Review: Pantheon High 1
originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]
Review: Pantheon High, vol. 1
Published by: Tokyopop
Writer: Paul Benjamin
Artists: Steven and Megumi Cummings
192 (160) pages.
Original Language: English
Orientation: Left to right
Vintage: February 2007
Lettering: Lucas Rivera
Cover Art: Steven Cummings
Cover Design: Fawn Lau
Editor: Paul Morrissey
Publisher’s Rating: Older Teen, 16+
Rating: 4 out of 5
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Premise: Demigods face all kinds of challenges. At Pantheon High, the half-mortal, half-divine offspring of all your favourite dusty mythological powers get an education and learn invaluable social skills, though a few bad apples might occasionally attempt to upset the entire natural order and abrogate undue unholy powers upon themselves… Bad Kids! [*wrist slap*] Detention for you!
Synopsis:
…actually, I think the ‘premise’ blurb just about covers it. And a lot of the fun of this one is figuring out just who you’re dealing with (and how their parents’ baileywicks translate into high school, as seen through the filter of the representative scions).
Let’s just say that 4 baddies (daughters of Kronos and Loki, and sons of Set and Susano) are making their play, and while it seems like more-or-less innocent pranking to begin with, things soon get deadly serious.
So it is up to our heroes — one descendant each from the Greek, Egyptian, Norse, and Japanese pantheons — to work together and thwart the evil scheme. Good triumphs over evil, duh, but there are sacrifices, transformations, and inevitable fan service to consider before we get to a more or less happy ending.
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Review:
It’s the side jokes that make this one so much fun, from Principal Prometheus & Hercules as a Gym Coach, to “Hall Monitor” Heimdahl (I may be one of just three or four people on this continent who laughed out loud at that last one)
Even if it’s all Greek (Norse, Egyptian, Japanese) to you, I think you’re going to like this book. Enough explanation is given, in context and as needed, and a fair amount of familiar myth (Greek and Norse) is applied for the important story points. And even if you strip all that away, there is still the underlying plot, where superpowered high school students save the world — That’s one part of this story that I know you’ll get.
The book also comes with a whole mess of end notes, which I doubt anyone will reference as they read (at least the first time) though like many other “translation” notes, it’s a handy coda to explain a few fine points you may have glossed over on a first read. The extras also include a ten-page preview of Volume 2, which ably shows that this isn’t just a one-off gimmick, and that the writers have deeper plans for both these characters and this concept.
Good show all around. 4 marks out of 5.
