Inspired by ideas from umbral calculus and based on the two types of integrals occurring in the defining equations for the gamma and the reciprocal gamma functions, respectively, we develop a multi-variate version of umbral calculus and of the so-called umbral image technique. Besides providing a class of new formulae for generalized hypergeometric functions and an implementation of series manipulations for computing lacunary generating functions, our main application of these techniques is the study of Sobolev-Jacobi polynomials. Motivated by applications to theoretical chemistry, we moreover present a deep link between generalized normal-ordering techniques introduced by Gurappa and Panigrahi, two-variable Hermite polynomials and our integral-based series transforms. Notably, we thus calculate all K-tuple L-shifted lacunary exponential generating functions for a certain family of SJ polynomials explicitly.