The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite
by Gerard Way, Gabriel Ba, Dave Stewart, Nate Piekos
Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Science FictionPages: 184
Series: The Umbrella Academy #1
Rating:
Synopsis:In an inexplicable worldwide event, forty-three extraordinary children were spontaneously born to women who'd previously shown no signs of pregnancy. Millionaire inventor Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven of the children; when asked why, his only explanation was, "To save the world." These seven children form the Umbrella Academy, a dysfunctional family of superheroes with bizarre powers. Their first adventure at the age of ten pits them against an erratic and deadly Eiffel Tower, piloted by the fearsome zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel. Nearly a decade later, the team disbands, but when Hargreeves unexpectedly dies, these disgruntled siblings reunite just in time to save the world once again.
I thought I’d give Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy a shot, though I didn’t know anything about it other than that there’s a Netflix(?) series, and I kinda liked the violin-woman design on the cover.
It’s… a bit of a mess, to be honest; there are some interesting character designs, but it jumps around, motivations aren’t clear, characters don’t really have coherent arcs, etc, etc. The idea of taking a bunch of “special” kids and training them to fight/unlock their powers/etc is a classic, but barely really used here; why they’re so dysfunctional, alluded to but barely touched on; the whole situation for Vanya, nope…
I don’t really get it, overall. Though I still think the violin-body design is astounding to look at.
Rating: 1/5
Good to know. I loved the show, but will avoid this.
The show is definitely better, thanks in part to listening to their actors and partly because you can’t film something completely incoherent. Or well, you can, but it’s not going to get another season. And the Netflix show is still fairly problematic because the source material has so many problems.