Comics Toast

Today I would like to discuss some sweet comics that I have recently read. First, there was Charles Burns' 70's high school freakout, Black Hole, and second was Gerard Way's and Gabrial Ba's Parisian dysfunctional superhero family drama, The Umbrella Academy.
Black Hole is about a group of high school kids circa 1970 who deal with the outbreak of a sexually transmitted disease that they call "the bug." The disease isn't lethal or anything, but it does cause its host to display weird physical characteristics (molting skin, weird boils, a tail, etc.). So you think, "If this weird venereal disease is going around and everyone knows about it, why are these kids still having sex?" But that's when you remember that in real life there are all kinds of bizarre STD's going around and despite knowing about them, people still have lots of unprotected sex. It's the teenage sense of invincibility coupled with the teenage reality of alienation that provides the basis of Burns' work.
The main body of the story focuses on a few key characters that go through a series of love triangles, bad trips, and eventually some murders only to realize that the best thing to do is grab someone you love and hit the road. In the background is this weird disease that has disfigured some of the kids so badly that they run away from home and take up residence in the woods.
Altogether, it's a really weird look back at high school that manages to capture the confusion, pain, lust, and frustration that comes with adolescence. I heard that David Fincher is going to do a movie adaptation of this book, and it'll be interesting to see what he does with it.
This is one that Ben lent me, and I must say that despite my hatred for My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way is a pretty good comic book writer. The Umbrella Academy is the story of seven extraordinary children that become adopted by a dude named The Monocle so he can train them to protect the world. Flash forward about twenty years, and The Monocle has died. His adopted kids, now grown up and embittered about the harsh childhood that they endured, show up for his funeral and hesitantly reconnect just in time to save the world from a psychotic composer and his orchestra of madmen, murderers, and malcontents bent on the destruction of the world.
I give this one props on the awesome narrative, but I do think that Mr. Way was just a tad overambitious. There's a lot of stuff that is brought up (The Monocle is a space alien; there were 36 other extraordinary births in addition to the titular seven) that I expected would be addressed at a later time, but weren't. All the same, it was pretty cool.
In other comic book news, The Punisher finally killed Barracuda, and I am seriously thinking about giving up on Moon Knight because both the new writer and artist kinda suck.

Any good ideas for a new series to replace it?