Writer: Scottie Young

Artist: Humberto Ramos

Colorist: Edgar Delgado

Letterer: VC’s Clayton Cowles

Release Date: 10/28/2020

Price: $3.99

Is this “Strange Academy” or “Strange irrelevant events”? Comic shops pitched this title as the “Harry Potter of current Marvel Comics”, and “Think X Academy but with all of your magic heroes.” This title has hit a lull after it’s second issue and although Scottie Young has created interesting characters to follow, the draw from the original pitch has already faded.

Scottie Young has created a potential villain for the story, secrets between our main characters (which will cause conflict in the future I’m sure) and has introduced a mysterious character behind a locked door, but yet it all felt bland. Reveals were too quick to process, and nothing was built upon them. Conflict was resolved in a page or two, and by the end did Young forget half of our characters in different dimensions while playing door tag? There was too much of nothing happening from cover to cover just to get Calvin alone on the last page.

Dramatic irony has to be one of the biggest misfortunes of storytelling of all time. Dessy sees what is not seen. She could tell Doyle doesn’t really hate Alvi and Iric, that he likes Emily, and that Zoe was hiding something. That secret wasn’t held for very long, especially with Young putting it in the preview page seen below. This is a secret that although odd, didn’t give me a sense of “I need to know what happened to her” vibes. A reveal like that should be big, but it just happened too fast. Young needs to let his readers commit to these characters first before dropping something potentially so heavy because it would be something big to talk about.

I do want to take a step back and comment on Humberto’s art and Delgado’s colors. They work great for the oddly colorful but flat palette that this book has. There was a couple panels where Zoe’s and Emily’s face were smudged or blurry, but other than that, excellent work.

Final Thoughts:

Scottie Young has the right recipe, all the right ingredients, it’s just a matter of working on how long he takes cooking. I want to see more teacher/student interaction and teaching as well as relationships forming throughout our main cast of characters. There’s so much Young has left for between the panels that I feel like I have missed something already. And also, why is it is so easy to get into the Sanctum Sanctorum these days?

7.0/10