After a series of delays, Gotham Academy: First Year #4 has finally dropped and the other shoe has dropped with it. The tension of the first three issues was slowly ratcheting up and it’s almost as cathartic as it is tragic to see what’s happening to Olive, or Livi, rather. Gotham Academy: First Year #4 is where the book shifts from teenage soap opera with some light reminders that this book takes place in the DC universe to a full-blown Gotham tragedy title, and it’s better more often than not because of it.
Gotham Academy: First Year #4 is technically told in a pretty straight-forward, linear though it doesn’t immediately feel that way. When we last saw Olive she was reeling from the explosion of Arkham Asylum and decided to not join Kyle and his family on their August trip to Norway and we thought she was going to get Carrie’d at her Junior Prom by angry jocks who blame her for their suspension. Couple those dramatic points with a new Man-Bat resident on the Gotham Academy grounds under the oversight of Batman, and things seemed like they were getting interesting for Olive.
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However, her summer didn’t become a waiting game to hear from her mother. Instead, Olive has been suffering from a series of blackouts that leave her confused about where she is and how much time has passed since her last lucid moment. After being rescued from a fire, she comes to in the emergency ward of the school with Kyle by her side. She thinks it’s only been a few days since the disaster at prom, but it’s been a month. She returns to her dorm to find a complete mess of her life, and the pills she was given by Scarecrow when she had visited her mother earlier in the series. “Madness can be hereditary, after all.”
These blackouts are when she becomes a different person, who goes by Livi. A more confident person, Livi has a bit of wild side, dressing either more provocatively like a modern goth kid or more conservatively like a time-displaced Puritan. She acts more brash, and may or not be committing light arson. She’s developed a relationship with the newly introduced Man-Bat, a young man named Tristian Grey who has no memory prior to being discovered and taken under the protection of Batman.
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Oddly enough, the real-world delay of the issue feels diegetic with how the story is being told. So much time has passed since the last issue, you’re (un)comfortably placed directly into Olive’s point of view; you’re just as disoriented as she is when she regains consciousness. It’s so effective that it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional, because it so thoroughly adds to the confusion that she’s experiencing.
The worst part? Her alter ego Livi and Tristian Grey have such great chemistry together that you almost feel bad that it’s at the expensive of Olive and Kyle. It’s a really interesting dynamic where you’re rooting for both of them to make it work but you know one succeeding will cost the other everything.
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Gotham Academy: First Year #4 returns from its hiatus in mid-season form, briskly shifting the tone of the book from teenage drama to a more appropriately Gotham supernatural romance with real costs for the characters involved. Scarecrow’s influence seems to be growing, at least over Livi, and threatens to upend everything for Olive and her relationship with Kyle. This still isn’t a superhero book, but it’s a fun and energetic story about what parents inadvertently do to their children, and how hard it is for those children to break the cycle.
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