Hello and Welcome to the World of Bats, the Batman Book Club!
This week we’ll be heading back to school and taking a look at Gotham Academy #7-12, written by Becky Cloonan and Branden Fletcher, with art by Karl Kershl and Mingjue Helen Chen!
I have never read this series before. It was fun to read. I knew Hugo Strange was up to no good, of course. Seeing Kirk Langstrom as a teacher is interesting, although I wonder about his involvement in the “boybat” problem. Clayface’s daughter is great, and I liked Damian’s and Tim’s appearances.
The whole series is really delightful, though in my reread of everything except the Yearbook a few weeks ago, I could really tell when Fletcher took over scripting duties, and Cloonan stopped being as involved in the dialogue. It was still very good, but there was a touch lost.
Glad you liked it! I think that’s one of the more fun things about book clubs like this, to get people to try things that they might not have been prompted to otherwise.
I noticed you mention that before, may I ask why you skipped Yearbook? I actually haven’t read any further ahead than this – well, technically the Robin War tie-in, which we won’t be covering since we already did with Renegade Robins a while back – and I was planning on doing that arc sometime in May-ish, around the time when most school semesters end.
Yearbook is fun enough, but I wanted to see how the whole story read in a row, and Yearbook disrupts the story pretty seriously. It has no real connection to any of the ongoing plot points, and is, in fact, mostly flashbacks or one-offs that don’t matter when they happen.
I think it would be a good idea to do Yearbook in May, for sure! It just didn’t fit my reread plan, which was purely plot focused.
This was a fun read. I think for me Damien’s appearance was the highlight. There was something about his dynamic with Maps that appealed to me and I liked that it was left open ended whether it was magic that bound their hands together or if it was in their heads.
I’d love to see that – I think it would be a different dynamic since Damian’s been through way more stuff lately and he also seems to be into someone new in Respawn, but I certainly wouldn’t say no to it.
