Ah, high school. No matter how old we get, there’s always a little part of ourselves that still remembers how we felt over those four years. Whether your experience was closer to Dawson’s Creek or Carrie, most likely, as a gay man or woman, you wish you could do it over again in a more accepting world…preferably with amazing powers.

I definitely would!

And that’s the most appealing thing to me about Pride High #1 (aside from all the cool superhero-y stuff): the idea of a group of gay and gay-friendly teens banded together at a superpowered high school. You know, like Charles Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters, but this time, Wolverine is doing Colossus.

For me (and all apologies to the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, etc.), but the X-Men will always be the comic gold standard when it comes to teams of characters you actually care about. Even though it’s got a long way to go before it reaches those X-alted levels, Pride High succeeds in appealing to a broad spectrum. The characters are a wide cross-section of sexualities, abilities and ethnicities (hey, it worked for Captain Planet) and it’s easy to picture growing to love the characters over the run of the entire series.

You’ve got blind lesbian Suravi, who’s channeling the whole Storm-peaceful-warrior vibe; Scotch Bonnet doing it up Rachel Summers-meets-Banshee-style; Kid Mischief, Changeling and Nightcrawler’s sexy lovechild who looks good in a jockstrap; and Mindsweeper, the handsome leader who’s like the sexy version of Professor X. There’s some Eurotrash cheetah dude, too. Oh, and extra points to the creators for preventing Scotch’s Scottish accent from being the torment that reading Dr. Moira MacTaggert’s always was…just thinking about it is making me angry…(and you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…)

Anyway, the first issue does the job of introducing everyone in a very quick and clever way—the students are returning to Poseidon Prep for Heroic Youth, and are given the year-long challenge of competing to be the best team-of-five in the school.

Of course, there are villains (the cute but bullying Argonauts), but they’re given more depth than the usual one-note offerings. Kid Olympus, the leader of the Argonauts, even has a cool, complex Hawaiian chick as his girlfriend. We haven’t met her all-Hawaiian superhero squad yet (what a lei-tastic idea, by the way), but that’s something I’m looking forward to. Plus, I’m a fan of anything where a main character is named Beowulf. It might have been cool to give the villains a greater variety of superpowers rather than super-strength (and super-snobbery), but we’ll see where that goes.

A series lives or dies by its characters, and the Pride High kids are ones I’d like to spend as much time with as possible. I’m not usually a fan of the leader characters (sorry Cyclops), but Mindsweeper won me over by managing to be wise and NOT annoying. His romance with Kid Mischief made me smile. As someone way past high school age, I like the book now, but if I were actually IN high school, this would be something I’d be thrilled to read.

As with any new series, there are a few kinks that’ll have to be ironed out. Throughout the book, some of the slang native to each kid’s country is defined at the bottom of the page. Sometimes this is helpful (now I now what a “Johnny-no-star” is or what “Crivens!” means), but some of it is a little redundant. Does anyone really need, “This is going to be brilliant!” translated into “This is going to be fabulous!”? Still, the slang is a cool touch to remind the reader that these kids come from all over the world. That inclusiveness goes a long way.

Poseidon Prep seems to be a fertile ground for lots of stories to come, as evidenced by the ad in the book for “The Dropouts,” a series about the kids who don’t make the grade. It’s a testament to the richness of the comic’s concept that I’m eager to read both series, and that I found myself looking at the background characters, wondering what their names were or what their powers were (especially one girl who seems to be wearing a nun’s habit with white go-go boots…now there’s a spin-off I would buy faithfully).

Overall, I really dug the book. The pro-gay stuff feels very natural and it’s nice to read something where being gay isn’t the sum total of what a character is. The Kid Mischief/Mindsweep romance was fun, sexy and playful, and the story ends on a good cliffhanger-y moment.

Can the creators sustain such a good idea? I’m hoping so. I may not be able to redo my high school experience as a hot, openly gay superhero (at least not yet), but I’m thoroughly enjoying the experiences of Pride High.

I highly recommend it.

Editor's note: Buy this comic here or ask for it at your local comics shop.

Jonathan Riggs, Senior Associate Editor of Instinct magazine, owes his love of comic books to Erica Ann Neyer, who got him hooked on X-Men comics in elementary school. He would like to attend Pride High.

All images and characters TM and © 2006 Pride Comics. Review © 2006 Jonathan Riggs.

Prism Comics promotes the works of the LGBT community in comics. It does not implicitly endorse any other material or products associated with those works. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s).