BOOK REVIEW | THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY: APOCALYPSE SUITE | Gabriel Bá, James Jean, and Gerard Way

 

On this cold and dreary day in the UK!

I went a little off the TBR this month and thought I would have a read of The Umbrella Academy.

BOOK DESCRIPTION 

In an inexplicable worldwide event, forty-seven 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.

Collecting: The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite 1-6, as well as out-of-print short stories and an expanded sketchbook section featuring work by Gabriel Bá, James Jean, and Gerard Way

REVIEW

So, if you haven’t seen The Umbrella Academy on Netflix, I urge you to watch it, it’s quite good. Well, I think so, and I think others do too coz that’s why it’s a hit Netflix show.

However, if you haven’t seen or heard of it, let’s give you a brief run through of the set up. One day, a load of women who hadn’t been pregnant give birth to children in an inexplicable worldwide event. Unfortunately, out of the forty seven births, seven survive and are then  taken under the wing of millionaire inventor Reginald Hargreaves.

Hargreaves then sets up The Umbrella Academy and the kids become a dysfunctional family of superheroes.

However, when they grow up, the not so merry band of misfits split up until they are called back home when their ‘father’ dies unexpectedly.

Now before we get on to things I am going to say that I watched the TV series before reading the source material, but I was interested in going back to the comic to see how it measured up, and I have to say that I was a little disappointed.

One of the things that I was surprised at was the similarities between the source material and the TV program.

But, ultimately I have to say that I actually preferred the adaptation to the comic.

I know, I know! You shouldn’t compare the two different mediums, but let’s be honest, you’re gunna aren’t you? You can’t help it! I fully expected the source material to be much better than it actually was. It was like a bare bones script of the TV series without any of the nuance.

One of the things that struck me was the lack of depth of the characters. For some reason the comic misses the complexities of the main characters, and this does show. Instead, it focuses solely on plot, and to be fair, there isn’t much of one. Some guys want to destroy the world for no apparent reason, and they use the seventh sibling who’s pissed off with her family,  as a conduit for that destruction. That’s it! Yeah, there is a bit of a family dynamic stuff going on, but it doesn’t really hold much attention.

Throughout this first arc of the comics there is an overabundance of ideas but on the whole, it isn’t really that cohesive, it just seems that there are a load of disparate plot ideas thrown together into a mish mash of ideas.

You can obviously see the influences of comics like Doom Patrol or The Invisibles, and you can tell that Gerard Way knows his comics, but despite these great influences, it seems that none of them of been transferred over.

On the plus side, Gerard Bá’s artwork is really good