Gabriel Bá

On days when my anxiety rears its head and its occasional nudges turn into a fully charged assault, I think—if I died crossing this road this second with a bag of groceries in my hand, guilt in my heart of somehow not being polite enough to the veggie vendor, and placating thoughts of next-time-apologies in a corner of my head—what would my obituary say? I proceed to letter it by myself and five minutes after that, for that's how long it takes to develop a thought-out obituary, I move on show more with my life. Daytripper is just that, but art. How best to talk about life if not through deaths that could have been the end, but weren't? And sometimes we die to prove that we lived. show less

I wasn't going to read this, after watching a bunch, but not all, of the show and enjoying it enough, but not being blown away. I am very glad it was sin my local library network because it's unbelievably different in form and tone to the show and I absolutely loved it!

This takes aesthetics and the veneer of the sensibilities of much older superhero comics and huge, weird premises, just go with it stylings, and updates the actual tone and writing to a very modern, fresh, and self aware look show more at superheroes, particularly child prodigy superheroes and how that effects their adult lives.

The DNA of the show is all there with some major changes, especially the portrayal of Vanya. The show fleshes out and deepens a lot of the characters and their relationships at the expense of the utterly ridiculous, rip-roaringnsess of the comic. There's just so much fun and herded-cat effective silliness and scale that just doesn't translate, and it's glorious to see in its original form, and to have both!

The art is great. The writing is really cool. This is just an absolute corker of a comic that wasn't in the least but spoiled by my already knowing the general beats of the story from the show. I will absolutely be checking out further volumes and kinda want to actually catch up on the show now too.

This was absolutely the cover to cover happy times, single-sitting read that I needed after BRZRKR was such a disappointment. show less

Grasps a little too frequently at a Grand Meaning of Life, but otherwise, a lovely meditation on life that hypnotized me with all of the details of its settings. I felt like a friendly tourist in someone else's memories, a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with every page serving as a good place to sit down and have a picnic. Small inconsistencies of anatomy are hand-waved away in lieu of all the accomplished art on display; the art's shortcomings would only matter if this was a book show more of talking heads and not a series of worlds opening before the reader.

My reading experience was aided by reading in an app that didn't tell me how close the ending was, meaning whenever characters talking about not knowing when their stories would finish, I felt amused and tense at the same time about when the book would end. show less

A bunch of babies are inexplicably born - odd given baby births are fairly explicable - and a gentleman adventurer adopts seven of them to save the world. It turns out they have freaky powers and they fight monsters and villains as The Umbrella Academy, then they grow up, split up and generally fall apart. Reunited at the death of their adoptive father, about whom they had mixed feelings at best, they have to deal with an impending apocalypse brought about by one of their own.

This is a mad, show more sharp, acerbic, inventive, pulpish, modernist, surreal superhero tale that owes much in tone to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. Gabriel Ba's visuals are astonishing. show less