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Preface
It’s our first official day at Ranger Academy!
And, like any first day at a new school, of course, this will involve the usual anxiety, already being behind your fellow students and giant floating heads.
The Cover
So, this series will have this consistent design choice of having a lightning bolt going down to the right corner to show two different scenes. This was present on the first cover, but I honestly didn’t recognize it because the colors and lighting for both blended in so well with each other. Here we see Sage meeting the Headmaster and then going off to do her first day of Ranger training.
In short, I like it. I feel like this is a good way of showing off exactly what the issue is about while showing more interesting stuff for what should be a low-key series.
The Story
Sage puts on her Ranger Academy uniform for the very first time before Mathis gives her a brief tour, telling her about what first years’ schedules are like as they go over the fake backstory to give the Headmaster. The Headmaster, who is just another floating head in a tube, accepts Sage’s story of her aunt giving permission to Mathis and Tula before telling her that she’ll have to work hard to catch up to everyone.
So, now that Sage is officially enrolled, she has the most difficult assignment of them all: surviving high school.
Since Mathis is a third-year, that means that Sage is all alone. And she’s not having a good time on her own. She is struggling in her classes. She’s not the best at making friends. She discovers the sad fact that cadets have actually died at the Academy. And, most importantly, she misses her dad and her home where everything felt safe, being plagued by nightmares.
Eventually, it all boils to the point where she breaks down, crying as she runs right out of class. However, two other first-year students, Lindy and Theo, ditch their classes as well and help cheer her up by taking her to a secret swimming spot. It’s there that she realizes that she finally has real friends.
The next day, Sage finds the school’s library being run by their head archivist, Nika. After Sage briefly tells her story to him, he offers to help her, starting with a lesson of the Ranger Academy itself. But, she soon finds an image of her dad as a cadet at the academy. Before she can dive any further, she’s called away to dinner as she joins her new friends, trying ice cream for the very first time.
However, what Sage didn’t notice in that image was a younger version of Nika. Who, after commenting to himself that Sage is ‘so grown up’ now, he receives a call from Rhianth, demanding to know where his daughter is.
Ending Thoughts
We’re practically hitting the checkboxes for ‘magic boarding school’ tropes, aren’t we? A new kid gets pranked, feels alone before making friends, finds a secret part of the school, is part of a big mystery that they don’t even know of…
However, at the same time, the pacing of the issue helps with that. You see, the pacing of this issue is fast, super-fast. As our full introduction to Ranger Academy, figuring out the classes and the structure, we don’t have a lot of time to really indulge ourselves and soak in the interesting environment. We don’t get a lot of time to really have fun with the school. But, it feels like the comic knows it has to hit these tropes so it can move on to something better. So, it hits it as fast as it can, settling Sage into her new environment.
Speaking of Sage, the pacing also helps the readers sympathize with her.
Sage is someone who wants something out of her life but doesn’t really know what. Just that she wants to leave her home and to do this, she ‘escapes’ to Ranger Academy. But, she finds it stressful being thrown into this new environment with not a lot of guidance and everyone expecting her to catch up. Having a lot of new info being brought her way when she doesn’t have the time to really figure out how to do it. There are panels spliced in here and there of these green flashes, showing moments that aren’t fully explained, some of them act as dreams, but others act like memories. It adds more to her anxiety and turmoil as we don’t fully know what this means, just letting us be just as confused as Sage is. The art for this really helps sell her emotional state, showing her as alone and confused cleverly before the comic settles in and gives her the friends she’ll need before becoming a Ranger.
Ranger Academy #2 is a fast-paced introduction to Sage’s beginnings at Ranger Academy, cleverly showing her anxiety and fears while introducing some new mysteries and friends along the way.
Random Thoughts from the Morphin’ Grid
- Let me make this clear. I think the teachers here aren’t any Rangers that we know of. Fairly certain about that.
- I don’t have any real opinion on Lindy and Theo yet. They’re good people, but just nothing too unique or interesting about them.
- Alright, I get Ranger classes for rock climbing, chemistry, hostage negotiation, CPR, and star travel. Those I get. Making a tent for camping is where I draw the line. When will that ever come up for Ranger-ing?
- This secret swimming pool that these kids use has to give secret superpowers or something. Because, if it’s at the core of the asteroid where all of the Morphin’ energy is, there’s no way swimming it won’t do anything else to them.
- Cool that the library is named after Jen.
- Zordon founded this academy… When? When did he have time to make this academy a thing?!
