Somebody shattered the crystalline student from Weirdworld, and the strangest, beakiest detective in the whole Marvel omniverse is sort of on the case! Strange Academy #11 is written by Skottie Young, drawn by Humberto Ramos, colored by Edgar Delgado, and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
Yet another book about a school for kids with powers (but this time they’re magic), Strange Academy was only ever going to be one of three things: a book that developed and took seriously the interior lives and the complicated connections among a small group of powered teens, like the 1980’s New Mutants; a book that focused on the busy, quirky, famous adult staff, some of whom had no business in a school (like Jason Aaron’s Wolverine & the X-Men); or an agreeable, underplotted book with a large, visually distinct, young cast and a flock of cliches (some drawn from Harry Potter), aimed at a future of toys and cartoons on TV.
So far it’s been mostly the third, with some hints of the second: the book’s been worth following if you’re a teen-superhero completist (like me), or else for the art, which gives each swampy, wintry, fiery, or otherwise interdimensional guest star more than their detailed due. Humberto Ramos and the art team continue to rock the plots they’ve been given, finding a whole row of sweet spots where the kids look like manga kids, the adults like sorcerous Marvel adults, and the backgrounds like something from the Witchy section of Hot Topic circa 2005 (and that’s not an insult- I just hope Doctor Voodoo won’t mind).
This start of a new arc (the first since the trade paperback) finds the frosty crystalline student Toth unexpectedly murrrdeerrred, or (since he’s made of Weirdworld minerals) shattered! No biggie, as long as we’ve got all the pieces, since Catbeast knows how to put Weirdworlders back together: a few lovely pages show the adults, and Toth’s distraught girlfriend Shaylee, reassembling the student like a diamond jigsaw puzzle, or like Emma Frost in New X-Men #141 (honestly, a lot like Emma). Alas, more than some reassembly is required: whoever shattered Toth took away his heart-piece, which means we’re looking at murder, and the school needs a detective.
Enter…. Howard the Duck, who seems no more out of place in the magic school than the magic school does in its touristy, swampy New Orleans. That is, he seems totally out of place, and not because he’s caught in a world he never made: HtD’s supposed to be a cynical source of comedy, looking at all this superhero business from the outside, waltzing in like a child’s idea of a hard-boiled adult, breaking the fourth wall without even trying.
But here he’s just a talking duck who’s rude to kids. He interviews each in turn and all have an excuse… except that Calvin’s doesn’t hold up: he dropped a badge from his leather jacket at the scene of the crime, and once he’s accused, Calvin becomes a monster of blackened tentacles, multiple eyeballs, oozing rage, and body horror. Can the kids defeat him? Of course they can– but not in Strange Academy #11: we’re done.
Or almost done, because this plot leaves room for one cool direction, if Young can go there. Each of the Strange Academy kids so far has had one (1) character trait: Emily is the Everygirl viewpoint character, Shaylee the enthusiast, Iric the grind, and Zoe the Black girl from New Orleans who is also a voodoo zombie (I know). Calvin is– wait for it– the immature pudgy kid, the one who’s all about eating, who asks about dinner five minutes past lunch. And Calvin is also the kid who erupts in eyeballs and body horror, who’s been taken over by Lovecraftian demons.
What if that demon represents decades of payback, on the part of rounder humans and those who love them, for characters like the Blob and the Shadow King and various other figures who must be evil or self-indulgent or unsympathetic or dim because they’re big?
Nah. It was probably something he ate.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
