Review by Frank Plowright

Freaks’ Squeele concerns a school for superheroes, but differentiating it from the X-Men is a supernatural background. While the teachers might have the students’ best interests at heart, the head teacher’s primary concerns are money and publicity.

Strange University opened with promise, being creatively character led, and amusing, but devolved into self-indulgence with a prolonged action scene taking up so much of the remainder. Self-indulgence remains part of Florent Maudoux’s approach, but more controlled and plot-driven here, manifesting in wild turns such as a brief flashback to Wolf Shadow’s time with military special forces. He, Chance and Xiong continue to provide the focus, the book’s early part explaining a need for new accommodation and where the trio end up.

Maudoux concentrates on school activities here, with the entire class set an assignment of providing a plan for global domination, and his art continues to be a character-rich mixture of both European and Japanese influences. A desire to pack in as much as possible leads to messy looking pages, but the art within each panel is solid and detailed. While sometimes resorting to extreme manga style of exaggeration, particularly with Chance wearing her heart on her sleeve, Maudoux also has a dry sense of humour enabling jokes to be passed off without being oversold. It works well with a character named Funeral, about whom some surprising revelations await.

It’s a long time before the puzzling title is explained, preceded by an imaginative library search the like of which you’ve never seen. Maudoux has a constantly shifting set of priorities, with the assignment plot a guiding line through them, his attention drawn in different directions, and the overall structure enabling that. We see an armoured knight from times of old, if somewhat confused and their appearance eventually prompts this volume’s leap into colour for a brilliantly ridiculous new plot.

What anyone surely wants from action comics is a stream of unpredictability, and Maudoux’s conceptual imagination keeps throwing in idea after idea, so many that he’s often uncertain which to prioritise. Mix that with a generally good-natured approach and it seems the first volume wrinkles have been ironed out and Freaks Squeele is in a stronger place going forward.