Morning Glories

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

An ongoing comic book series written by Nick Spencer and illustrated by Joel Eisma. It tells the story of six new students (Casey, Ike, Jun, Zoe, Hunter and Jade) at the very prestigious Morning Glory Academy. Each one of them has a dark and/or strange past and they all share the same birthday. The plot follows the six students separately and as a group as they explore the mysterious and shadowy purpose of this dizzying Boarding School of Horrors. The phrase "for a better future" is thrown around a lot by the staff, but it's hard to tell what that entails. The teachers are down right sadistic, the campus contains strange horrors and there's a ghost-like man stalking around who really enjoys making a mess of people. To top it all off, Daramount, the woman in charge of the these six students (nicknamed the Morning Glories) is trying to systematically break them in increasingly creative ways.

The tone and feel of the story so far is something akin to Lost in its earlier seasons: lots of character exploration and flashbacks amid completely baffling events that seem to hint toward a bizarre and complicated machination. It has also been compared to Gunnerkrigg Court in that it's about students exploring the weirdness of a boarding school with possibly dark purposes.

Warning: spoilers are beyond this point.

Tropes used in Morning Glories include:
  • Adorkable: Oh, Hunter.
  • Arc Words: So far we have...
    • "The hour of our release draws near"
    • "All will be free"
    • And we have an Arc Person in Abraham.
  • Ax Crazy: Pamela in a HUGE way. And maybe Zoe.
  • Blessed with Suck: Poor Hunter. His apparent ability is that all clocks read 8:13 to him most of the time and he can't hear alarm clocks.
  • Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Casey (blonde), Zoe (brunette) and Jade (redhead).
  • Break the Cutie: Daramount's goal for Jun, Hunter, Casey and Jade.
  • Break the Haughty: Daramount's goal for Zoe and Ike.
  • The Caligula: Ike. He's like a character out of a Brett Easton Ellis novel. At least, that's how he wants to be seen.
  • The Comically Serious: Jun to a degree.
  • Damsel in Distress: Jade in particularly horrifying form.
    • And perhaps Meagan.
  • Depraved Bisexual: Ike alluded to making out with guys because it was "in" and he's none too shy with a knife.
  • Dimensional Traveler: Possibly Jade depending how you interpret her scenes with her older self and the mysterious lover she sees when she's asleep or unconscious.
  • Emo Teen: Jade. Lampshaded by Zoe.
  • Evil Twin: Brainwashed!Jun to Hisao.
  • Five-Man Band: Interestingly, the roles shift around a lot. Casey is almost always The Hero and Jun is almost always The Big Guy.
  • Jerkass: Ike personifies this.
  • Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: In spades! Good luck figuring out any of the mysteries on your own.
  • Magnificent Bastard: It's questionable if Ike truly pulls this off, but he certainly sees himself this way.
    • However, both Gribbs and Daramount definitely qualify.
  • Manslaughter Provocation: Zoe thought her best friend was being raped by their English teacher, so she bashed him on the head. They burned the body in an incinerator.
  • Murder Is the Best Solution: Alarmingly common.
  • Ostentatious Secret: A few members of the staff love waving it in the students' faces that there's things going on that they don't know about.
  • Really Gets Around: Zoe and Ike.
  • Rich Bitch: Implied with Zoe and played very straight with Ike.
  • Sadist Teacher: Daramount really enjoys messing with the kids under her charge
  • Self-Made Orphan: Ike's mother isn't sure whether or not he killed his father
  • Stalker with a Crush: Implied with Jade. Apparently she had fallen hard for a teacher named Marcus.
  • Subliminal Seduction: A possible case with the slide show in the beginning.
  • Twin Switch: The character we know as Jun is really Hisao and vice versa.
  • Wham! Episode: Every issue has a WHAM moment of some kind.
    • Perhaps issue 1 sets the tone the best, when Jade attempts to contact her father, only for him to tell her that he's never had a daughter. She tells the others, and Casey asks for an explanation from the RA, who tells her that it's part of the protocol for the Academy to encourage parents to pretend to their children that they don't exist as a way to cultivate independance. Casey, horrified, says that her parents would never do that, and the RA says that indeed her parents refused--[spoiler: and then opens a door to reveal Casey's parents' mutilated bodies]]
  • Wham! Line: "You are not Hisao. I am"
    • "Hello, father"
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