Val, any chance you can estimate the reading level of the comic books?
Hmm. Well, I'd say that my grade-skipped DD8 who's only a month into 8 can understand it pretty easily. We read the comics together and take turns speaking for different characters and it's fun for her.
SIDE NOTE
From what I've seen with AoPS (Beast Academy with DD8 and Algebra II with my eldest), it's hard to define the level the books are ostensibly set at. This is because they go into more depth than the very good textbooks I've used with my kids and WAY more depth than the typical ones that have been discussed here. In the tough questions (and there are a lot of them), all you need is algebra 1 to solve the equations. But setting them up is the hard part.
Also take the pre-algebra stuff in Beast Academy. The book spends pages discussing what variables are, how to write equations, and then how to solve basic equations for x. By "solve for x," I mean that the book has a solid explanation about why something changes sign when you move it across the equals sign.
In contrast, the "algebra" worksheets my kids bring home from school don't do that. They just want the kids to fill in for x, as in "3+x=10 x=_____." I'm not convinced that the kids are learning much by doing these worksheets. I suppose that the idea is to teach them that a letter can stand for any number. But to me, this approach is simplistic and no different from what they were doing in first grade when they were memorizing math facts and filling in "3+____=10." They don't teach the logic that's there the way that Beast Academy does. And the same types of exercises seem to persist until pre-algebra, which means that things kind of stagnate.
