Mystik U
by Alisa Kwitney
art by Mike Norton
2018
Mystik U collects a 3-issue miniseries from DC comics that tries to cash in on the popularity of magical boarding schools. Teenage Zatanna gets recruited to a secret college run by Rose Psychic and a bunch of other older-generation DC occult characters, who are trying to prevent the future emergence of some world-ending catastrophe called The Malevolence.
Mystik U came out in 2018, a couple years before JK Rowling came out as a raging transphobe. It kind of mashes up a Harry Potter setting with CW-style teen superhero drama with a kind of whodunit mystery, since the teachers are trying to figure out which of their students is destined to transform into The Malevolence in a few years.
I was not especially impressed with this one. To me, it kind of feels like a cheap knockoff, or an attempt to cash in on the popularity of HP and JKR without investing much effort into making something with any appeal of its own, beyond just reminding you of the other thing. I sort of wished I could've read a better comic with the same characters, like the excellent miniseries that started DC's The Books of Magic in the 90s.
Zatanna is pretty famous for her showgirl costume and the way she uses magic by talking backwards. Her personality here is pretty much just feeling inferior to the other students and frustrated that she can't control her magic yet. We also get underdeveloped teen versions of June Moon / Enchantress and Sargon the Sorcerer, plus a son of supervillain Felix Faust, and healer Pia Morales, who I think is a new character. Mostly they just argue and get crushes on each other - it hardly matters which characters got used in these generic teen drama roles. You could pretty much swap in anyone else and it wouldn't matter.
At one point, the Faust boy accidentally kills Zatanna, but she's resurrected, and literally everyone involved treats this as a totally unremarkable incident, which for me was sort of a breaking point in my ability to take this story at all seriously or invest any concern for the outcome in it. If no one making it cares, why should I?
I had initially hoped for a showcase for the character Rose Psychic, but that got dashed too. She's an older character - she and Dr Richard Occult somehow share one body in the physical world, with the one who's not present appearing as a reflection in the mirror. Usually Dr Occult is the dominant personality, but he can trade places with Rose when needed. (So Dr Occult is not trans, but does kind of feel like a magical analogy for it.) Aside from Rose and Richard squabbling about whether to nurture the kids to be good or kill them all preemptively, neither actually gets much time on-page, and again, they seemed pretty generic. I might be better off trying to track down some of their original comics.
Anyway, if you're really insatiable for magic schools or supernatural teen dramas, you might like this, but otherwise, I don't think it has much to offer.
Mystik U came out in 2018, a couple years before JK Rowling came out as a raging transphobe. It kind of mashes up a Harry Potter setting with CW-style teen superhero drama with a kind of whodunit mystery, since the teachers are trying to figure out which of their students is destined to transform into The Malevolence in a few years.
I was not especially impressed with this one. To me, it kind of feels like a cheap knockoff, or an attempt to cash in on the popularity of HP and JKR without investing much effort into making something with any appeal of its own, beyond just reminding you of the other thing. I sort of wished I could've read a better comic with the same characters, like the excellent miniseries that started DC's The Books of Magic in the 90s.
Zatanna is pretty famous for her showgirl costume and the way she uses magic by talking backwards. Her personality here is pretty much just feeling inferior to the other students and frustrated that she can't control her magic yet. We also get underdeveloped teen versions of June Moon / Enchantress and Sargon the Sorcerer, plus a son of supervillain Felix Faust, and healer Pia Morales, who I think is a new character. Mostly they just argue and get crushes on each other - it hardly matters which characters got used in these generic teen drama roles. You could pretty much swap in anyone else and it wouldn't matter.
At one point, the Faust boy accidentally kills Zatanna, but she's resurrected, and literally everyone involved treats this as a totally unremarkable incident, which for me was sort of a breaking point in my ability to take this story at all seriously or invest any concern for the outcome in it. If no one making it cares, why should I?
I had initially hoped for a showcase for the character Rose Psychic, but that got dashed too. She's an older character - she and Dr Richard Occult somehow share one body in the physical world, with the one who's not present appearing as a reflection in the mirror. Usually Dr Occult is the dominant personality, but he can trade places with Rose when needed. (So Dr Occult is not trans, but does kind of feel like a magical analogy for it.) Aside from Rose and Richard squabbling about whether to nurture the kids to be good or kill them all preemptively, neither actually gets much time on-page, and again, they seemed pretty generic. I might be better off trying to track down some of their original comics.
Anyway, if you're really insatiable for magic schools or supernatural teen dramas, you might like this, but otherwise, I don't think it has much to offer.
No comments:
Post a Comment