Gotham Academy #4

[skemono]

When last we left our ghost-hunting heroine, she and her crack commando squad classmates broke into the haunted North Hall, where a hand grabbed Olive's arm.


Olive is called into Headmaster Hammer's office, where she notices a strange symbol carved by the window.




Since Maps saw the symbol earlier, she goes to talk to her about it.



They recall that another classmate had drawn the same symbol, so they decide to interrogate him. They track him to the school's production of Macbeth.



Fun cameos are fun.



After Maps's bad cop routine, the kid tells them that the symbols are all over the school, including the girls' dorm. So Maps and Olive prepare a dungeon crawl, when all of a sudden ghost!



Olive grabs the ghost, discovering that it's a fake. She goes onto the roof to find Heathcliff, Pomeline's boyfriend.



(He also tells Olive that the blond kid from above is named Tristan Grey. We find out he has a secret in the most recent issue, but it is not that he is into poorly-researched and -written BDSM.)






Writers: Becky Cloonan & Brenden Fletcher
Artist: Karl Kerschl

Comments

[crinos]

I love that one girl is painting a beholder.

[yvonmukluk]

That one girl is Maps. She's awesome.

[hotfoot]

Not sure why they gave a mustache like that to Simon Trent. Or made him so over the top. Still, this is cool.

[qalchemist]

Huh! Is that Croc?

[sagrada]

Well it's a scaly guy in a book called after Batman's city with an "Arkham" prisoner-style outfit, couldn't very easily BE anyone else. EDIT: Also humanlike bones, so there's that too.

I kinda don't like that part, actually. Every time I see those nods to the world of Batman it irks me, just a little. Something like this ought to be able to stand on ita own, not as part of the bloated Bat-franchise.

Call it...I don't know, "Spooktasm Academy" or whatever.

[mrstatham]

But then that would essentially make it lose the entire hook and it'd just be a more (or less) blatantly weird school story like Morning Glories. Using Batman and his world is the hook, really, and I don't think it *needs* to stand on it's own - it is to a school setting what Gotham Central was to crime procedurals. They both need the world they're set in.

[ebailey140]

Agreed. It expands Batman's world, a bit. I like that there are some books in the Batman line that aren't the usual, such as this, Batgirl, and Harley Quinn. The variety makes Batman's world more interesting.

That, and the previous issue already tied it in

[chortles81]

Her mother was an inmate who's in a coma after the collapse of Arkham Asylum.

Then again, to me it helps that the book might lose its hook without Gotham/the Bat-'verse, but the PLOT works even without knowledge of Batman's world beyond pop culture osmosis (which I'm guessing includes the idea of Arkham Asylum as the name of the "...kind of...hospital").