Review: "Morning Glories Vol 1 & 2"

Morning Glories Vol 1 & 2
words by Nick Spencer
pictures by Joe Eisma
covers by Rodin Esquejo
2.75 out of 5 stars combined

I'm not sure where I first heard of this series but I have been wanting to read them for probably a year or more. I got lucky at Half Price recently and found the first two volumes, so I decided to give them a shot. And...I'm not sure about them yet. There are some things I really liked and then some things I pretty much hated. I ordered the next two volumes on Amazon yesterday though and am going to give them another chance. Actually, I went graphic novel crazy yesterday :) so I'll probably have another haul post up again when they all arrive.

Okay, so let's start off with a brief summary and then move on to the good and bad. Morning Glory Academy is a fancy pants boarding school that handpicks its students using a strange and mysterious criteria. Six new students arrive at the school for the new year (or maybe in the middle of the year? not sure) and are immediately thrown into some crazy and dangerous situations. And by "dangerous" I mean people dying in the first few pages. Graphically. So this series is not for the faint of heart. Or those annoyed by mysteries within mysteries within mysteries. Because there are lots of those too.

I've seen many reviews refer to it as a twist on the TV series LOST and I'll just have to take their word for it, because I've never seen a single episode. But I know enough that it has those same twisty mysteries that hardly ever get solved and I really hope that MG doesn't end up like that, because that's one of the things I didn't like. I would like to have some explanation, eventually, of why there are weird bald, ghost girls wandering around the basement and what the spinning sphere thing is and what the kids have to do with all of this.

The second thing I wasn't crazy about was the artwork, or more specifically, how the teenagers are drawn. And getting down into the minutia, the teenage girls. They wear school uniforms, which is fine, but there are lots of heaving bosoms straining the buttons of their shirts and waaaaay above dress-code short skirts. Is that really necessary, especially for a series geared towards teens/young adults? It was difficult at times to tell who was a teen and who was an adult, other than the uniforms.

Volume 2 was a smidge better, in my opinion. We get some background on each of the six new students (one story per chapter/issue) and it was really interesting to see where the kids were coming from. There were still some mysteries thrown in from the present day, which was frustrating, but for now I am going to trust that the author knows what he is doing and wait anxiously for my next books to arrive.