Morning Glories #19

Written by Nick Spencer
Art by Joe Eisma

I don't understand why I don't hear a lot more buzz for this comic.  Nick Spencer's story, complex and secretive as it is, is very exciting.  This issue picks up on the events of a few months back.  The students of Morning Glory Academy have been participating in Woodrun, a kind of cross between a scavenger hunt and Capture the Flag. 

Hunter, the nice kid and sort of secondary point-of-view character for this series has been partnered with Zoe.  They were actually talking to each other a little, but then Zoe suddenly killed a girl that had been talking to Hunter.  Now she's chasing him, and he doesn't really know what's going on.

While he's running, the audience is given a series of flashbacks to Hunter's life before coming to the school.  We learn that his mother is in the hospital with a terminal illness, and that she is pressuring him to apply to MGA.  The scenes between them are touching, and also suggestive of the idea that Hunter's mom knows something about how the school operates, since she is certain that he'd be accepted, despite his average grades and test scores.

The story notes of this issue are all a little predictable (except for Hunter's weird inability to tell time - that's just odd), but Spencer and Eisma handle them with enough sensitivity to make them work very well.  The last couple of pages, once again, raise a bunch of questions, but that's just become par for the course with this series.  That's a big part of the draw for me, really.