So, Gotham Academy is a batman spin-off comic starring Olive Silverlock, teenaged daughter of imprisoned supervillainess Calamity and student at the prestigious private Gotham Academy, via the patronage of philanthropist playboy Bruce Wayne. Struggling with depression and paranoia after Arkham Asylum collapsed over the summer, putting her mother Sybil into a persistant vegetative state, Olive is going to have to face her phobia of bats, reconcile the loving and gentle mother she remembers with the sadistic firestarter Calamity, and uncover secrets hidden in the walls of Gotham Academy. There are strong themes of mental illness and the stigma around it as well as hints of the sort of medical abuse that goes on in a place like Arkham, where the inmates are genuinely dangerous but the environment is also genuinely not a rehabilitative one. Olive is a mentally ill person herself, and the narratives of 'dangerous mental illness' is played with and subverted, as Spoiler Calamity is strongly implied to be a spirit haunting the Silverlock family and not any sort of split personality, but since so many Silverlocks have taken the moniker Calamity and tried to burn down Gotham in revenge for some mysterious wrong, it's very hard for Olive to get adult help for her problem without people assuming that she's going to 'go bad', too. There are only 18 issues in the comic proper and 3 issues of a 6-issue crossover with Lumberjanes so far, but it's all really fantastic. There's a diverse cast, complex issues, strong character writing, and a very interesting main plot.
And now some speculation for caught-up readers. Spoiler I think Calamity might be Millie Jane Cobblepot, or at least connected with her. Her diary shows up so much, and the whole thing about her (fake) ghost haunting the campus in the first arc seems like foreshadowing.
