First Year is Done: A Review of Strange Academy, Vol. 3

written by Skottie Young

drawn by Humberto Ramos

colored by Edgar Delgado

A thing I have found funny about comic books featuring kids is how weirdly elastic time can be. 

Strange Academy, a book which kicked off just before the COVID-19 pandemic, ended its first 18 issues earlier this year, and within the book, the kids' first school has just ended with a bit of a bang. Suffice it to say that Emily Bright and the vast majority of her classmates have had enough of the lies and manipulations perpetrated by the adults running the Strange Academy, led here by Jericho Drumm, aka Doctor Voodoo and have taken drastic action. Also, Doyle Dormammu confronts anew the terrible visions he's been shown of the future and comes to a frightening realization. Also, how will all of this play out given that Doctor Strange is dead?

As I was saying earlier, time is an oddly elastic thing in comic books. Peter Parker, for example, has been a twentysomething college graduate for forty years now. He stopped aging in real time sometime in the 1970s and even though he's progressed a bit over the years, every so often, every time he's been on the the cusp of some very adult breakthrough in terms of achievements or responsibility, an invisible temporal rubber band has snapped him back to that sweet spot of youth, when he's always on the verge of realizing his vast potential.

Oddly enough, though, Marvel doesn't give that treatment to all of their characters, especially those who exist in an academic setting. Many of the teachers of Strange Academy were quite notably once teen characters themselves, like the New Mutants' Magik or the Runaways' Sister Grimm, and an entire school year has just passed in more or less real time. This isn't so much as a complaint as it is an observation I make with some amusement.  The series ends (for now) on an intriguing cliffhanger with an actual academic year having passed in story time.

Young and Ramos have created some pretty engaging and, dare I say, memorable characters like Emily Bright, Doyle Dormammua and Calvin Morse, among others.  Emily in particular has the most potential because unlike many of her contemporaries in the Strange Academy she's not tied into any preexisting characters, whether it's the lord of the Dark Dimension or the Enchantress of Asgard of anything like that. There's a lot of potential to chart a unique path for her and I'm fairly confident that with the upcoming series reboot/continuation Young and Ramos, have more planned for her and the rest of the gang. 

I'm quite grateful for this book because it's really gotten my youngest kid, who spends too much of her spare time playing online games, to actually read something and I like how Young and Ramos have created characters that a young reader can connect with as she has done. 

I look forward to the next chapter. 

8.5/10