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A review by quetzelish
Gotham Academy, Volume 3: Yearbook by Dustin Nguyen, Hope Larson, J.M. Ken Niimura, Sandra Hope, Steve Orlando, Zac Gorman, Brenden Fletcher, Minkyu Jung, Natasha Alterici, Annie Wu, Colleen Coover, MSASSYK, Rafael Albuquerque, Eduardo Medeiros, David Peterson, Derek Fridolfs, Michael Dialynas, Katie Cook, Becky Cloonan, Adam Archer, Kris Mukai, Moritat, Rob Haynes, James Tynion IV, Christian Wildgoose, Dave McCaig, Mingjue Helen Chen, Faith Erin Hicks
4.0
Gotham Academy wraps up its first series here in a volume that is best described as a rocky ride. I'm giving it a 4, even though the volume is a 3.5, leaning toward 3 as a whole but the parts that are good are really good and everything else is either meh or bad. Gotham Academy is just such a rough series to begin with. Sometimes it feels like it has an overarching mystery and character development and other times it feels like a series of one and done stories that slowly throw out any progress made with the characters. Fletcher and Cloonan (although I feel it's more Fletcher's writing here) need to pick a tone with this series if it's to be better than it currently is.
As it stands, we have a cast of various Gotham Academy members whose personalities are hard to pin down and are just so flat. Maps is boisterous, Olive is troubled and (sometimes?) vindictive, Pomeline likes the occult and Kyle is cool sports guy and Colin is a bit of a felon. That's it and we don't see them grow or even attempt to change. The best growth of character that's been shown through the whole series so far was in this volume with Mrs. Macpherson's backstory. It was only a few pages but it had an arc, connected me with the character, didn't get bogged down in huge word balloons (a bit of a problem with the main book) and made me want to know more about her. I don' care for Kyle or Colin or Pomeline (heck I always have trouble remembering their names).
The biggest issue with the series is that there are all these teases as to a bigger story that never get resolved, even a little. Ostensibly, this is Olive's story. What happened to her mother, what is up with the strange things that have always followed her, and why is Gotham Academy so strange? While volume two vaguely tells us about the mother and why Olive hates Batman so much, it doesn't do anything to make the characters want to explore it more. They just go back to classes, saying that something is weird but never actively searching or finding anything. Let's use Scooby Doo as an example for tonal commitment. The school either needs to be like the original series, where there is just a series of monsters (fake or real doesn't matter) with no real connection other than the detective club searching for them or encountering them, or like Mystery Incorportated where there is a commitment to a large ongoing mystery that is broken up with episodic villains but also a constant moving forward of the mystery and character interactions.
I know this wasn't a discussion of this volume in particular but that's a bit hard to do. I really liked the anthology style of the volume (although the connecting story with the yearbook felt really forced and difficult to actually follow) as it allowed various artists and writers to build on the world and characters and mystery of the Academy. Did all of them work, no but enough of them did that I'm glad I continued with Gotham Academy. It's also bad that I want to know more about the teachers than the students at this point, since this is an all-ages book about the students. The authors just need to commit to a tone and story direction, which hopefully will happen in Second Semester. I want to see these people grow, to have emotional moments and to explore more of the academy instead of just putzing from class to class and from coincidental problem which gets resolved in one issue and then ignored from then on to another. Hopefully this gets better and I think that it definitely can.
As it stands, we have a cast of various Gotham Academy members whose personalities are hard to pin down and are just so flat. Maps is boisterous, Olive is troubled and (sometimes?) vindictive, Pomeline likes the occult and Kyle is cool sports guy and Colin is a bit of a felon. That's it and we don't see them grow or even attempt to change. The best growth of character that's been shown through the whole series so far was in this volume with Mrs. Macpherson's backstory. It was only a few pages but it had an arc, connected me with the character, didn't get bogged down in huge word balloons (a bit of a problem with the main book) and made me want to know more about her. I don' care for Kyle or Colin or Pomeline (heck I always have trouble remembering their names).
The biggest issue with the series is that there are all these teases as to a bigger story that never get resolved, even a little. Ostensibly, this is Olive's story. What happened to her mother, what is up with the strange things that have always followed her, and why is Gotham Academy so strange? While volume two vaguely tells us about the mother and why Olive hates Batman so much, it doesn't do anything to make the characters want to explore it more. They just go back to classes, saying that something is weird but never actively searching or finding anything. Let's use Scooby Doo as an example for tonal commitment. The school either needs to be like the original series, where there is just a series of monsters (fake or real doesn't matter) with no real connection other than the detective club searching for them or encountering them, or like Mystery Incorportated where there is a commitment to a large ongoing mystery that is broken up with episodic villains but also a constant moving forward of the mystery and character interactions.
I know this wasn't a discussion of this volume in particular but that's a bit hard to do. I really liked the anthology style of the volume (although the connecting story with the yearbook felt really forced and difficult to actually follow) as it allowed various artists and writers to build on the world and characters and mystery of the Academy. Did all of them work, no but enough of them did that I'm glad I continued with Gotham Academy. It's also bad that I want to know more about the teachers than the students at this point, since this is an all-ages book about the students. The authors just need to commit to a tone and story direction, which hopefully will happen in Second Semester. I want to see these people grow, to have emotional moments and to explore more of the academy instead of just putzing from class to class and from coincidental problem which gets resolved in one issue and then ignored from then on to another. Hopefully this gets better and I think that it definitely can.