Zatanna goes to college in new DC Comics prestige series MYSTIK U

Today, DC Comics announced a new prestige three-issue bimonthly limited series called Mystik U. In a clear and brazen attempt to play to my biases, this prestige comic tells the story of a group of fashionable teenage magicians who discover the extent of their fantastic powers while redefining themselves as newly minted adults.

Mystik U re-envisions classic characters including Zatanna, Sebastian Faust, Sargon the Sorceror, and Enchantress, along with new character Pia Morales as young adults who have only recently discovered that they have the ability to perform magic. They end up attending a university that series artist Mike Norton characterizes as being for “the magically gifted, where the world’s most powerful practitioners of magic will mentor their fledgling talents…and try to discover which of them is fated to betray the others and become a powerful force of evil.”

While Mystik U will clearly focus on magic, writer Alisa Kwitney noted that the series is also character-focused. In an interview about the series, she said:

The first year of college is a kind of theater where people improvise themselves—sometimes they change their names, and they might adopt a whole new way of dressing along with a new passion. It’s also a place where you might discover that, after years of being on the bottom of the food chain in high school, there are people who recognize your talents. But the opposite can also occur—you realize that you’re no longer the best in the class at something. Mystik U is very much a story of freshman orientation for Zatanna and the others, but on magickal steroids.

Kwitney has had a long career in both novels and comics. Over the years, she’s occasionally worked with DC on Sandman-related projects such as The Dreaming: Beyond the Shores of Night, Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold, and Sandman: King of Dreams. This will be her first writing credit through the publisher since her 2015 Batgirl comic, “The Love Song of Stephanie Brown,” which was released as part of the Convergence event.

Norton is best known as the artist on Revival, an image series he works on alongside writer Tim Seeley. Norton also won an Eisner Award for his webcomic, Battlepug. What strikes me most about his initial artwork for Mystik U is his penchant for captivating and fashionable character designs.

Mystik U #1 releases on November 29th. DC’s website has additional information on the series and a look at more interior pages.