I decided to do a re-read of this before watching the Netflix show. Before becoming a rock star as the lead singer of My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way ran a comic book shop. His love of early Vertigo comics shows through in his storytelling. This has the same weird strangeness of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run. That shouldn't surprise anyone at this point now that Way just wrote a year's worth of Doom Patrol stories himself. The basic premise is that these kids with superpowers were adopted by

"Our souls are tainted...painted black by the very deeds that make us so wonderfully individual..." Dark yet hopeful, sinister and yet has a hint of innocence, cruel yet witty, full of love and hate, music, family, neurosis, heros that hate, villains that love, aliens, robots, superheros, war, the eiffel tower, the end of the world, and a full orchestra. This isn't just a comic book, this is an accumilation of a lifetime of talent and pain. If i had not known that Gerard Way had written this gra...

One of the few instances in which the adaptation is way better than the source material.

as the back cover states, this is a comic with an arch Victorian sensibility. steampunk superheroes, i love it! in an alternate world, "43 extraordinary children were born..." and seven of them were collected, to form a super-powered super-team. they have powers like time travel and mind control and super-strength and super-agility and the ability to spawn cthulhic tentacles. they are pretty awesome. my favorite is the devious, cold-blooded little killer Number Five, a 10-year old with a 50-year...

This was...interesting.I don't really read comic books. Ever. My only reason for reading this was because it was written by Gerard Way.Based on my questionable reasons for reading this, it was better than I expected. Kind of confusing, but it was enjoyable. I have nothing else to say because I've never reviewed a comic book before.4/5 (view spoiler)[Here's a picture of Black Parade era Gerard Way (hide spoiler)]["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>

2020This was a quick re-read, from last year.I remember reading it and wanting to get my hands on the rest of the volumes and then life happened...So getting all 3 volumes at once seemed to be the best solution to my problem.I must say reading this the second time was way more fun. I remember the first time there was a lot of going back to check and refresh my memory. This time I knew all the characters and just enjoyed the ride.And what a ride…Family, you have to love them, right? Or you can tr...

3.5 to 4 starsI had been seeing this graphic novel in my Hoopla list for quite some time. I had not been giving it much thought, but it is amazing how seeing that a title is being made into a series on Netflix will move it to the top of your list! I thought this was interesting because I hadn’t heard anything about it other than the cover popping up in passing, so I will be curious to find out what led to interest in making it into a show.This is the story of a dysfunctional family of adopted mi...

The hardest thing about reading this after watching the TV show, is the surprising revelation, that for me, the TV show is a lot better! One day 43 virgins gave birth to healthy infants around the world. Sir Reginald Hargreaves set out to find and adopt as many as he could. He found 7. They were the Umbrella Academy who made a dazzling debut aged 10 as a super hero group. Many years later, those that are still around pull together for Sir Reginald's funeral.There are lots of innovative concepts,...

I found Netflix's The Umbrella Academy joyous and silly and energetic and fun. The source material absolutely pales in comparison.Literally pales: the lack of diversity in the comic, compared to the show, is just one of many profound bummers one gets to experience by coming to this in reverse order.But there's also:--comparatively moronic character motivations--the characters reduced to thinness and blandness all around--Allison rendered utterly useless--Diego rendered unsympathetic (and his tou...

This is...something, huh??I flew through this comic even quicker than you would expect to, largely because there’s very little build up to anything. Stuff just kinda happens and that’s that. Nothing about it felt authentic, too much was crammed into one volume, and the art style just wasn’t for me. I could barely tell the characters apart for half of it. I won’t say it’s awful, because it has so many interesting concepts and storylines that have potential. But it wasn’t fleshed out enough at all...

~ 2 stars ~I only read this because I love the T.V show, but, the show was better. I hate to say it, but it's true. I'm pretty disappointed. I know it may be unfair of me to judge this harshly considering I am not a comic book connoisseur, I think this actually might be the first I have ever read, but alas, I can't really name anything that I liked about this book. I guess I thought the art was unique, but that's it. It had pretty bad pacing, I felt like I was getting wiplash the entire time. I

The art is stylish and compelling. The story was difficult for me to follow and keep up with what was going on. They didn't do a lot of connecting dots so the story moves fast and I had to simply flow with it. I had to fight to keep up. I can't say that it was an enjoyable story. There was no joy in it, simply pain and angst. The hero's were hard and burnt out and the world burned around them.I might continue on with this one.

Wow!!! I got this TPB since I had read good comments about this Umbrella Academy stuff but without knowing about what was about. Wow!!! I never had read something so creative, original and entertained that it wasn't written by Alan Moore and in my case, it's the best compliment that I can do to a comic book. Gerard Way & Gabriel Ba did a joint work so good, so exciting to read and watch that it's without a doubt one of the true new masterpieces of the modern age of comic books. Even I want to co...

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/I’m not going to waste much time on this review because it was simply a case of this just wasn’t for me. I’m not a huge graphic novel reader to begin with and when I do pick one up they aren’t often superhero/save the world types of stories. Buuuuuuuuuuut my kid totally geeked out and binge watched the new season of this when it debuted awhile back to the point where I thought he might get a bedsore, so I decided to give it a whirl. An...

Great concepts, lousy execution.The Umbrella Academy is a seemingly-random collection of plot points stapled haphazardly together in a garbled attempt at creating a story. The attempt fails. Rarely has so little been communicated in so many panels.43 babies are suddenly born to random non-pregnant women. The seven survivors are adopted and raised by a wealthy inventor who is an alien. His alienness is immediately set aside and forgotten. At age 10 the heroic children do battle with the admittedl...

2.5 stars This is one was fast-paced and cool, but at the same time, it teetered on awful.Does that make sense? The ideas thrown about in The Apocalypse Suite were interesting and clever, but they were just that - thrown about. It needed to be about double the size of itself to properly tell the story (I think) it was trying for, in my opinion.Unless, of course, everything and everyone gets some sort of a flashback-y kind of origin that goes quite a bit more in-depth in volume 2. The only way I

Umbrella Academy looks like another case of Saga - a comic everyone loves that I didn’t like at all. I honestly don’t know what people see in UA that makes it so beloved. It’s a mix of sci-fi and superhero comics starring a group of weird kids with powers that on paper reads a bit like a Grant Morrison comic - the Eiffel Tower goes “crazy”, one of the characters turns themselves into a living instrument - all of which I should love except Gerard Way has none of the artistry of Morrison. The plot...

If you:A) hate comic booksB) love comic bookC) feel indifferent about comic booksD) have never picked up a comic book in your lifeREAD THIS TRADE PAPERBACK. This is one of the greatest comic books ever written, drawn, inked, etc. I hate to oversell it, but it's totally true. A group of kids, adopted by a scientist, time-traveling, killing for the good of mankind and having all of the dysfunctional problems kids have. In this installment, we jump back and forth between their childhoods and their

So I'm coming at this from the wrong side of things. I watched two seasons of the great TV show based on this comic and then got the bright idea to pick up the comic.Sometimes it works out fine. Even great. But this time, I'm all... Where's the depth, the pathos, the brilliant timing?This volume is QUICK. So many of the iconic details are there but if you blink, you miss them. But the CORE of the story is all there if you have eyes to see and not only the core -- but the tiny and wonderful inter...

Honestly it was a little weird, and there was practically no backstory. It truly blurs the lines between sci-fi and fantasy without any regard to actual science. Which in some cases is fine, but occasionally that made it bizarre in some places, and hard to follow in others. It was a little less weird the second time I read it, but there were still a lot of things that made absolutely no sense. It also had a lot of moments that felt like a movie with too many scenes cut; you just couldn't be sure...