Secret Hero Society Gets Trapped in Detention of Doom

Derek Fridolfs and Dustin Nguyen continue the SECRET HERO SOCIETY series that casts all your favorite DC Comics characters as middle school students. Told from the perspective of a cynical Bruce Wayne via notes, diagrams, text message continuity, and standard comic book style panels, DETENTION OF DOOM kicks things off with a handful of your heroic students getting academic awards from the Luthor foundation. Clark gets a unique looking trophy for bravery, while Bruce gets a medal for participation. (Other students can be seen in the program, including Guy Gardner for Debate and Dinah Lance for Musical Achievement.)

Almost immediately after the ceremony, however, Clark activates a hidden button on his trophy and disappears, leaving his friends to begin the search for his whereabouts. This leads Bruce, Diana, Oliver, Barry and Victor into the Phantom Detention Zone, where their powers no longer work and where they encounter soul-sucking phantoms and "bizarre" duplicates of themselves as they search for Clark.

While I like Dustin Nguyen's art style, the pencils-only look when published loses a lot of contrast provided in an inked drawing. As a result, I sometimes could not tell which character was supposed to be represented in an image. Storywise, the adventure was fun and filled with many humorous moments, but also had more than its share of deus ex machine moments to save the heroes when things got too dire.

Despite these particular flaws, I very much like the Secret Hero Society series from Scholastic, and gladly put it alongside other such efforts, like Yale Stewart's JL8 webcomic.