Writer: Rick Remender
Artist :Wes Craig
Colorist: Lee Loughridge
Publisher: Image Comics
Imagine you’re thrown back to 1987. You are are teenager who hates school, grades sucking, jocks are out to get you and your friends, can’t focus in class. BUT, the jocks are the children of Joseph Stalin’s assassin, teachers are also killers just older and wiser, and the crush you have as a literal body count. Welcome to Kings Dominion School for the Deadly Arts, the most brutal high school on earth, where the world’s top crime families send the next generation of killers to train. At Kings Dominion School for the Deadly Arts, the backstabbing is literal and the pain can get you killed, which makes Deadly Class quite the exciting comic.
We follow up on Marcus’s induction to the school with the normal, high-school film introductory montage. All of the social circles of teenage killers want something from him. At worst, they want to kill him on sight. At best, they want to see what he’s got and just how badly they can push his buttons. Maria from his Rescue Squad invites him to join her squad, but he declines because “he’s not much of a joiner”. From there, we’re introduced to the school schedule: Assassin Psychology, Poison, Lunch (At the very, very dark and isolated graveyard) Hand-to-hand Combat, and a special invite to AP Black Arts. Deadly Class reads like a twisted, Kill Bill inspired Harry Potter gone wrong and is all the better for it. The various clans: Preps, Dixie Mob, Soto Vatos, Jersey Kings, F.W.O, and the Kuroki Syndicate all deserve a spinoff series by themselves detailing their school escapades and just how they attempt to change the world through killing.
Deadly Class is about teenagers doing the dirtiest job possible and the highs and lows of what it means to be a killer in training. This point rings home when the Master gives AP Black Arts their first assignment: judge and execute someone that’s done evil in their lifetime. Through a near death experience and the equivalent to bonding for them both, Willie and Marcus spy their target…the homeless man that Marcus fended off months befor hand. In a few short seconds Willie loses it and comes clean about the facts behind his legendary status in the F.W.O…his Uncle gave him the gun to make it appear he killed the entire room full of rivals that killed his Dad. Little did they know that a enemy from Marcus’s past is literally right around the corner and waiting to pounce. They eventually find what appears to be a qualifying target but, to no avail. They both fail the assignment and Marcus is abandoned for a short time…until Saya busts him out for a trip to Vegas with the friends.
I won’t get heavy into the details of what goes down but just understand: boyfriends get jealous and cause fights that end with stabbings, father’s and sons punch their problems away, Wes Craig draws the best trippy “acid trips gone bad” sequences, and ghosts from your past never let up the search. All of this, and more make up Deadly Class Volume 1. The only book on the stands that want to change the world with bullets…and teenage hijinks with added blood!