Umbrella Academy (2007), Volume 2

November 9, 2009
The second installment in this Eisner-winning series, Dallas
is even more surreal and darkly quirky than its predecessor. The Umbrella Academy is a group of superheroes who were mysteriously born at the same time, adopted and raised together as a family and a team. Now adults, their heroic and family dynamics are traumatized and dysfunctional, despite their love for one another. In this volume, the bizarrely childlike time-traveling team member Number Five recruits his siblings to right a wrong—to save President Kennedy before he is assassinated, possibly saving the world in the bargain. But in the tradition of dysfunctional families, they overshoot the mark by three years and end up in Vietnam in the middle of the war and opposed by a Machiavellian super-intelligent goldfish. Way’s nuanced, complex writing and Bá’s magnetic, lush art continue to click together like a finely tuned machine. Dallas
hits a sweet spot, appealing to mainstream audiences and hardcore comics fans alike, not to mention a legion of teenagers drawn by Way’s other role as lead singer of the popular band My Chemical Romance.

Starred review from March 15, 2010
Apocalypse Suite (2008), written by the front man of the emo-punk outfit My Chemical Romance and drawn by Eisner winner B, provided a dizzying refreshment of the superhero group, adding here a dash of severely dysfunctional dynamics and there a glug of gleeful peculiarity. The story line of this follow-up swarms like an electron cloud around a plan to avert the Kennedy assassinationor are they trying to avert the plan to avert the plan? Way has a special affinity for enigmatic plotlines, in which minor details and major occurrences are left unexplained for ages, and he isnt afraid to literally end the world, which has happened at least twice in Umbrella Academy history. Information gets doled out in morsels and roundhouse kicks as the squabbling squad of super-stepsiblings zips back and forth in time and works to save the world from, well, themselves and their beyond-clever powers. Rumors ability to tell a lie and have it come true offs an Abraham Lincoln monument run amok, mirroring the the first books opening, in which zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel terrorizes Paris with his tower. Such stuff makes spectacular fodder for Bs chunky, irresistibly hooky art, bursting with constellations of weird, exciting, and funny touches. Fresh, bitter, ultraviolent, oddly touching, The Umbrella Academy may be the shrewdest, wildest superhero thing going in mainstream comics. Its certainly among the finest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)