Somehow we’ve made it to the end of the year despite its efforts. It’s been a lot—so much so that I don’t want to write about it in the hopes that the looming shadow of dread that’s cast its shadow over the land will go away. But at least, as always, the comics have been consistently good. And with the end of the year should coming the beginning of something else to help capstone things as Kelly Sue DeConnick, David López, Cris Peter, and Clayton Cowles bring us their new series in FML’s first issue.

Riley is a teenager with teenage problems. He wants to be a rockstar, but he needs his big break. His mom was a legendary musician, but she’s just his mom whose obsessed with true crime now, so how could she help with that? He wants to get through school, but the fires burning near Portland s sketching in class keep that from happening. At least he has his group of friends and bandmates to make it all the more tolerable. And making it even more tolerable is their game at the Witch’s Castle—a disused public restroom deep in the woods. But for teenagers with games and isolated locales and a page from his mom’s old zine that looks like it could be a spell, things can quickly get complicated. For Riley, this means, the morning after the game at the Witch’s Castle, waking up transformed into a giant beast from his notebook.

For a book like FML, it takes a certain kind of balance to help the first issue really land as well as it can. It’s teenagers doing teenage things leading to a big reveal that, through their meddling in magic, there are consequences to their actions. As a plot, it feels timeless as Riley’s story is the kind of thing almost every former teenager can connect to in some way—albeit without the transformation ending. From the first issue, though, we’re thoroughly steeped in a controlled recklessness of being a teenager that is both contemporary and timeless. We’re given school shooter drills and bulletproof backpacks, but friends biking to a spot in the middle of the night to play a game only they know. Everyone has been Riley or one of his friends at one point or another, so we can connect with every one of them the moment the story introduces us.

DeConnick, López, Peters, and Cowles show us a world so like our own that the final page stinger of this issue actually does feel like a genuine twist. But then that’s the power of a creative team like this and how comics can play with expectations over thirty pages. We see the grounding and the world being built up that’s steeped in off-kilter realism that the deviations actually feel like they matter. And for a first issue, giving readers just enough of a twist to play with expectations is what keeps them reading into the second issue. 

Get excited. Get real.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.