Midville High: Comic Caper Collection

by Matt Blair, Alan Moore (Introduction)

Tag along with Kyle, Barry, and June as they sail the turbulent waters of Midville High’s over-pressurized water fountains. You’ll read their zaniest antics in this volume that collects the best of the trio’s terrific tales. This stately volume includes eleven stories as they were originally published, as well as the covers, letters, columns, gags, and a special puzzle section.

293 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2025

About the author

I love to read and write. Most recently, I published Midville High: Comic Caper Collection, a compilation of small press comics that I wrote over the years. I've also had a few bilingual children's books published, including "Voy Pa' Calle - I'm Stepping Out by Editorial UNED.

Although I enjoy reading humorous comics, I absolutely love reading fiction in translation. Check out the books I think are "masterpieces," including Hua Yu's "Brothers" and Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

I am very proud of my wife who is one of the hardest-working people you will ever meet. She is a trail runner and enjoys Costa Rican literature. We have two daughters who are both readers as well: my youngest loves fantasy novels and my oldest is into murder mysteries right now. I always look forward to seeing what their next books are!

Reviews

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Matt Blair has been producing Midville High mini-comics since the late 1990s and collects eleven of them here. It has all the energy and enthusiasm you'd expect from a passion project but also many of the shortcoming of an amateurish work: spelling errors (see "Contents" listing below), production mistakes (a couple of pages are printed twice), simplistic art, and corny jokes.

The stories aspire to Archie-level high school humor with a cast of anthropomorphized students and teachers. Unfortunately, without an Archie comics editor to catch him up, Blair slips in a couple of homophobic jokes that rely on a variant of the F-slur, so this isn't something I'd recommend for an audience of children.

The more recently produced stories did show some improvement, or at least they were focused on things I'm more interested in, with tributes to Star Trek, William Shatner's Twilight Zone episode about gremlins ("Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"), and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.

Alan Moore allegedly contributes an introduction, but a couple of pages before, there is also a notice that this book is a "Winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature," so I'm not sure if Moore's participation isn't just another joke/prank. It's certainly oddly written.


Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the author through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.


FOR REFERENCE:

Contains material originally published in single magazine form as Midville High #3-7, 9-14.

Contents: Introduction / Alan Moore -- Foreward [sic] -- Guidance Counseller [sic, Issue #3] -- Band Debautchery [sic, Issue #4] -- Poe Money, Poe Problems [Issue #5] -- The Breakfast Bunch [Issue #6] -- Bunyan Onion [Issue #7] -- Historical Hysteria [Issue #9] -- Detention Dilemma [Issue #10] -- Canned Imposter [Issue #11] -- Tangible Manifestation [Issue #12] -- Hairy Situation [Issue #13] -- Snow Day Release [Issue #14] -- Puzzles & Games