February 16, 2023

Well, Mother Nature screwed up another plan.

I have my tickets for Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania later this afternoon and so I had planned on doing some comics for the Comic Catch-Up featuring Ant Man and the Wasp. I had pulled out a bunch of those issues, including the new Wasp #2 which was released yesterday and I was excited to see the movie. I had a personal day from school and everything.

Then, we wound up in a Winter Storm Warning, with multiple inches of snow forecast, including high winds. Travel is potentially dangerous. I am still waiting for a little later today to see if I am refunding my tickets and waiting until the weekend to see the movie, but it changed my plans for today’s Comic Catch-Up post.

So instead, of the theme of Ant Man and the Wasp, I decided to do another special edition of the Comic Catch-Up and do the whole series of Strange Academy.

Strange Academy was a book that I was always interested in reading, but never seemed to get around to actually doing it. I did read the Strange Academy: Finals issues 1-3 that are currently being released and I really enjoyed those, so that only emphasized the desire to read this series of books even more.

With the combination of the snow day and the lack of movie going experience today, I found Strange Academy to be a good compromise.

This morning I read Strange Academy #1-18, including Strange Academy Presents #1 (which was a part of the Death of Doctor Strange arc).

Some of the things I really loved about the series included the following :

• Doctor Voodoo made a perfect headmaster so Dr. Strange did not have to be involved in every issue.
• I loved the characters. Especially Doyle Dormammu, Iric and Alvi, Emily Bright, and Zoe Laveau.
• I found the relationship between Doyle and Emily to be really sweet and different.
• Love, love, love the character of Gaslight. His character design was just epic.
• It definitely had that Hogwarts/Stranger Things vibe to it.
• Cool use of some of the other magic users of the Marvel Universe as teachers.
• The writing was excellent. All of the issues were written by Skottie Young.
• The art was classic. As a fan of Amazing Spider-Man, I am very familair with Humberto Ramos’s work.

Some of the issues I had included the following:

• The story felt a little rushed at the end, as if they tried to get to a certain point before the final issue.
• The cliffhanger was not friendly at all.
• A couple of the characters were not my favorites: Shaylee, Dessy, Toth all were, at best, okay for me.
• The inclusion of Man-Thing was weird. I like that character but he felt out of place.

That was about it. I really liked this series and it is shameful that it languished on my shelves so long before I actually read it.