The Umbrella Academy Volume 2: Dallas

The team is despondent following the near apocalypse created by one of their own and the death of their beloved mentor Pogo. So it's a great time for another catastrophic event to rouse the team into action. Trouble is, each member of the team is distracted by some very real problems of their own. The White Violin is bedridden due to an unfortunate blow to the head. Rumor has lost her voice - the source of her power. Spaceboy has eaten himself into a near-catatonic state, while Number Five dives into some shady dealings at the dog track and The Kraken starts looking at his littlest brother as the key to unraveling a mysterious series of massacres... all leading to a blood-drenched face-off with maniacal assassins, and a plot to kill JFK!

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. (Oct.)
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*Starred Review* Apocalypse Suite (2008), written by the front man of the emo-punk outfit My Chemical Romance and drawn by Eisner winner Bá, 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 assassination—or 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 isn’t 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. Rumor’s ability to tell a lie and have it come true offs an Abraham Lincoln monument run amok, mirroring the the first book’s opening, in which zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel terrorizes Paris with his tower. Such stuff makes spectacular fodder for Bá’s 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. It’s certainly among the finest. --Ian Chipman