It’s been a long time since we checked in on Olive Silverlock and her friends. Aside from some brief appearances here and there, eight years have passed without a proper Gotham Academy book on the shelves to continue their adventures. The original run meant a great deal to me, its launch coinciding with the time I started getting back into regularly reading comic books (heck, I even named my cat Olive!). I found great joy in the big swing DC took with publishing a YA series like this, and reading those issues brought me real comfort in the aftermath of a hurricane in my hometown. And while I was initially somewhat disappointed to learn that this long-awaited new series would be a prequel, I have to say that it largely gave me everything I hoped for in a return to Gotham Academy.
Even after Gotham Academy‘s prolonged absence from the shelves, returning creative team of Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, and Becky Cloonan, along with Marco Ferrari, Eva de la Cruz, and Steve Wands, make it feel like they haven’t missed a beat.
DC
Gotham Academy has always been a fun and heartfelt series about friendship, sleuthing, and falling in love during the most heightened emotional period of your life — with a side of superheroics thrown in for good measure. You get all of that in this first issue, which reintroduces Olive Silverlock shortly after her metahuman mother has been captured and imprisoned by Batman. We get to see the Caped Crusader from a very different perspective in this issue, as the traumatic memory of her mother’s last explosive battle with the Dark Knight has become even more twisted and horrific. Batman is saying dialogue that would sound heroic in any other context, but he appears as an inhuman and aggressive monster in Olive’s flashbacks. It’s a smart choice that reinforces Olive’s distrust of authority and her difficulty settling into her new digs at Gotham Academy.
It’s not all gloom and doom, though, as Gotham Academy: First Year #1 reminds us. Olive is already finding moments of happiness where she can, particularly when it comes to the dashing Kyle Mizoguchi, a.k.a. the first person to really make Olive smile since everything with her mom went down. He’s just one of a few characters from the original series that we get to see cross paths with Olive, and it’s really great for longtime readers to see how their romance began. The book also takes a few moments to revisit another recurring element of the original series: the humanization of Arkham’s patients. Yes, there are some truly rotten apples in the hospital’s hallowed halls, but many of them look out for each other. A tender moment is even afforded to the Scarecrow in the book’s last few pages, and I can’t wait to see how it pays off.
All in all, Gotham Academy: First Year is off to a great start, serving as a solid entry point for new fans and a trip down memory lane for the folks who loved its original run. I’m so happy to see more of one of the brightest spots in all of Gotham.
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