A new Umbrella Academy comic will finally deliver the anticipated Sparrow arc

The Umbrella Academy comics are set to return this summer, six years after the last issue was published.

Out June 11, The Umbrella Academy: Plan B will be co-written by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, who will also illustrate. Per the official description first reported by Variety, the comic will go deep on the dynamic between the Umbrella Academy and their new rivals, the Sparrows:

After the mass release of The City’s greatest foes and the chaos that followed in Hotel Oblivion, the Umbrella Academy faces their most fearsome challenge to date–their other brothers and sisters. Known only as The Sparrows, they share a different connection to Sir Reginald Hargreeves and Mom. No one knows how to hurt each other more than family, and this powerful, ruthless brood will spare no brutality in favor of their sole objective—control and the obedient glare that comes with it.

The Sparrows were briefly introduced in the final panels of The Umbrella Academy’s third volume, Hotel Oblivion, when they showed up to help fight the the supervillains that escaped during the jailbreak. But this glimpse of the new group of super-powered siblings was so brief, it wasn’t until the third season of the Netflix adaptation that fans were able to learn much of anything about the Sparrows.

In the show, the Sparrow Academy was a mirror group of siblings who were adopted by Reginald Hargreeves in an alternate universe. When the Umbrella Academy siblings found themselves in the Sparrows’ timeline, their arrival sparked a universe-threatening time paradox, as well as a heated rivalry between the two groups. The TV series also interwove the Sparrows with elements of the Hotel Oblivion arc, rather than introducing them at the end, creating a storyline largely unrecognizable from anything in the comics — meaning, whatever Plan B has in store should still feel fresh to fans of the franchise.

“Just as it happened with every season of the show, they took elements from our original story and worked it out into telling it their way,” Bá told Variety. “They used ideas we haven’t done yet, but differently than we originally intended for the comics. And that’s the fun of the show, in my opinion. It began very similar, but it grew to become a completely different thing, even though it has some elements that are the same. So we might see things in the comics that have appeared on the show, like the Sparrows, but the reader will soon be reminded what makes our comics so unique and why we love this medium so much.”

Given how much weirder the Umbrella Academy comics are — and how disappointing the TV show became— it’s hard not to get excited about finally seeing what Way and Bá always intended the Sparrows to be when Plan B hits shelves this summer.