Adolescence is often a time of tremendous turmoil for most teens. Often it seems no one understands them, and they are forced to attend school and take courses most see no point in. Even worse are the students and teachers who do their absolute best to squelch any signs of individuality and creativity, seeing it as an affront to their own attempts to control their environment. No doubt this is one reason why high school is a popular subject for a number of webcomics. The problem with this lays with the fact these comics risk being lost in the sea of comics likewise set in a high school setting.

Muse Academy was brought to my attention in my seldom-read suggestions forum thread at a time when my own muses were playing hard-to-get. And while the comic has an unfortunate tendency to use exposition to explain key background elements (rather than show these elements), the fact that the comic not only had the Greek Muses in it but also mentioned the poet Sappho, attributed by some philosophers and scholars as the thirteenth muse, as the inspiration for the Muse Academy had me quickly hooked. I mean, any school that caters to the education of young Muses definitely sounds intriguing.

In many ways, MA is your typical high school webcomic. Charlie Fairfax (our young poetic protagonist) is the odd duck out in a family that Hitler would have considered the genetic foundation of the ideal Aryan. Not that her family’s evil or anything… but they’re all business entrepreneurs (with the exception of Charlie’s youngest sister who’s too young yet to have cornered the newspaper delivery market, but give her time!) and can’t comprehend a young lady who isn’t perfect and who loves music, poetry, and the classics instead of finance books. Nor is the Academy necessarily all love and roses. While she may very well learn that which she loves… fitting in as the only mortal in a school of immortals will prove difficult. But it’s these differences that help MA stand out from the pack of high school comics; these differences make it well worth reading, as does the creativity visible behind the pen.