ComicBook Revised My Opinion
I just this week found Apocalypse Suite in the library. The picture on the front was mild Fetish Fuel and it had a foreword by Grant Morrison so I saw no reason not to check it out. And what can I say, I actually no longer have a problem with Gerard Way.
The comic is, as you can probably tell from the other reviews here, a bit of a marmite thing. The characters are eccentric in a delightfully twisted fashion, the artwork is great fun and channels Mike Mignola heavily. The plot is predictably fairly dark, but is still very enjoyable because it has a great sense of humour. It plays the dark elements for laughs and is so absurd that you can't NOT laugh. The characters however are a little ill-defined and vague, but hey this is only the first story arc. No, it's not for everyone, but I imagine it's an easier read than Crossed.
If you're a fan of Weird Fiction mad science, Black humour and talking Chimps this really isn't to be missed.
Not nearly enough to make me want to listen to MCR, but I'll be keeping an eye out on Mr. Way in the future.
ComicBook Darkly Enjoyable
I think this series suffers from a heavy case of Your Mileage May Vary, because, while some might dislike this comic...I actually really enjoyed it. Granted, I probably enjoyed it for reasons other people disliked it (its darkness, its morbid sense of humor, its cast), but I did. Umbrella Academy is a hard comic to define. It's like if a parody of a superhero comic and a deconstruction of a superhero comic had a baby and that baby turned out to be one of the X-Men (or something). Whether or not this is good or bad is up to you, really.
The first arc, "Apocalypse Suite", does a good job of setting up the characters while still leaving some wiggle room for the rest of the series. You know the basics about the cast, but some things are left unexplained so they can be brought back later. The story of the arc itself is straightforward and easy-to follow (in a good way). Then came "Dallas", which I personally thought was better than the first arc. It was zany, involved the Kennedy assassination, and introduced some truly dark, twisted villains. It also focused a lot on my favorite character, Klaus AKA Number Four AKA the Seance (guess what his superpower is). Also, time-travel.
Again, this comic can get pretty dark and weird at times, and that's definitely a turn-off for some people. But if you're into that sort of thing, I highly recommend this comic. So far, there hasn't been a third arc, but word on the street is that there will be soon (read: at some undisclosed point in time that they haven't actually told us yet), so now's a good time to catch up.
ComicBook A Horribly Broken Umbrella
This is the most disturbing comic book I have ever read.
I want you to take a moment and let that sink in. This is the most disturbing comic book I have ever read. I'm not sure how to stress this enough.
Here, let me attempt to clarify:
I have read Watchmen. I have read Maus. I have read Sin City and Preacher and 100 Bullets. I have read Transmetropolitan, all of it, without blinking.
And this putrid, ugly, abomination is the single most disturbing comic book I have ever set eyes upon. It's not that this thing is bad, you have to understand. Mere incompetence I could deal with. It's that, down to it's rotten core, this thing is wrong. It starts out promisingly enough, with a troupe of superpowered children doing battle with the Eiffel Tower and, inevitably, Zombie-Robot Gustav Eiffel. Stupid, yes, but entertainingly so. Then comes the abrupt time skip to adulthoold, and then everything just plain goes to shit.
The problem is that none of the characters, and I mean none of them, are sympathetic. Or, for that matter, interesting. They are a petty, dirty, selfish, cruel bunch and I feel dirty for spending as little as an hour with them. Additionally, the comic attempts to create an entire, fabricated continuity for its heroes, which worked in Watchmen and fails utterly here. Every single thing that happens is obtuse, nonsensical, unnecessarily cruel, and above all, pointless. It's like if Axe Cop were written by a manic-depressive, whiny emo child.
...Oh, wait.
Worst of all, there is no theme or message to be found, anywhere. It can't be "It Hurts to Be a Superhero," because Watchmen already did that, and better. It can't be "Blessed Are the Meek" because the most touching scene in the book, a flashback in which the lone powerless child is assured by her simian butler that she doesn't have to kill people to prove that she is strong, is ruined by her murdering him, horribly, in the present on the very next page.
This is not a comic. It is a man breaking his toys and getting off on it. Stay away.
ComicBook Coffee Brained
Having exhausted myself with the wasted potential of the Netflix tv series, I went back to the original comic of The Umbrella Academy. There were just that many zany, fun ideas presented - and then squandered - by the show, I had to see if the original comic handles them any better.
For starters, the comic is far more zany than the show ever could be. The opening page contains references to boxing squids, chimpanzee psychiatry, teleporters and immaculately conceived super babies. Moments later, we see superhero child protagonists fist fight the Eiffel Tower. The tv show features only a smattering of these ideas, and has to either dilute them down or makes them a whole lot less fun. It's understandable, considering the size of the budget the show would need to show every last bizarro thing. If anything, the comic has too many ideas, with elements being introduced and dropped almost as soon as they are described. For instance, we learn Prof. Hargreaves has invented a monocle that allows the wearer to analyze superpowers, but this monocle serves literally no story purpose and is forgotten two panels after it is introduced. In a similar vein, Pogo the Chimpanzee butler was abruptly killed off in the tv show without doing anything for the story, and I was expecting the comic to expand his role beyond fridge victim. Instead, the comic kills him off even more quickly.
Another big departure is that the show wasted so much time on watching its mal-adjusted heroes mope around. The comic instead has a frenzied energy where it can't wait to rush to the next bit of violent action. It has the opposite problem from the tv show, in that it is often way too fast for its own good. Sometimes there are some basic cutting and transitional problems with the action depicted, where it isn't clear to the reader what has happened from one panel to the next. I occasionally found myself having to re-read the same few panels to work it out what had just happened. It adds to the idea that this comic was being rushed. One other effect of the hyperactive, frantic story telling is that the tone of the comic is far lighter and breezier than the show, despite the often grim and violent content. The inter-sibling rivalries and angst is all there, but this comic is incapable of dwelling on it for any length of time, rushing on to the next crazy thing. One benefit of this is that it does soften some of the problematic plot elements from the show; the trope of having a woman superhero be too powerful and emotional feels more palatable when the comic isn't taking the concept at all seriously.
Whilst the comic isn't perfect, and sometimes has far too much enthusiasm for its own good, I like the throwback aesthetics, the explosion of colourful ideas, and the silly black humour. It is the perfect antidote to the boring tv show it spawned.