DUNGEON CRAWLERS ACADEMY

Welcome to the school that trains young treasure hunters to seek out magical artifacts in a perilous parallel dimension.

Artifacts fetched through a magical portal that admits only kids can be auctioned off for big bucks—though young Nathan is starting at a disadvantage, as his inadvertent, nonreversible bonding to school founder T.J. Vance’s $5 million wizard’s staff has saddled him with an unusual load of student debt. Worse yet, hardly has he begun attending classes at the titular high school than he’s teamed up for an exploratory field trip with compulsively light-fingered overachiever Mandy and surly Zach, an undersized sociopath with an exaggeratedly outsized magic sword. Maintaining a properly adolescent tone of detached irony as they battle their way past kobolds, goblins, necrogoblins, and a zombie giant (which, explains Mandy pedantically, is different from a giant zombie), the three emerge triumphantly, if neither as rich nor as high on the scoring leaderboard as they expect. (Stay tuned for further misadventures, as their exploits leave the roused and irritated Dungeon Master behind.) In the brightly colored, tidily composed panels, Damaso dresses manga-eyed students in conventional RPG–style costumes and gives a few brown or olive complexions; most figures, though, including the three main characters, are White.

May entice gamers to put their phones away for a while.