The early 2010s were a special time for Image Comics. Series like Saga, Sex Criminals, The Wicked + The Divine, East of West, Bitch Planet, and others were showing what a comics publisher could really do when it let creators make the kinds of comics they wanted to see—something Image had done in the 90s to various levels of success. But at the bottom of my comic pile was a series from that era I had been enamored with when it came out and, after getting behind on it for a few months, decided I would finish reading once the whole thing was out. Deadly Class by Rick Remender, Wes Craig, Rus Wooton, Lee Loughridge, and Jordan Boyd is a series that ended in 2022. Please don’t shame me.

Deadly Class as a series follow Marcus Lopez Arguello, a recent orphan and new student at the King’s Dominion—a school for assassins, and a cast of other teenagers trapped in continual cycles of violence, revenge, jealousy, and backstabbing. Enrolled with Saya Kuroki, Willie Lewis, Maria Esperanza Salazar, Billy Bennett, Shabnam, and others, we see their classes through their first year as freshman and the often bloody tribulations the school puts them through. Only the most violent and cunning are even able to make it out of the freshman class as much of the cast we first meet end up dying in their final exams.

Having stopped at issue #36, I had seen the ways in which the creative team had put every single member of the cast through the most violent hells before a couple were able to escape. But picking things back up, Marcus and Maria returned to King’s Dominion to exact elaborate and systematic revenge—not simply on the fellow students who had hunted them down, but the entire faculty for perpetuating the violence. Because, at its core, Deadly Class was a series that decried the violence it showed in its pages. And as the last twenty issues unfolded, we could see this coming through more and more, namely as we see the results of Marcus becoming one of the best assassins in the world before stopping completely to live a life with Maria. They leave it all behind—the money, the power, everything to have a relatively simple life in near poverty for years. But they were able to make it out. We see much of the surviving cast years later in various positions of power before dying horribly as a result of the violence they helped perpetuate.

In one of the later issues of the series, Marcus talks about his own writing and how he wanted the main character of his novels to die and for the bad guys to win. But his plans change as his life does—the cynicism that defined him throughout the series begins to melt away. While it’s still present, it isn’t his entire self anymore. He had gone from having nothing worth living for to having something after years on the streets and on the run. And so he changes. You can almost feel the creators here changing in the same way—at least the bad guys in this series faced consequences. 

Get excited. Get reflective.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, & 651) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.