I did actually see in a few of the *negative* reviews, that the reviewer felt it was a good book for prior fans, but not newcomers. I wonder if people are taking Way's wacky storytelling for allusions to older runs. I suppose if Umbrella Academy was an old resurrected property, you might assume you were missing who Dr. Terminus was, and should have read the storyline about how they trapped him in the hotel, or something to that effect.
I haven't read the new book and this is quite aside from the current debate going on, just a thought in general. If you accept that the book is *new* and trust anything you didn't understand is something that will be explained going forward oppose to being something you're missing or the writer didn't convey form older issues, maybe it reads better, I don't know.
Yeah I wonder what reactions would have been if it was like that Mother Panic book and was a brand new IP set in the DCU and wasn't using a known name. It'll be interesting to see what kind of reaction Shade gets next month, because that does reference what came before. Although to be fair I don't think the comics community as a whole has the same kind of emotional attachment to Milligan's Shade run as it does Morrison's Doom Patrol, which quite frankly is a shame, Shade the Changing Man was great.