Comics
Review: “Deadly Class” # 2
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
Comics
‘You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive’ – IDW Dark’s Next Horror Comic Will Make You Question Reality
Five friends. Four houses. One perfect life. Bloody Disgusting is excited to exclusively announce You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive, a brand new horror comic from IDW Dark.
From Eisner-Nominated writers Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly, and rising horror artist Heather Vaughan, You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive is described as a “paranoia-laced, socially-conscious, horror mystery that will leave you questioning reality, and reveal that this crafted world is more of a nightmare than the idealistic dream they were expecting.”
Phoebe Joplin has never questioned the world her parents built: a secluded community where she and her friends were raised to be smarter, stronger, and better than anyone else. No distractions. No dangers. No secrets. Until the night of their graduation.
When one of them dies under impossible circumstances, Phee starts to pull at the edges of her perfect life—and what she finds is something far more terrifying than she ever imagined.
Because this place isn’t a sanctuary. It’s a cage. And no one who discovers the truth ever leaves it alive.
Collin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing (Batman – One Bad Day: Clayface, Star Trek: The Last Starship) co-write the upcoming IDW Dark horror comic, featuring art by Heather Vaughan.
Jackson Lanzing said in a statement to Bloody Disgusting, “You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive is in many ways a spiritual successor to our last creator-owned horror, The Principles of Necromancy – a dive into the promise and consequence of playing god with the blood of innocents. But the Hivemind book this reminds me of most is Clayface: One Bad Day. This is a deeply human story with intensely raw emotions – five best friends and their five mysterious parents, tearing one another apart for the promise of some impossible glory that’s waiting just beyond their darkest actions. We’re thrilled to be bringing this story to life with our long-time partner in crime, editor Heather Antos, at IDW Dark – and we’re particularly excited to give our Clayface fans a new, brutal and emotional horror made just for them.”
Adds Collin Kelly, “We’re deconstructing a feeling that seems universal these days; our elders have a death grip on their power, without any intention of giving it up to the generations that come next. YNLTPA is about growing up with the limitless potential of the future… and realizing how much it’s a lie we’ve been fed to keep us under the yoke of the past. Bringing this brutal experience to life is our artist and co-creator, Heather Vaughan, who brings an incredible amount of humanity to our cast. But it’s in our youthful leads that Heather’s art really shines – you are going to fall in love with these young people, even as they go through the worst experience of their lives. What we’ve all crafted together is going to be tragic, painful, but above all else, sincere – with a future so uncertain, there’s only one thing we can trust: you’ll never leave this place alive.”
“Some horror stories are about monsters in the dark. YNLTPA is about realizing the monsters raised you,” previews Senior Group Editor Heather Antos. “Working with Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly on this series has been a dream in the darkest possible way. They’ve built a story that’s layered, brutal, and deeply emotional, and every issue gives artist Heather Vaughan opportunities to push the art into places that feel both haunting and deeply personal. Some horror comics will keep you up at night…this is one that will stick with you for years to come.”
The first issue of You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive goes on sale October 14, 2026! Make sure to pre-order at your local comic shop by September to guarantee a copy.
Exclusively check out the various covers for Issue #1 down below.
IDW Publishing’s horror imprint IDW DARK features comics like A Quiet Place: Storm Warning, Smile: For the Camera, The Exorcism at 1600 Penn, Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees, The Twilight Zone, Event Horizon: Dark Descent & Event Horizon: Inferno, and more.
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