Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors #2 – Review

By: Mark Andrew Smith (writer), Armand Villavert (art), Carlos Carrasco & Andre Poulain (colors) & Thomas Mauer (letters)

The Story: Young super-villains continue their training, but the battle they are preparing for is not what it seems!

What’s Good: This comic is just all kinds of fresh.  Because of the art (both linework and colors), these 10-year-old super-villains don’t come off as brooding proto-monsters, but as rascally kids…and that makes all the difference in how this comic is perceived.  Even if they are kinda on the bad-guys side, they’re just so darn earnest and cute!  They attack their school lessons with gusto: taking down summoned sparring partners in the gym or mixing up monsters in a Hogwarts-style potions class.  And when they gather around the live TV coverage of a superhero vs. super villain battle, you’d think they were kids watching a WWE Pay Per View.

So much of this comic is just watching kids having fun and being larger than life.  Only the most black-hearted among us can fail to enjoy that!

What’s ironic about the enthusiasm for their studies that the young villains is that while the kids think they are being prepped to join the larger hero vs. villain battle… The events outside the school are not what they seem.  That will clearly be one of the central stories for the early parts of this series.

As mentioned above, the art really makes this comic.  Flat(ish) colors just kick all kinds of ass and it’s this type of coloring that makes this comic leap out at you from across the room.  And most of the colors are just bright and powerful reds, greens, yellows, etc.  Mix this together with very impish art and you’ve got a very fun book that is quite visually distinctive.