I’m not normally one to put a tremendous amount of stock in a publisher’s promotional blurbs — they’re over-hyped by their very nature, and get the factual basics of the work in question, which they’ve presumably read, flat-out wrong with surprising frequency — but when Koyama’s pre-press promotional materials referred to Mickey Zacchilli’s Space Academy 123 as a blend of “Starfleet with Degrassi,” they captured the essential character of the book, originally serialized as a daily strip on Instagram, with fairly astonishing accuracy. But, of course, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Zacchilli, who hails from Providence, appears to have picked up no small amount of the residual energy left over in the cultural zeitgeist of that town from Fort Thunder, in that her strips are imbued with, and subsequently convey, much of the frenetic immediacy that her cartooning forebears made their stock in trade, but they necessarily…