Gotham High
Written by Melissa de la Cruz
Art by Thomas Pitilli and Miquel Muerto
Lettering by Troy Peteri
Published by DC
‘Rama Rating: 8 out of 10
Gotham High is a solid high school riff on the long history of the Batman canon, nailing a Riverdale-adjacent tone that plays perhaps even more naturally with Gotham City than it does with Archie Comics. There have been a handful of YA-oriented origin stories from DC in the last year and a half, but the Gotham High team dive into this world gleefully embracing what makes all the best alternate universe stories so great. This isn’t the tale of Bruce Wayne or Selina Kyle before the masks – this is Gotham without masks entirely, taking these lasting archetypes and dropping them into something brand new and familiar all at once.
Penned by writer Melissa de la Cruz with art by Thomas Pitilli (a Riverdale comics alumnus), Gotham High tells the story of a young Bruce Wayne who finds himself Cady Heron’d into a Gotham public school after a fistfight with some bullies gets him expelled from Arkham Preparatory School for Boys. At Gotham High, young Bruce finds himself befriended by a hall-of-fame lineup of Batman staple characters, and unsurprisingly, finds his wealth a prime target for Gotham High’s ambitious criminal elements. There are no superpowered masterminds or supernatural twists to this book. Instead, Gotham High is a YA heist story on a Gossip Girl scale, which is a huge part of what makes it so delightfully engaging.
The freedom of diving into a media franchise and writing whatever alternate universe you want is that the pressure of having to write the next Batman magnum opus is stripped away – a show like Riverdale doesn’t exist to be the definitive take on Archie Comics, and in that similar vein, Gotham High exists to give you a chance to see familiar faces in situations so mundane that they circle back around to being utterly bizarre in their own way. It’s super-fun to read, mostly because de la Cruz, Pitilli, and colorist Miquel Muerto have an uncanny knack for landing on precisely the right tweaks of Gotham staples for a world like this. A card shark! The principal’s kid! An incredible twist involving a luchador’s mask! Suddenly Alfred is Bruce’s extremely handsome uncle! Within the confines of the universe the Gotham team has created, it all tracks exactly. To be honest – it rules.
In as much as there are weak points, though, they are usually the ones that thematically adjacent franchises often share, which is more an underlying issue with the YA genre than it is anything specific about the creative team’s technical skill. This is ostensibly a graphic novel about teenagers – on DC’s website, Bruce is specifically referred to as a 16-year-old – but it feels, not exactly dated, but older than the target audience. If somehow Gotham High got a television adaptation, this would be a CW show with early-20s actors playing high school sophomores.
Pitilli’s art doesn’t necessarily make these characters feel that old, though if this had been called Gotham University and they were all college freshman, it would have tracked fine for me; the designs and poppy colors from Miquel Muerto on the fashion make the students of Gotham look like extremely trendy teens. (Speaking of the fashions – the pattern mixing with Selina’s wardrobe and Ivy’s entire aesthetic are impeccable choices for this book, linework and colorwise.) De la Cruz keeps the dialogue fairly timeless, avoiding the struggle of adults attempting teen slang that can plague some younger reader-oriented books, but the nature of the content just makes it easy to forget the book is about… high school sophmores, in a very Gossip Girl way.
It is, again, just the nature of the genre – are you writing something for a teen-and-up audience set in a high school, or a young reader book about high schoolers? If you’re itching for something that feels a bit younger, Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo’s Teen Titan books might be a solid alternative, or Sarah Kuhn, Nicole Goux, and Cris Peter’s stellar Shadow of the Batgirl. That’s not to take away from Gotham High which is a genuinely fun read, however – I powered through this in one sitting an had an absolute blast, and would read just about any high school/college-aged DC lineup by this team in the future.