Review Detail

Marvel's Miles Morales first appeared in 2011, after the fictional death of Peter Parker. His story has been told in Reynolds' previous Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2017) as well as Justin A. Reynold's graphic novels Shock Waves and Stranger Tides, as well as comic books and movies. In Suspended, we find Miles struggling with multiple issues at the Brooklyn Visions Academy, the elite boarding school he is attending. He's not a fan of living away from parents Rio and Jeff, who are not only supportive of him, but also of Black culture and social justice issues. The school struggles to understand and properly discipline students of color, and employs problematic teachers like Mr. Chamberlain, who doesn't teach history properly. Miles' parents are called to school when he is wrongly accused of stealing sausages from the cafeteria and of breaking a desk, and he eventually lands in In School Suspension for his accumulated actions. Is part of this due to the evil force of the Warden, who has a long history of mind controlling teachers and influencing their actions to be racist? ISS is horribly boring, and Miles and the others assigned to this punishment have packets of work to be turned in, administered by Coach Holt. She largely ignores them and reads the newspaper. Miles is preoccupied with the fate of his cousin Austin, who is in jail, and during a fire drill he talks to Mrs. Tripley, the helpful school librarian, and asks is she would consider helping him run a book drive to get books to send to his cousin. The fire drill ends in some scuffles, and there is an increasing amount of strange stuff going on. Miles sees termites, not only around the building, but coming out of the mouth of Tobin. Tobin has been accused of damaging library books, many which are commonly challenged in school libraries. As Miles works on the packet, he thinks about how the school is failing Black and Brown students by not providing the books they need for projects, sometimes because the books have been challenged. Why is Tobin, a self professed book nerd, damaging books? Clearly, some evil forces are at work. Will Miles, or his alter ego, Spider-Man, be able to defeat them?