Gotham Academy #2 (Comics Review)

While the many Bat-books over the last 75 years or so have done much to explore the younger generation of Gotham, we haven’t really seen the more… civilian side of things. The normal kids of Gotham who get caught up in the various mysteries of this city. That’s where last month’s debut Gotham Academy comes in. Written by Brenden Fletcher and Becky Cloonan, this new series looks at a young female lead at a (possibly) haunted boarding school in Gotham, and the slivers of mystery and character offered up in the first issue were good enough for me to come back for more this month.

Gotham Academy #2 continues to explore who Olive Silverlock is and what happened to her in the summer that caused her to forget it all and even led to her having strained relationships with her boyfriend Kyle and his sister Maps. Not to mention the hazing she gets at the school from some of the other characters. This is quite a wonderful teen-oriented book, with actual teen characters no less, and it offers up some interesting stuff about life at the so-called Gotham Academy. The writing is good, if not really excellent, but the art definitely takes the top marks.

The Amazing Spider-Man #8-9 (Comics Review)

Dan Slott, Christos Gage and many other writers have been laying down the foundation of Marvel’s current event, Spider-Verse for the last several weeks now and it is pretty much time for readers to get the dividends on their investments. In the pages of both Edge of Spider-Verse and The Amazing Spider-Man, we’ve seen how various Spider-themed heroes have been murdered and their souls stolen by interdimensional beings and how it is going to affect the main Marvel 616 universe. In recent weeks, we also got to see brand-new superhero Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel join forces with Peter Parker as well and The Amazing Spider-Man has definitely moved into a new phase of its second existnece

In The Amazing Spider-Man #7, we saw Kamala and Peter team-up to take down a supervillain who dressed up in one of Carol Danvers’ old outfits from when she was Ms. Marvel. It was a bit of a silly story in some ways but also executed well enough that I ended up liking it. And then we got to meet Spider-UK from an alternate Earth where he was part of the Captain Britain Corps. Fun stuff. But in issues #8 and #9, we see something altogether different. Kamala and Peter’s team-up comes to a nice soft close, we see the debut of Mayday Parker, and then Dan Slott kicks off Spider-Verse in the ninth issue, out this week. As I said, the title just keeps getting better, and the art is improving along with it, which is pretty awesome