Review: Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy trade paperback (Boom/DC Comics)

It’s a shame that inter-company crossovers aren’t quite what they once were, seeming these days more the provenance of video game tie-ins than special superhero mash-ups. In their time, it seemed to me the team-ups of semi-obscure DC characters (at least not first in mind for the cartoon and Underoos set) with characters of other companies spoke particularly well for those DC characters — Azrael/Ash, let’s say, or Ghost/Batgirl (with Cassandra Cain), or SpyBoy/Young Justice.

Much the same with Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy. Given I think we can safely call Gotham Academy a “cult classic” that never quite hit the big time despite running for a collective 30+ issues, that within that time it warranted an inter-company crossover makes that seem worth checking out. Also, as I’ve recently been doing a grand Gotham Academy read-through, it rather seems if I’m going to read Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy, now should be the time.

[Review contains spoilers]

Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy was not, for me, a barn-burner, but I have always acknowledged not being Gotham Academy’s target audience, and likely not Lumberjanes' either. Futher, I purposefully went into the book without knowing anything about the Lumberjanes characters to see how well the book might introduce them to me.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

The answer is not well at all. I wasn’t sure if a Lumberjanes character throwing a couch was super-strength or just storytelling zaniness, though equally on the other side neither does writer Chynna Clugston Flores explain to uninformed readers how Olive Silverlock stokes a fire with her mind late in the book. Still, Flores demonstrates enough detailed knowledge about the Gotham Academy characters that I can only assume the Lumberjanes characters are equally taken care of. In all the crossover is probably best suited to readers already familiar with both properties.

I was also interested to see one of the few instances of the Gotham Academy characters not written by at least one of series creators Brenden Fletcher, Becky Cloonan, and Karl Kerschl. On that point, again, Flores acquits herself fine. There’s a moment early in the book where Olive faces off against some menacing specters where I expected her to use her fire powers and she didn’t, and that lead me to wonder what had been revealed about Olive at the time Flores was plotting the issues, vs. later when Olive does use her powers. References to the kids stealing Headmaster Hammer’s car or the school dance where Olive ditched Kyle make this feel of a piece with Gotham Academy; if there were similar references to actual events in Lumberjanes, they went over my head.

Flores' character that seemed most unlike herself was Maps Mizoguchi, who at one point seems to have to be pepping herself up for action, not the usual boisterous Maps. On the other hand, Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy is a rare opportunity for Kyle Mizoguchi to save the day, offering some cogent words of wisdom and talking down the bad guy instead of fading into the background as usual.

Among the book’s awkward spots are that it turns on two of the series' adults being kidnapped, Gotham Academy’s Professor Isla MacPherson and Lumberjanes' camp director Rosie. We see Rosie but never see MacPherson in the book, until later on when Olive and Lumberjanes' Jen stumble upon two prisoners, one with MacPherson’s trademark brogue and one wearing Rosie’s cat eye glasses.

There’s a big to-do later over the fact that Olive and Jen didn’t recognize MacPherson and Rosie because they’d been de-aged, but it falls flat given that Rosie looks entirely the same and we never saw MacPherson before this under these artists' pens. The whole thing — the audience not having enough information to realize something’s wrong, the characters being excessively slow to understand what the audience already does — makes the book’s middle part unnecessarily confusing.

Artist Rosemary Valero-O’Connell does well in the book’s beginning, with a particularly on-character rendition of Headmaster Hammer. The book is mostly set among Lumberjanes Crumpet’s Camp, so the fact that the whole thing is more Sunday comics cartoony than Gotham Academy’s Disney animation aesthetics doesn’t feel as glaring. Though I thought the book’s finale was as fine as the rest, it perhaps does not help the suspense and drama in general that the later artists drop backgrounds from many of the scenes and offer altogether less detail than the earlier chapters.

Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy is not essential to your Gotham Academy reading; it references events from the series (generally between the end of the first series and the start of Gotham Academy: Second Semester), but Gotham Academy never acknowledges it. It’s entertaining reading — I like that the solution comes in the form of a 1980s-themed birthday party, verily like a 1980s movie itself, and also thumbs up to BOOM! Studios for bumping all the covers to the back and printing this like a graphic novel — though distinctly light fare, for however that sits with you. I might have liked a little more mix-and-match between the two sets of characters, which we don’t really get.

[Includes original and variant covers, recommended playlist]

Rating 2.0