It’s time for the Penguin to go down!
Creative Staff:
Story: Brenden Fletcher, Becky Cloonan, Karl Kerschl
Art: Adam Archer, Sandra Hope. MSASSYK
Colors: MSASSYK, Serge LaPointe
Letterer: Steve Wands
What They Say:
“The Ballad of Olive Silverlock” part two! As everyone around him begins to lose faith in their quest, Kyle refuses to believe that all hope is lost. But which will be harder…leaving behind the friends he thought would never give up, or facing his true feelings for Olive?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The second semester of Gotham Academy is in its final arc and this one takes us through the halfway mark on it. Which is unfortunate as it really feels like the series has started to find its footing again after being so off for so long. With the main group all still working on it, one that still feels like that too many cooks in the kitchen element, Gotham Academy gives us more of the struggle that Olive is going through and some of the ramifications of it. These are all characters that I enjoy a good bit but hate seeing them going through this situation and ambling toward a finale as they have so much more potential. Hell, I’m stupidly hoping that they’ll reconfigure this property into a series of young adult novels as they would be ideal for expanding the audience to.
Olive’s run as Calamity is one that has some dark moments here as Harvey has nicely manipulated her to save his own skin and eliminate a lot of the competition. With his knowledge backing things up, using her to take down Cobblepot is a pretty smart idea on his part. His locale is one that feels weak in terms of design and that undercuts how effective it is to use the Penguin as a target but I do like the way he attempts to save his own skin, scowl at Harvey all along the way, and the way he looks at painting a bigger target on the Wayne name. Sadly, this is all an area where Calamity really should just be ignoring everything that Cobblepot tells her and exacting her revenge but they’re going to play the whole Olive under the surface thing easing some of that, which is unfortunate.
The rest of the book… well, there are things going on and it does all come back together. Maps’ attempt at figuring out more secrets in regards to the Vos and what that means has her dealing with the secrets of that secret society and their animal masks. A secret society in which she wants to join because that’s totally her thing. Pom and Colton eventually catch up with her after going the wrong way really to discover more about this Vos group but it at least brings all of them back together and on the same page. What ties things all around is Kyle as he ended up following Olive to see what she was going to do and he gets taken out by Calamity along the way, resulting in some wounded hospital time at the end wherein Olive is back to herself, for now at least, trying to apologize. Suffice to say bringing everyone back together under these circumstances can only lead in a few ways, most of them too obvious.
In Summary:
Gotham Academy in a lot of ways continues to just be “there” for me even amid the small moments that harken back to why I loved those first dozen or so issues of the original series so much. These are characters I want to spend more time with but they’re also characters that I wish had more story worth being told to be involved with. This installment moves things a bit closer to the finale and dealing with Calamity, but it’s more about place setting and getting the characters where they need to be rather than anything truly critical. The time with Cobblepot was decent but could have been so much more while the rest of it felt like they were treading water until they could reconnect the group.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: June 14th, 2017
MSRP: $2.99
