"The Umbrella Academy Volume 1: Apocalypse Suite" is the jumping in point for the series, collecting together the initial origin story for a wildly dysfunctional, diverse and truly lethal family collected together by a harsh and unloving father figure.
All born on the same day, the incumbents of The Umbrella Academy are actually seven orphans, six of which show signs of incredible and strange superpowers under the watchful and controlling eye of one Sir Reginald Hargreaves.
Sir Reginald begins to train the children to become a super-force to be reckoned with, and in the comics we're given more of a backstory to their super-heroics than you will eventually see in the TV show - mostly thanks to an excellent and stunning set piece where the six main heroes fight an animated and bestial version of The Eiffel Tower in a scene you dearly, dearly wish they had the budget for in the TV show (but is sadly lacking).
Klaus, Allison, Vanya, Diego, Luther, Ben, and Number Five are trained to work together as an elite team of superheroes and assassins, but each child has their own flaws - which come to light as the graphic novel digs its treads into the snow and starts to gain traction.
The seventh child, Vanya, is told throughout her early life that though she was born on the same day as the other kids, she has no special powers at all. Something that later on in the graphic novel leads to her discovering quite the opposite (trying not to spoil things too much but Sir Reginald turns out to be a terrible, terrible liar and an absolutely appalling father figure).
Gerard Way, the talented ex lead-dude of "My Chemical Romance" who is now possibly more famous for his exquisite comic writing has created a distinctly different set of heroes, often deeply flawed, seemingly lied to and misled throughout their entire lives, but drawn together again by the death of Sir Reginald - and a doom-laden message from Number 5 / The Boy, a diminutive member of the family cursed with being a 58 year old trapped in a child's body, who witnessed the end of the world in the rapidly approaching future, and has mere days to convince the others to assist him in preventing the apocalypse.
As two bounty hunters are dispatched by a sinister organisation known as "The Commission" - the previous 'employers' of Number 5, to kill their errant agent, the whole story barely takes a breath as it whips from one excellent scene to another, culminating in a final confrontation that could bring about the end of the world.
I absolutely loved this when I first encountered it some years ago, and wanted to re-read the first few volumes before dipping into the show. The graphic novels are inventive, crazy, original and weird - and it's at least worth reading this first volume even if you don't want to get into the nitty gritty of the later volumes.
Thankfully the show only seems to touch content from the first volume anyway, so again do yourself a favour and track down a copy of this before watching the Netflix show (which, actually, is also very good all things considered, with a cracking cast particularly Number 5 who is a total badass!)
Sum this comic up in a sentence: Utterly unmissable, wildly original, and totally cool.
"The Umbrella Academy Volume 1: Apocalypse Suite" by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba is out now, published by Dark Horse Comics (self purchased, not supplied for review).