Comic review: Deadly Class #1 by Rick Remender and Wes Craig

Cover by Wes Craig.

There are about a million ideologies and influences behind punk. Much of it finds root in the do-it-yourself, be-your-own-person school-of-thought. Things aren’t how we want them to be, and we can’t change the overall landscape — so we’ll be over here doing our own thing. We’ll look like nothing you’ve ever seen before. We won’t do anything other than what we want. Rick Remender’s work in comics — from self-published to Marvel stardom — has always seemed to strive for that working-class punk vibe. This is the next logical step: a punk story.

One strike against Remender is that his books repeat themselves, from time to time. Okay, here’s the grizzled space badass trying to do right, narrating obsessively about his attempts and failures. You can replace ‘space badass’ with ‘Canadian mutant killer,’ ‘Sentinel of Liberty,’ ‘undead pirate captain.’ If that’s what you’re looking for, Remender’s work will never get old. For some, it scratches an itch, and to Remender’s credit, it gives him a signature style. It’s worth noting, as well, that hard sci-fi like Fear Agent and Black Science — and by all appearances, the forthcoming Low with Greg Tocchini — don’t look like anything else on the stands. Well: except maybe each other.

Deadly Class puts a stick in those spokes.

We start off on a character that really couldn’t be more vulnerable. The Remender obsessive-narrative is in-place, but with a different tone. This is personal. It drifts between idealism and nihilism, defeatism and optimism, at a rapid clip. It calls Stray Bullets to mind — both in the style of the writing, and in Wes Craig’s work, which has a lot of David Lapham’s controlled chaos at work. This is about the only line you can draw. There may be comparisons to Morning Glories, with the clandestine school and the ensemble cast, but this is a different ballgame; intrigue-on-intrigue is abandoned for precision, straightforward delivery, and in-ground exploration. It’s about as effective as you could hope, and it fits the book perfectly.

Wes Craig has never turned in a bad page, but these are on a new level. He plays with layout, but never to the point where things become confusing; you might find yourself thinking of David Aja, Marcos Martin, and Frank Miller — the way those artists play with movement and weight. It’s breakout-caliber work, and, again, in spite of those touchstones, it doesn’t look quite like anything else on the stands. A particular amount of credit should be given to the incredibly-effective car chase scene — these are historically hard to pull off in comics — and Wes Craig makes it look like that was never a concern.

On the subject of uniqueness: Lee Loughridge’s coloring gives you just about everything you could ask for from a book like this. Certain pages lean on one color or another with variations, to great effect; some go straight-up neon splatterhouse and jump straight at you — reminiscent of Cris Peter’s Eisner Award-nominated turn on Casanova. The book is an exercise in restraint and full-speed aggression, and this might be best communicated through its colors.

When you add all of this up, you get something that looks and feels like nothing else.

The surprise star of the book might actually be Remender. At a time where it looked like his work might be sailing in one direction, this is a whole different turn — all the while, keeping the kind of flair that people do expect from him. As previously noted, and by his own admission in the backmatter, this is a deeply personal book. The passion, care, and attention come through in the characters, the uniqueness of the setting, the exaltation of all things punk and individual and undying.

Go to Youtube and pull up Mission of Burma, or the Minutemen, or Big Black, or the Ramones, or Crime in Stereo, or Minor Threat, or the Descendents; dust off the records if you’ve got them; load them onto your iPod if it’s all mp3s. These guys changed the landscape; if Deadly Class keeps on this track, it could, too. Bare minimum, those bands and this book all have two things in common: they are outstanding, and they are punk.