Comic Cuts - 19 April 2019

Before we get into the news, a quick note about the Bear Alley blog. I've had to set comments to moderated because I've been receiving a lot of spam comments and when I say a lot, I mean 23 comments in 7 minutes on Wednesday night spread across many recent posts. Whether it's some sort of robot doing it or whether it's being done by hand by someone in the Middle East (the messages are in Arabic) I don't know, but hopefully it will stop once the messages no longer automatically show up.

All I'm saying is that, if you have a genuine comment, it may take a while for it to show up as I check my e-mail every few hours when I take a break rather than let it interrupt me while I'm in the middle of something.

Thank you for your patience.

The profile work is almost finished and I'll be unemployed after Easter. I'm planning to spend a few days wrapping up the Gwyn Evans project, after which I'm going to be seriously looking for work. All other projects will have to go on hold until such times as I'm more financially stable.

The Evans books are coming along nicely. I've now finished the first run over the text for the third book and have the book roughly laid out; I've also started on the text for book four. I also have one rough cover, which is generic enough to use on three of the books (!). I'll see if I can replicate the style before I reveal all... things have a way of changing as I develop an idea, although that's mostly down to my lack of talent as an artist/designer.

Spring has arrived in full force and we've been forced into the wilderness outdoors to do some gardening. As you can see from the photo above, the garden fought back and after only an hour or so I'd been scratched and stabbed twenty or thirty times and had a splinter in the muscle where my thumb met the rest of my hand that took 24 hours to work loose enough for me to pluck out with tweezers.

More gardening news below, but first... this:

Umbrella Academy is reviewed below... there will be spoilers, so be warned.

I wasn't reading too many comics when The Umbrella Academy originally appeared from Dark Horse back in 2007 and was unaware of its quirky delights until the TV series came along. Since then I've managed to dip into the early issues of the first series, collected as The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite in 2008, and discovered that it's even more fun than the Netflix show.

It follows the same basic premise: on 1 October 1989, 43 women give birth despite showing no earlier signs of pregnancy. Of these, seven babies are adopted by a eccentric, monocled inventor and billionaire entrepreneur, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who secretly trains the seven children until, ten years later, they are revealed to the world – in the comic saving Paris from the Eiffel Tower, which I would have loved to see in the television series but, sadly, it was not to be. Rather, the TV show jumps to twenty years later and the news that Sir Reginald has died, bringing the surviving, now adult, members of the Umbrella Academy together again for the funeral.

They are only known by their numbers:

• One (Luther, aka Spaceboy) who only survived a mission when his adoptive father injected him with a serum that turned his body into that of an ape; he has super strength and has remained mission ready, even when sent to live alone on the Moon for four years;
• Two (Diego), a knife-throwing brawler, equally adept at throwing a tantrum;
• Three (Allison), now an actress but still able to command people's actions by telling them "I heard a rumour...";
• Four (Klaus), a twitchy, flambouyant drug-addict who is able to communicate with the dead; his constant companion is his dead brother...
• ... Six (Ben), whose body contained monsters from other dimensions;
• Five (The Boy), who can jump through time but became trapped in a post-apocalyptic future for decades before being recruited by a time-fixing agency known as The Commission, for whom he has been working;
• Seven (Vanya), who has been told that she has no powers; instead, she practices playing the violin to reasonable standards and jealously watches her brothers and sisters as they save the world. At the funeral, the missing Five reappears, the same ten-year-old who disappeared two decades earlier. He reveals that the end of the world is coming... in fact, it's only eight days away and the only clue he has is a prosthetic eye.

The Umbrella Academy is attacked by two goons (the bickering Hazel and Cha Cha), yet the siblings are too caught up with their own problems to worry about saving the world. Two's ex-girlfriend, a police detective, is killed; Three shares her suspicions with One that their father was murdered by their mother; Klaus is kidnapped and nobody notices; and Vanya has a chance to become first chair violin at an orchestral concert thanks to the support and aid of her new boyfriend.

If this sounds to you less like a superhero serial and more like a family drama where the kids have drifted apart and are now thrown back together again by circumstances, you'd be right. They area all carrying so much baggage that they can barely see past it to answer the bigger questions: Was their father murdered? Who is trying to kill them? How will the world end and can it be stopped?

The Umbrella Academy takes its time about answering some of these questions, and introduces a bunch of others.... can Klaus physically interact with the dead, is Vanya as powerless as she seems, is her boyfriend all he seems, will Hazel find a way to run off with Agnes from the donut shop that doesn't involve killing his partner, and how could Sir Reginald have known about the coming apocalypse?

All this and a monkey butler!

After the somewhat disappointing Titans, it's good to find a superhero adaptation that revels in its weirdness and has characters that, by the end, you genuinely care about. The sets are stylish, the plot convoluted enough to keep viewers on their toes, and the whole thing I found thoroughly entertaining. There will be a second season, so maybe we'll yet get to see the Eiffel Tower go berserk in a flashback.

We've had some reasonable success these past few years growing tomatoes and cucumbers. This year we thought we'd try cats and, as you can see, the first is growing quite nicely.

This week's not-so-random book cover scans... they're all by someone named Butler.