School is in session and its one hellish place. If you thought the cliques in your school were bad, imagine if they were made up of the viscous offspring of world-renowned assassins. Marcus is thrown head first into King’s Dominion in an incredibly original and cruel spin on the high school dynamic “Deadly Class” initiates the insanity. Think Harry Potter but instead of magic you’ve got bloodlust and you’re halfway there.
WRITTEN BY: Rick Remender
ART BY: Wes Craig
PUBLISHER: Image
PRICE: $3.50
RELEASE: February 26, 2014
“Deadly Class” should remind you of all those awful times you walked the cafeteria looking for a place to belong and you were met with blank stares. School can be a volatile place. Now imagine if trained killers attended your school with chips on their shoulders and you didn’t quite belong. That’s Marcus’ plight. He may be good, but he’s going to have to prove it to everyone.
Remender balances the inner school dynamics with the politics of social clubs. Socially the school is a mess, comprised from cliques centered on lineage. They all have something to prove and each of them are dangerous in their own way. The classes are brutal and ridiculously interesting. It’s almost as if we get to step into Remender’s mind after years of killing characters in comics. He’s teaching us to be trained killers. It’s clear the man has stored a lot of this deadly information in his own head, and here it flows naturally to the page. It reads smooth like silk, and is presented with a certain matter of fact that will make you eager to attend your own beheading class.
Wes Craig’s art is a revelation. The amount of panels the dude can fit on a page is staggering. He commands the page brilliantly and uses many small panels to demonstrate the larger scene at hand. He manages to keep his art dynamic and interesting even when he doesn’t have a whole lot of action to deal with this month. His style pays tribute to the eighties with perfect design flourishes that exhibit the many fashion styles of the era. His character models are thorough and diverse.
“Deadly Class” made me want to be an assassin in very much the same way Harry Potter made many children want to be a wizard. It’s not quite as friendly of an atmosphere, but the foreign world is so interesting that you can’t help but want to be a part of it.
The stakes are incredibly high here, and the learning curve is only bound to get more difficult. Plus, in the final moments of the issue Remender does his best to remind the reader that this book isn’t all about learning. It’s about Marcus’ past, and it seems that his history will come knocking sooner rather than later.
“Deadly Class” #2 is a master class in social dynamics with incredibly skillful art that will leave you slavering for more. It’s fun, dangerous, and lewd like all the best stuff.
Rating 4/5