Strange Academy: Finals #3 clarifies that the Sorcerer Supreme’s best students are actually reinventing and rewriting the standard rules of magic.
The students of Strange Academy have learned more than they could have imagined from within the school’s hallowed halls. Apart from its namesake former Sorcerer Supreme, the next generation of Masters of the Mystic Arts has studied under some of the greatest minds and mages that the Marvel Universe has to offer. This makes it all the more surprising that they have seemingly eschewed all the old rules that have governed their world for centuries, although that might just be the smartest thing any of them have ever done.
Strange Academy: Finals #3 (by Skottie Young, Humberto Ramos, Edgar Delgado, and VC’s Clayton Cowles) finds New Orleans’ resident Masters of the Mystic Arts convening for a meeting that will ultimately decide the future of the eponymous school. When the students took it upon themselves to deal with the villainous Gaslamp, they did so without any real understanding of what they would be in for. Though they did save Calvin and put a stop to Gaslamp’s operation, they did so with no regard for his position within the city, not to mention at the expense of a large section of the French Quarter. This coupled with the school’s wider impact on the community has made their continued presence all the more concerning, though not necessarily for the right reasons.
The Strange Academy Students are Writing Their own Magic Rules
As Doctor Voodoo is quick to point out, the only thing holding himself or his fellow mages back from taking down Gaslamp on their own was tradition. This is the same reason none of them had dealt with The Hollow prior to their encounter with the students of Strange Academy. Thanks to these villains’ centuries-old agreements with long-dead sorcerers, they were allowed to keep their respective places in New Orleans unabated. The Masters of the Mystic Arts who came after them may have tacitly agreed to those terms at some point, but none of those enrolled in Strange Academy were even aware of them.
Even if someone had made the students aware of these obscure and outdated laws, there was never a reasonable expectation for them to be followed, especially not when real people are suffering because of them. Both Gaslamp and The Hollow were obvious villains by any measure, and harvesting their peers wasn’t something that the students could ever be asked to simply live with. If anything, taking down Gaslamp’s operation has solidified the students as heroes in their own right, even if they do have blocks of the city to rebuild in the wake of their victory.
Strange Academy’s Students Aren’t Bound by Tradition
This isn’t to say that Zoe Laveau or any of her peers are ready to venture out into the world on their own as full-time supernatural superheroes. Rather they have redefined what that means for their generation. Ms. Hazel, Doctor Voodoo, and the rest of New Orleans’ elder mages certainly aren’t villains. But their begrudging acceptance of the villains in their midst is a clear indication of how much they limited their own heroics.
For their students, however, the limit hasn’t even been mapped out yet. While Emily Bright, Iric, and Dessy are busy discovering theirs within the Dark Dimension, the rest of the school is coming to terms with the idea that the only limit that matters is the one they set for themselves. It might take doing some damage to figure out exactly where to draw those lines. But they are already well beyond anything Doctor Strange or anyone else had decided for them.
