Although he's the first child adopted by Sir Reginald Hargreeves, aka The Monocle, and the old man’s admitted favorite, Luther isn’t a character who gets a lot of love in either the comic or the Netflix adaptation of The Umbrella Academy. Despite one of the other seven adopted children being codenamed “The Horror,” Luther’s outward appearance is arguably the most grotesque: a man’s head stuck above a towering gorilla-like body with tubes and hoses coming in and out of his body into some kind of dialysis-machine-looking contraption strapped to his back. It’s a monstrous thing to have happen to somebody, regardless of their extraordinary abilities. Moreover, unlike his siblings, any chance Luther had for a normal life vanished before he even had a chance to experience his adult body. But more on that later.
In the Netflix series, Luther is critically wounded on a mission. To save his life, Hargreeves injects a mysterious serum into his chest. The result is some kind of genetic transformation that turns Luther’s body from the neck down into a human/ape hybrid. Strange, yes, but not nearly as strange as what happens in the comic books.
The little readers know of Luther’s transformation come in the first issue of the Apocalypse Suite storyline, in the form of framed newspaper clippings on the wall of his moon base. That’s right: when fans are first introduced to Luther, he’s been living alone - save for a robot named Ben - on the moon for several years. At some point earlier in his life, he is sent out into space on an undisclosed mission to Mars. When the mission fails, he is near death, and Hargreeves must perform experimental surgery to save his life.
Let’s face it, grafting the head of a child to the body of a Martian ape would make even Victor Frankenstein shiver. Almost nothing is known of the mission, or the specifics of the procedure. However, there is a glimpse of the dead Martian ape’s head preserved in a jar in Hargreeves’ laboratory. Unfortunately, just as little is known of the apes who dwell on Mars, besides the fact that Luther may very well have not survived whatever went wrong on the red planet were it not for their existence.
Don’t forget, Luther at this point in his life is popularly known as Spaceboy, for being literally the first boy in space. Luther was, in fact, still a child when the procedure took place. This really adds an extra layer of weirdness and tragedy to his transformation. Weirdness, because it’s hard to imagine what going through puberty and the awkward teenage years must have been like as a human head grafted to a giant alien-ape body. Tragic, because from that point forward, Luther was relegated to a life as a freak. A freak who can’t just throw on a turtleneck and large green trench-coat to blend in with the crowd for an afternoon.
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/2SJq7gj
No comments: