“School’s Out”
Creative Staff:
Story: Elliot Kalan
Art: Andrea Mutti
Letterer: Taylor Esposito
What They Say:
Gina Greene and Zelda Pettibone are face-to-face with Maniac Harry once more, and they’re armed with enough Molotov cocktails to burn down the borough! But the Mayor of New York seems determined to get in their way. Can Gina and Zelda stop Harry before his body count rises?
SPOILER ALERT: They can’t! There’s only one issue left after this one, and it just might be the biggest bloodbath yet!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The first five-issue series was my first experience with writer Elliot Kalan who has done some work at Marvel with big-name characters and has a pretty strong body of work out in the entertainment world that I’m unfamiliar with. Coming back for a second round was welcome and with this set for a four-issue run, this penultimate installment puts us into a fun place going into the finale. Like all past issues, Andrea Mutti is handling the artwork and coloring for it. I’ve sung Mutti’s praises for years now and thoroughly enjoy the projects he takes on as his character design work is great with some neat elements that he utilizes. There’s a particular sense about them that I’m just drawn to on top of already great worldbuilding skills.
With all the chaos going on at the school, the city administration is about to make it a whole lot worse. We have them telling Gina and Zelda to get out of there because they’re going to send in the SWAT teams to basically shoot and kill the Maniac since he’ll really be the only one in there at that point outside of some of the kids and faculty. The outside of the school is chaos with the police rounding up and removing all the protestors and others that are there, which is making things even more complicated. And as we see inside, the principal is in the bad position of having to go and find the Maniac to keep his job as part of Smartscorp because they need the information to make a judgment based on. And because he needs his job, he’ll actually go out there to find out what’s happening even though it ends up with him being shot by a SWAT member.
Where a lot of the focus is on is with Gina and Zelda as they continue to track down the Maniac. They’re fully in at this point, obviously, and even as they get closer to finding him they’re getting calls from those placed higher than them to knock it off. The whole political aspect of the storyline is just playing out in such a comically bad way that you expect it to just make it worse and worse. It is amusing to see them get closer to where the Maniac is but only to learn that he’s kind of lost his spirit a bit and has wandered off-campus at this point, which Celine is able to tell them about having seen him. Of course, having him wander over to Yankee Stadium is just going to set up for an even bigger bloodbath and I’m really curious to see just how far they’ll take it.
In Summary:
This installment does get Lena a bit closer to finding Gina, though she’s facing her own troubles along the way at Penn station. Her journey has me wondering if the finale isn’t going to be the end of the story as it’s hard to see her being so key to things with just one installment left in this series. That said, we do get a lot of fun things in this issue as the chaos continues on and you just wait to see more and more bodies drop. It’s actually tame in this issue how little death there is but that just has me figuring the next issue is going to overcompensate, which is exactly what we want.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: February 16th, 2022
MSRP: $4.99
