A review of The Umbrella Academy #3 By Neil Shyminsky (neil) December 11, 2007 Rating: 7.9 / 10

Writer: Gerard Way
Penciler: Gabriel Ba

"Apocalypse Suite: Part 3"

I bought the first two issues of this series only a week before this issue was released. Had I written about those, my comments would've been positively glowing: the freakish spontaneous birth of babies all around the world who are gathered up by an eccentric millionaire (who is, incidentally, an alien) so as to become an unusual sort of superhero team? Great stuff. And with dialogue and presentation that falls somewhere in between Casanova and Hellboy? Even better.

I expected this sort of work from Gabriel Ba - who is utterly fantastic, as usual, especially since he's cranked up the darkness in a very appropriately Mignola-esque way - but Gerard Way is an incredible surprise. The content does well to ride the thin line between hyperironic kitsch and undeserved self-importance, and his writing is snappy in a way that I don't come to expect from anyone whose first and/or last name doesn't start with an 'M', much less a rookie. (Or who isn't named Joss Whedon, I guess, since he hadn't changed his name to Moss Whedon or Joss Mhedon, when last I checked.)

The first two issues - featuring other quirks such as the gorilla-body Spaceboy transplant, the 60-year old time-traveler trapped in a 10 year-old's body, and the evil orchestra whose symphony will end the world - have earned Way and Ba plenty of goodwill. This issue is more perfunctory: the characters have been introduced and their rather odd relationships established, so this is the first big-battle issue where we get to see that the anti-hero really is really a hero at heart, that the sister who betrayed them by writing a tell-all book really does care, etc.

But we've come to expect these sorts of middle-act mandatory-first-mega-battle-in-a-two-battle-match kind of structures from our already-ready-for-the-trade 6-parter stories, haven't we? I enjoyed it anyway, but that probably has more to do with the concept and its delivery to this point than this issue in particular. But that's more than enough for me.

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