#*projecting

he hasn't outright said he doesn't like it because he's not a dick and i'm sure he respects the team who work on it but like...okay i'm not gonna go and source all of this because it's stuff he's just kind of hinted at over a couple of years in various places but basically there was meant to be an umbrella academy movie in, like, 2012 or something that was going to be a pretty direct adaptation of the comics but it got canned. there definitely used to be a script floating around somewhere because i remember reading it a few years ago but i'm not sure how official/final it was. anyway it got canned because of the usual legal difficulties but also apparently gerard got a bit controlling about his artistic vision and wasn't happy with where it was going and shit.

anyway fast-forward to...2017 or 18 or whenever it was when they were first making the show and gerard was still relatively on board (he didn't have any input into the scripts themselves, but he had a hand in casting and discussed each of the character's arcs with steve blackman the showrunner, visited set a few times, that kind of thing. he made some comments in interviews that he'd matured a lot over the years and was now better at giving up creative control of things and listening to advice from the other people - he specifically mentioned being glad there was more racial diversity in the show because that's something he (very rightfully) regrets about the original comics. anyway he was involved a bit in the press for that first season before it aired and was pretty positive about it, and the first season is definitely the one that's most faithful to the comics (though tonally and thematically speaking it's a pretty loose adaptation). this got....looser as the show went.

like i said, gerard hasn't said anything actively negative about the show, but more recently he has kind of edged around praising it, stopped advertising it on social media even before he left instagram etc etc. He got asked what he thought about the music in the netflix show in an interview relatively recently and he gave a very roundabout careful answer (that's pretty representative of how he's recently spoken about the show in generally) that was basically "it's not.....what i would have chosen.........but i've gotten better at letting that kind of thing go." and then went on a spiel about how he considers the comics and the netflix show two entirely separate entities that have no bearing on each other. he's said multiple things like this clearly distancing himself from the show, and been quick to correct people when they assume he has a hand in writing it.

I would never disrespect kebab like that