It's Nerd Wednesday!

Variant cover by Jim Lee

There are going to be a lot of unfamiliar faces at your local comic book retailer today. There will be lots of folks who haven't picked up a comic in years, scooping up copies of Batman in the vain hope they will someday pay for a new car or a college education.

The true geeks out there know you can't kill Batman. So you should look for another book. One that you will actually read.

Since it's Thanksgiving, and you'll be fortifying yourself with enough turkey and tryptophan to endure your Uncle Dwight's racist jokes, you might appreciate a family with even bigger problems.

For instance, their father is a dead alien, their mom is an animatron, the eldest brother has his head grafted to the body of an ape, one sister had her throat slashed, and the other was recently shot in the head.

But all of that is pretty normal for the Umbrella Academy, a collection of superhuman orphans cursed to save the world. Their debut adventure, Apocalypse Suite, was, no contest, the best new comic out last year. Author Gerard Way -- you might know him from his day job with My Chemical Romance -- created a fascinating world with rich characters and deep mysteries. And now, the sequel hits stores today.

It will be interesting to see if Way and his collaborator, artist Gabriel Ba, will be able to sustain the same quality in the encore. The preview looks pretty good. But more importantly, it's going to be cool just to see what happens next.