By: Christos Gage (writer), Sean Chen (pencils), Scott Hanna (inks), Jeromy Cox (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters), John Denning (assistant editor) & Bill Rosemann (editor)
The Story: The Avengers Academy teachers throw a prom for the kids.
What’s Good: There’s a lot of good character development in this issue for the Academy kids and teachers and also a nice guest starring appearance by a bunch of other younger characters in the Marvel U. Avengers Academy has been a really quality title and its kids have been through the wringer the last few issues, so it was fun to see the teachers (notably Hank Pym and Tigra) decide that a prom was a good idea. One nice thing about a prom issue is that it really nails down the age of these kids: They’re high schoolers. That’s kinda important for the reader to realize because I’d imagine most readers are probably in their 30s and just perceived these kids as “young”, but we all know that there is a world of difference between 18 and 23 and that many of the experiences that normal people go through in that age range that help us mature (college, marriage, kids) will not be on the table for the Academy kids.
Of course, a prom issue is going to have lots of romance in the air. If you read the quite good Giant Sized Avengers Academy (also released last week), you know that there are some residual issues with Reptile and Spider-Girl. There’s a budding romance with Hazmat and Mettle. Finesse has been had her eye on a few guys in her weird way. Striker fancies himself quite the ladies man. But, with all of this, it was kinda funny to see two of the teachers end up in bed together. I also really like the Hazmat/Mettle relationship, as the two of them are both complete outcasts due to their powers. We get the sense that a romance that seemed to begin as “any port in a storm” could become more.
It was also neat to see some of the Young Allies and Spider-Girl at the prom. I’ll talk about this more below, but with those other series for young heroes never finding their footing from a sales standpoint, I wonder if we’ll be seeing more of them around the Academy. I certainly wouldn’t mind it if Spider-Girl hung around.
The art is fine. Chen does a really nice job of using framing and depth to his panels to make sure that you know what is going on. One measure of the artist is whether you can tell what is going on without the word balloons and Chen hits that mark most of the time.
What’s Not So Good: Even though I like Spider-Girl and enjoyed seeing all the other kids, I do kinda worry if we’re going to get more people joining the Academy. One of the things that has made this series so cool is that we’ve gotten a year’s worth of issues to just explore the relationships between this group of kids. Unlike other team books (like the X-Men with its massive cast), in Academy I think you could look at the line-up of characters on the recap page and say in a few words how every character on that page feels about every other character. They can probably keep that dynamic if they add just Spider-Girl to the mix (and I applaud that because I love that character), but if it becomes a bigger “school” where (for example) Finesse is dating Gravity even though Gravity isn’t really in the main story, we’ll lose some of the magic. At least I think…
Conclusion: Another strong issue of Avengers Academy. Considering that this is a B-list title and it is one year old, it says a lot that I’ve never once considered dropping it. It’s been just that strong. Even though I think people make WAY too big of an issue of “jumping on points”, this is a pretty good issue for the uninitiated. Trust me, you’ll like it.
Grade: B
-Dean Stell
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