus would die in the series, we can only imagine what that magnificent cowboy would say to him should they meet again.
