lurkerwithout | Sunday Trade: The Umbrella Academy

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite written by Gerard Way, art by Gabriel Ba, colors by Dave Stewart, letters by Nate Piekos of Blambot

The first volume of the Umbrella Academy opens with a professional wrestler dropping a flying atomic elbow on a cyclopean space squid from Rigel X-9 and quickly begins to get weird. What kept surprising everyone about this comic wasn't that musician Gerard Way had some decidedly odd ideas for his story. What surprised everyone was just how damn good the whole thing turned out to be. Seriously, outside of My Chemical Romance's legions of teen fans, who was expecting the guy to have these levels of creative chops. But he does. And when matched with Brazillian artist Gabriel Ba you get what is easily one of the top comics for 2008...

Time travel, little kids fighting the Eiffel Tower, bad parenting, talking chimps and a family reunion that probably isn't that much more of a disaster than most peoples. I mean sure most reunions don't lead to the end of the world, but the crying and fighting is probably pretty typical...