January 11, 2009 | Trades
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite
Gerard Way, Gabriel Bá
Dark Horse Books
$17.95 US (Paperback)
**** (out of five)
The Umbrella Academy is a wonderful story about family — the ties that bind ... and sometimes choke, stab and shoot.
It would be really easy to write off this series just because its creator is famous for something other than writing comic books.
It might even be easy to do so when told the loose premise is “a group of students at a private school for kids with super-powers run by an erudite older man,” reminding many of the X-Men.
But it doesn’t take very many pages into Apocalypse Suite that to realize that Gerard Way, frontman for My Chemical Romance, really gets comic books and that while the premise may seem similar, it’s actually a pretty radical departure from those preconceptions.
Teaming with talented artist Gabriel Bá (Casanova), Way weaves together a group of bizarre-yet-compelling characters with a story about sibling rivalry gone wrong to create a highly original and thoroughly enjoyable book packed with weirdness.
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