Welcome to the second installment of I WANT MORE, a new fanfic review feature.
Today's offering is HIGHER LEARNING #1-5 at FAUXDC, written by Dave Marshall. Find it at http://fauxdc.com/Titles/main/higherlearning/
There have been plenty of series, both real and fanfic, focusing on the bad guys rather than the good. Similarly, there have been several series which focus on kids or take place in schools, from
Academy X to Young Justice. But has anyone ever brought the two together, and shown us life inside a school training the next generation of supervillains? None that I'm aware of, except for Higher Learning.
Higher Learning #1 introduces us to the cast of students and teachers at the Windsor Academy of Higher Learning, located in Colombia. By and large, these characters are original creations of Dave's. Certainly this makes sense for a group of supervillains-in-training, as there's no reason for existing comicbook baddies like Copperhead or Silver Banshee to be in school, so the students must be characters we've never heard of. A few of the teachers' names may ring a bell
with diehard DC fans, but the students are all new. The issue does an excellent job of introducing the newest arrival at the Windsor Academy, as well as highlighting the personalities of his classmates as they get to know him. It's hard to say which part Dave handles better, the teenage future villains as students, with their clique politics, adolescent awkwardness and other hallmarks of youth, or the teenage future villains as operatives out on their first mission to steal drugs from Colombian dealers. Oh, why play favorites? I love both aspects of the story. Fair warning, though - issue #1 is long and the formatting leaves something to be desired, with no paragraph indents and no space between them either. It is, however, well worth the effort to read through it.
Luckily the formatting clears up by issue #2. The school deals with the fallout from the previous mission, setting into motion additional events which affect everyone. All the while, the interpersonal relationships between the kids, and with their teachers, continue to develop. Issue #3 brings the culmination of the opening storyline, but thankfully no neat and tidy resolution for the characters' inner lives. Dave writes a mean fight scene, whether it's a team of teenage would-be villains taking on a gang of heavily armed criminals, or two of the Windsor Academy students pounding on each other in a schoolyard brawl, but this series isn't really about guns, explosions and giant robot monkeys. It's about teens dealing with their peers, in all the beautiful and ugly variations on the human experience ... PLUS the possibility of exploding, gun-wielding giant
robot monkeys.
Issue #4 is a bit of a departure as Dave finally brings in some super-heroes, but again, there's far more nuanced character interaction than punch-throwing involved. In fact, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, there's no punches thrown at all. Dave even manages to work in a serious philosophical discussion about the nature of fighting an enemy that considers itself a family. Really good stuff.
Issue #5 introduces yet another student at the Windsor Academy of Higher Learning, and Dave shows an ability to always find new angles to explore within Higher Learning's framework. The new girl at school is very different from the other students introduced so far, and has the potential to make life at the school even more interesting. Her first day is far from a resounding success, but is entertaining to observe nonetheless. Unfortunately, that's where things leave off, at a point where the story and its characters could literally go anywhere.
My one and only complaint about Higher Learning so far is that the students at the school seem, by and large, far too nice. Granted, it can be extremely challenging to write a story from the bad guys' point of view, because you need to get the audience on your side by portraying sympathetic characters, and if the bad guys are irredeemably evil they won't be very sympathetic. So Dave definitely piles on the sympathy with his characters. And on one hand, it rings very true (to my memories of high school, at least). There's a boy who has the tough exterior of a bully, but comes around to do the right thing when pushed. There's another boy who is a loyal friend to the bully, even though he sees what a jerk his friend can be, who ends up spending a lot of time and energy trying to keep his friend out of trouble. There's a withdrawn, intellectual boy and a painfully clueless girl, a sweet girl with a painful past and a happy girl struggling to control her powers. The characters are fleshed out more completely than I'm giving them credit for here, but the point is that the fleshing out is done in humanized, sympathetic ways. These could be characters in X-Men, or Young Avengers, or the Newsboy Legion. A bully is not the same as a supervillain, nor is a person more interested in science than in other people inherently evil. None of the students seem to have a killer instinct, as all of them seem basically decent, as if ending up in supervillain school is something that just happened to them. Their one conflict outside of the closed system of the school is against other criminals, a mission which could have as easily been undertaken by fledgling superheroes for all its moral weight. I truly hope that as the series progresses Dave shows us two things: exactly why these students are training to be villains rather than heroes, and exactly what kind of nefarious deeds they are capable of. I know Dave's capable of pulling it off.
But again, that's just one complaint. Higher Learning has a premise overripe with potential, some well-rendered characters, and plenty of moments of humor, pathos and everything in between. If you haven't checked it out, you truly should. Then you can join me in saying, come on, Mr. Marshall ... I WANT MORE!!!
UPDATE:
Higher Learning #6 was posted to the FauxDC website on November 29, 2006. It is every bit as good as its five predecessors, but it continues the current major storyline, without concluding it. It will probably be a few more issues before everything comes to a head. So, as you can imagine, I’m still jonesing for more!!!