I have mixed feelings.
I wanted a snazzier intro than that, but as I’ve learned time and time again (most recently, this week) you can’t always get what you want. When Mystik U— helmed by celebrated romance author Alisa Kwitney and Revival artist Mike Norton, with stunning colours by The Nameless City’s Jordie Bellaire— was announced as an official go last year, I was ecstatic. Both Norton and Bellaire are Eisner award winners.
Zatanna Zatara is one of my underrated favs— the fact that she was set up to be the lead of her own prestige-format limited series had me over-the-moon. Like, I was literally sold with just her involvement. Add in a magical university setting, a book that’s mainly targeted at a YA audience, and a boatload of underused DC characters, and this sounds like my dream.
I was finally able to get my hands on the completed trade just this week, and devoured it in one sitting. While my expectations weren’t met, there are a lot of good things about Mystik U, and I’m going to go through them all right now and give credit where credit’s due.
More than half of Mystik U’s appeal can be credited to Norton and Bellaire, who work together as seamlessly as Mr. Incredible and Frozone. Norton’s art, clean and modern, demands attention, and Bellaire’s colours make every page pop.
In Mystik U, we do indeed follow Mistress of Magic, Zatanna. If you’re unfamiliar with her, the most important thing to know is: when she speaks backwards, magic happens. Mystik U takes a slightly different approach with Z, for after a terrifying prologue that’s set a year in the future (on the heels of an evil force called The Malevolence’s apocalyptic reign), we’re sent backwards in time so that the year can be repeated, The Malevolence stopped in its tracks. But at the beginning of that year, the Mistress of Magic is, well, not.
Whaaaaaat?! Yes, that’s right. Mystik U starts off with Zatanna not knowing about her powers, or even how to control them. Like Harry Potter, sort of. Not really.
Anyway. After Zatanna overhears her father lamenting over her lack of magical gifts, she goes off-script during a show, and accidentally sends him to lleh! The audience eats it up. Shocked and horrified, Zatanna runs offstage, trying to fix her mindless teenage rebellion, when she’s greeted by Rose Psychic, acting headmistress of Mystik U (it gets weirder). Since the clock is ticking on The Malevolence, and Rose remembers everything, she promises Zatanna her father will be alright, and entreats her to enroll at Mystik U to learn to control her powers. Alone but intrigued, Zatanna agrees, and after hopping through a magic portal, well, class is officially in session.
Pretty early on in the book, Zatanna links up with what will be her core friend group throughout the story: her roomies, June Moone and Pia Morales (new creation of Kwitney and Norton), friendly sorcerer Davit Sargon (whose mother, in her brief time on the page, should adopt me and make me food forever), and broody bad boy Sebastian Faust.
Their friend group is solid, if a little cliche— okay, a lot cliche, but like, I waited for this— as they struggle to balance learning the fine art of magick and the typical university fare: awkward crushes, silly fights, and a hive-minded sorority led by a trio of mean girls.
I highly recommend Mystik U if you don’t know anything about any of these characters, or you’ve never read a comic book before and want to give it a tentative try instead of diving right in. It’s fast, it’s cheesy, and it’s gorgeous. It’s a totally sweet way to interact with the DC universe for the first time, especially if Hogwarts-lite (extremely lite) piques your interest.
But if you know and love Zatanna, or any of these other characters, this might not be your thing. It wasn’t mine, and I have to admit, despite the good things about Mystik U, after reading it, I immediately tossed it into my donation box, because I knew I’d never feel the urge to pick it up again. The short explanation for why I didn’t like Mystik U is that it’s all style, no substance. Like biting into a sandwich someone promised you would be the best of your life, only to find the only ingredient used was bread. But the pictures look great!
This next part contains spoilers, so if you’d rather skip it and see what all the fuss is about by ordering your own copy of Mystik U, I hear you! The recipe is at the bottom of the page, so feel free to scroll down just for that!
For those of you who are still here, the spoilers start now:
I spent most of my time while reading Mystik U trying to convince myself I was enjoying it. The plot screamed of awesomeness, and I wanted to love this, which may be why it all fell apart so sharply. Here’s my checklist of what I expected when I picked up this book:
✓ GOOD CONCEPT
x STRONG EXECUTION
x COHESIVE NARRATIVE
x FUN
x STRONG DIALOGUE (PLEASE SOUND LIKE REAL PEOPLE WHEN SPEAKING/THINKING)
x SERIOUSLY I WANT THIS TO BE MAGICAL BUT ALSO MAKE SENSE
x BALANCE BETWEEN MAGIC AND UNIVERSITY SHENANIGANS, BUT MOSTLY MAGIC IF WE’RE BEING HONEST.
x I GUESS IT’S FINE IF NOTHING ELSE IS GOOD AS LONG AS ZATANNA IS COOL.
Well. At least the plot was good. Let’s go through my list of complaints, briefly, because I have time today:
I was hyped for this plot, but almost right away, the execution was sloppy. The writing was all over the place, and the balance between magic-centric DC comic and feel-good university contemporary was nonexistent. We got a lot of largely irrelevant classroom scenes and a lot of cringey, intrapersonal angst, and not much else.
The dialogue read like bad fanfiction and contributed to the “this is all over the place” feeling I had toward the narrative, which bounced jarringly from unfunny student bonding scenes to tense faculty arguing scenes to something slightly relevant to the plot, never to be mentioned again, rinse and repeat. If I wasn’t bored out of my skull, I was confused by things like: if Zatanna was technically dead, how could Pia sign away one-sixth of her life to Nebiros, thus bringing her back to life? She was technically already dead, and Google doesn’t have answers. How does she have any life left to live/trade with a demon? D E A D. Also, where the f*ck was Constantine? Zatanna mentions him at the beginning, looking for him during The Malevolence’s reign, but he literally never shows up. WHY? I wanted a Z/C team-up. I needed it. They’re both awesome and … well, actually, Zatanna wasn’t her usual kickass self, so maybe it’s good Constantine was spared.
While I understood the characters have been modified for a new audience, Zatanna felt like a cheap, watered-down copy of herself; horribly unsympathetic towards others while simultaneously wringing sympathy from her new friends. It’s understandable that she’d be frustrated with her inability to master her new powers, but she’s kind of a twat. There’s literally a scene where, after fighting with Sebastian, she learns that he accidentally murdered his mother. She immediately decides to apologize (yay for personal responsibility!), goes to find him, and all of a sudden, we’re slammed into the middle of an aggressively bad “seduction” scene in which she tells him he likes her, and asks what his problem is (probably expecting to be bent over the pool table at the end of the whole conversation, because legendary, amirite?)
What. The. F*ck.
No, seriously, what did I just read? She didn’t apologize for being awful to him (given that she accidentally sent her father to hell, you’d think she’d be a little more understanding) and basically bullied him into admitting his feelings for her. When he snaps at her, she storms back to her dorm and kvetches about the male species.
Excuse me, body-snatcher, but I will dump a whole vat of Holy Water on you if you don’t give me back the real Zatanna Zatara, this instant.
When she wasn’t being a complete idiot, she was crying, pouting, and complaining about how much easier everything is for everyone else. A perpetual victim. The few instances she did use her powers were either courtesy of an alcohol-like substance or completely random, given her (seeming) ineptitude with them. For a series sold with her as the focal point, she really functioned like an annoying side character taking up too much of the plot with her drama. Again Zatanna is usually one of my favourites. I gave her more wiggle room than anyone else in this book. I grew to hate Kwitney’s version of her, so that’s annoying.
June was really just the inconsequential other half of Enchantress, who, most of the time, treated Davit like a loyal pet and sex toy, not an actual human she cared about. Davit was simperingly nice. I was really hoping he’d tell June/Enchantress off, but it’s looking like he’s stuck with her until she decides they’re done. Pia started off kind of Mary Sue-ish, but eventually grew to be sanctimonious (I did like her friendship with Plop), and Sebastian was the most cliched thing about a book full of cliches (an Albus Dumbledore, Rose is not). Zatanna was still the worst crime, though. What a selfish brat.
Lastly, the resolution was awful, predictable, and lame. Nothing about this was creepy or enchanting, just mediocre on all fronts, except the art and colours, which blew my mind.
I think Mystik U would make a fun Netflix series, and I hope the next person who reads my donated copy truly loves it, but I just didn’t.
Anyway. It is uncomfortably hot where I am, so this week’s recipe is a pomegranate lemon slushie.
Thanks to Amelia over at Eating Made Easy.
Have you read Mystik U? What did you think?
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