School’s hard enough without the devil as your principal.
Creative Staff:
Story: Adam Warren
Art: Carla Speed McNeil
Colors: Carla Speed McNeil
Letterer: Carla Speed McNeil
What They Say:
Trapped in a high-school hellscape, can struggling superheroines Empowered and Sistah Spooky avoid dissection by giant, revenge-minded frogs in an infernal Biology class–and can they survive spell-powered bullying by sneering, school-uniformed sorceresses wielding hellishly abusive text messages and emoji as shockingly lethal magic weapons?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening installment this series was fun in its setup and what it wants to do in giving us a good time with Emp and Sistah Spooky. I do like that Adam Warren has been doing more spinoff books with the property in the last few years to tell some fun tales that accent things and nudge along some of the supporting cast so that the main series can plunge forward in its own big ways. That said, as much of a fan as I am of Carla Speed McNeil, it just feels once again like an ill fit with this property. The designs just don’t work for me with these characters and nobody feels like who they are in a way that keeps it from feeling like an Empowered book. The characters are true to who they are in how they act and talk but the visual side is just too jarring for me, unlike what we got with the Soldier of Love series.
This issue works us through two stories while also digging into the past. We get a lot more on how life was for Spooky during her younger days and like it is for a lot of kids it was pretty untenable. The time in biology where she ended up screwing up the grading because of a bad performance can haunt for a long time, especially when the blonde popular girl berates you over it. Similarly, we get a subplot flashback story that shows us the “texting twins” who used their phones to regularly badger and destroy her. These are familiar pieces to most bullying stories and Spooky put up with a lot of garbage along the way and dealt with it as best as she could. But her ending up with all the sorcery powers in the end, and eschewing the “conventional” look of beauty that the other girls took just made her an even bigger target for this venture.
And that makes for the present day storyline to be a lot of fun, such as Bethany trapping the pair in the biology lab as she’s ready to gut Spooky like the frog back in the day. This just gets plain creepy and I’m totally on Bethany’s side with how awful it is with the formaldehyde things coming back to life as I’d freak out like nobody’s business. What’s nice is that dealing with it all is a joint venture between Spooky and Emp even if Emp gets the “killing blow” to take down Bethany. It’s a little similar later in the library as more of the students are sent off for revenge and we get the texting twins going at it by having emojis take physical form and really pummel the pair before Spooky can work a little background magic like she did earlier in the biology lab to give her and Emp an edge over things.
In Summary:
We continue to get a fun story here that works the past for Sistah Spooky pretty well and offering up a chance at finally putting all of that baggage behind her. There are several challenges ahead as there are plenty of students that took the bad guy’s offer of power and beauty to deal with and that means some creative and familiar obstacles that we’ll be facing. Spooky gets most of the time here as one would expect but it feels like Emp is even more background than I expected, which I’m a bit mixed on. It’s probably a bit for the best as I really don’t care for the designs for her in this series, or in general as it just doesn’t click for me, but everything is solid and has a good sense of flow about it to keep up with Warren’s copious dialogue and how much he crams into every installment.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: January 24th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
