Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
It’s been awhile since I started a series that I enjoyed this much. Dark, thrilling, and violent. I’m not kidding when I say I’m about to head out and buy the rest of the series right now.
I didn't enjoy this.
Initially, I started out reading one of those big compilations on Hoopla but, I have no interest in continuing this series. This is like a "dark and edgy" John Green novel.
What do we have here?
- A young male protagonist that's "special" for... reasons. (I'm sure you'd have to keep reading to understand why).
- This is a high school series with cliques and packs because... reasons.
- There's a very attractive girl that's into him (for reasons) but she's not the one he wants
- There's a cool Asian chick that he's pining for. She's 10x more interesting than him but, of course she's not the main character
- There's a black side kick
It's all just... very boring. This is every YA book I've ever read, except Remender added a murder school to it. And, for once, I would have rather seen more of the school than all the acid trips. The attempts at making everything oh so dark and edgy with the violence and beastiality and all manner of things that remind me of Locke & Key and not in a good way. Last year, I would have forced myself to suffer through more of this in the interest of not adding to my DNF list. But it's 2019, life's too short to continue on reading things that I hate and there's nothing in this that makes me want to continue.
It's not new and it's not my cup of tea.
Initially, I started out reading one of those big compilations on Hoopla but, I have no interest in continuing this series. This is like a "dark and edgy" John Green novel.
What do we have here?
- A young male protagonist that's "special" for... reasons. (I'm sure you'd have to keep reading to understand why).
- This is a high school series with cliques and packs because... reasons.
- There's a very attractive girl that's into him (for reasons) but she's not the one he wants
- There's a cool Asian chick that he's pining for. She's 10x more interesting than him but, of course she's not the main character
- There's a black side kick
It's all just... very boring. This is every YA book I've ever read, except Remender added a murder school to it. And, for once, I would have rather seen more of the school than all the acid trips. The attempts at making everything oh so dark and edgy with the violence and beastiality and all manner of things that remind me of Locke & Key and not in a good way. Last year, I would have forced myself to suffer through more of this in the interest of not adding to my DNF list. But it's 2019, life's too short to continue on reading things that I hate and there's nothing in this that makes me want to continue.
It's not new and it's not my cup of tea.
3.5 I was on the brink of giving it 4 stars bc it’s a pretty cool story, but ultimately it was just the set up for the others to follow, which I’m sure will be 4 stars.
dark
informative
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is bad ass. An assassin high school set in the '90's complete with cliques and relationship drama. Except for at this school, shit turns deadly.
This is a collective review for Deadly Class, Vols. 1-10. There are some spoilers ahead.
Deadly Class, written by Rick Remender and illustrated by Wes Craig, is the story of a wayward youth in the late 1980s who finds himself in a private academy where the children of extremely powerful people are trained in the arts of assassination. There, he learns the tradecraft of murder, but also must navigate the corridors of teenage angst, shifting alliances, and more as he tries to survive long enough to challenge the school itself - and by proxy, all of the corrupt institutions that make the world such an awful place.
Now, lest you be tricked into thinking that this is going to be any fun, be advised that it isn't. Remender is at his Remender-iest here (a feat he won't top until he launches his Scumbag series a few years later), which means that what begins as an intriguing, edgy concept has more than run its course by the end of Volume 1. By the end of Volume 4, we get a pretty interesting surprise ending that suggests a new direction for the series, but no, it's all undone, and it's all just more of the same.
And that same we get so much more of is just an endless conveyor belt of half-assed world-building, slapdash plotting, threadbare character development, self-important sermonizing about pop-culture, off-target edgelord references, and bathroom jokes a-go-go (somewhere in the middle of this, we get a three-page long fart joke). Remender opens the first volume by opening up about what a rough adolescence he had in Phoenix, where he saw one friend shot in the head, another die from a heroin overdose, and personally experienced two group beatdowns. One imagines that given the premise of this story - which involves children murdering each other - that he tells us about the terrible things he witnessed as a way of gaining social permission to express things much worse than that narratively for the sake of cheap entertainment.
It seems strange therapy, then for him to channel those experiences the way that he does in this story, where he glamorizes all of those things as throwaway storytelling disguised as some kind of meta-commentary about what it was like to become a teenage cynic in the 1980s. Either Remender was lying about his teenage trauma, or he decided to mine it in the most crass and exploitative manner imaginable. One doesn't get the sense that he was lying.
That this series' non-stop orgy of sex, drug use, murder, depravity and fecal expulsion all occurs to children under the age of 16 is perhaps its most unsettling aspect. Sure, we have seen kids-killing-kids stories elsewhere (Battle Royale and The Hunger Games being two notable examples). But in those series, the authors at least try to make such violence an inherently horrifying state of affairs. Remender never puts in that work here, apart from a little half-hearted exposition before he sets up yet another scene of teenage mayhem. It's like he tried to turn Kids into a John Woo movie, with predictably abhorrent results.
Deadly Class is not condemned inherently by its problematic subject material. Were this story used to make a genuine examination about some aspect of humanity, we could look past this story's many, many excesses. Hell, were this story simply well-told, we could give it a lot of leeway. But especially in the back half of this, it's clear Remender doesn't really know how to land the plane. Between weird jumps back in forth in time, unexplainable shifts in character motivations that are later hand-waved away, the suggestion that sometimes it's heroic to start a school shooting, and an exceedingly lame copout of an ending that involves simply killing everyone in an earthquake, Deadly Class becomes such a narrative disaster that no matter how cool we might have thought this was when it first began, there's nothing left to love about it now, no matter how badly one might want to.
But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that it's clear that Remender (and Craig, who enables him) are simply getting off on being transgressive. You can do that as an artist, of course, provided there's a point to the transgression. Here, though, it's not about any of the things Remender says it is, because it's all just so hollow and cynical and poorly formed. Whatever there is supposed to be in Deadly Class never feels like more than one of those stupid, half-formed philosophical rants one goes on while out of their mind in the seedy back room of a smoke-stained kegger. And while you can forgive some dumb teenager for thinking they're onto something profound in those moments, Remender is old enough, and experienced enough, to know better. That's what makes this thing feel like such hot, angry garbage. None of it is by accident. And none of it is for any purpose other than to keep Remender's fingers busy while he makes sure somebody, anybody picks up the screen rights for this.
That SyFy actually did kind of proves the ultra-cynical worldview of this thing, but actually being the problem you're decrying is just being more of the problem. Somewhere within this is a deep sense of self-loathing beyond the main character's unconvincing diatribes. And if that's what's really driving Remender here, then this series is an extended cry for help. If it's not, then it's an extended act of public defecation that isn't art, no matter what Remender and Craig manage to scrawl with it.
Deadly Class, written by Rick Remender and illustrated by Wes Craig, is the story of a wayward youth in the late 1980s who finds himself in a private academy where the children of extremely powerful people are trained in the arts of assassination. There, he learns the tradecraft of murder, but also must navigate the corridors of teenage angst, shifting alliances, and more as he tries to survive long enough to challenge the school itself - and by proxy, all of the corrupt institutions that make the world such an awful place.
Now, lest you be tricked into thinking that this is going to be any fun, be advised that it isn't. Remender is at his Remender-iest here (a feat he won't top until he launches his Scumbag series a few years later), which means that what begins as an intriguing, edgy concept has more than run its course by the end of Volume 1. By the end of Volume 4, we get a pretty interesting surprise ending that suggests a new direction for the series, but no, it's all undone, and it's all just more of the same.
And that same we get so much more of is just an endless conveyor belt of half-assed world-building, slapdash plotting, threadbare character development, self-important sermonizing about pop-culture, off-target edgelord references, and bathroom jokes a-go-go (somewhere in the middle of this, we get a three-page long fart joke). Remender opens the first volume by opening up about what a rough adolescence he had in Phoenix, where he saw one friend shot in the head, another die from a heroin overdose, and personally experienced two group beatdowns. One imagines that given the premise of this story - which involves children murdering each other - that he tells us about the terrible things he witnessed as a way of gaining social permission to express things much worse than that narratively for the sake of cheap entertainment.
It seems strange therapy, then for him to channel those experiences the way that he does in this story, where he glamorizes all of those things as throwaway storytelling disguised as some kind of meta-commentary about what it was like to become a teenage cynic in the 1980s. Either Remender was lying about his teenage trauma, or he decided to mine it in the most crass and exploitative manner imaginable. One doesn't get the sense that he was lying.
That this series' non-stop orgy of sex, drug use, murder, depravity and fecal expulsion all occurs to children under the age of 16 is perhaps its most unsettling aspect. Sure, we have seen kids-killing-kids stories elsewhere (Battle Royale and The Hunger Games being two notable examples). But in those series, the authors at least try to make such violence an inherently horrifying state of affairs. Remender never puts in that work here, apart from a little half-hearted exposition before he sets up yet another scene of teenage mayhem. It's like he tried to turn Kids into a John Woo movie, with predictably abhorrent results.
Deadly Class is not condemned inherently by its problematic subject material. Were this story used to make a genuine examination about some aspect of humanity, we could look past this story's many, many excesses. Hell, were this story simply well-told, we could give it a lot of leeway. But especially in the back half of this, it's clear Remender doesn't really know how to land the plane. Between weird jumps back in forth in time, unexplainable shifts in character motivations that are later hand-waved away, the suggestion that sometimes it's heroic to start a school shooting, and an exceedingly lame copout of an ending that involves simply killing everyone in an earthquake, Deadly Class becomes such a narrative disaster that no matter how cool we might have thought this was when it first began, there's nothing left to love about it now, no matter how badly one might want to.
But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that it's clear that Remender (and Craig, who enables him) are simply getting off on being transgressive. You can do that as an artist, of course, provided there's a point to the transgression. Here, though, it's not about any of the things Remender says it is, because it's all just so hollow and cynical and poorly formed. Whatever there is supposed to be in Deadly Class never feels like more than one of those stupid, half-formed philosophical rants one goes on while out of their mind in the seedy back room of a smoke-stained kegger. And while you can forgive some dumb teenager for thinking they're onto something profound in those moments, Remender is old enough, and experienced enough, to know better. That's what makes this thing feel like such hot, angry garbage. None of it is by accident. And none of it is for any purpose other than to keep Remender's fingers busy while he makes sure somebody, anybody picks up the screen rights for this.
That SyFy actually did kind of proves the ultra-cynical worldview of this thing, but actually being the problem you're decrying is just being more of the problem. Somewhere within this is a deep sense of self-loathing beyond the main character's unconvincing diatribes. And if that's what's really driving Remender here, then this series is an extended cry for help. If it's not, then it's an extended act of public defecation that isn't art, no matter what Remender and Craig manage to scrawl with it.
Cool art telling a multi-level story. More than I expected in projects ambition and they nailed it.
As indicated by the blurb, this is a truly brutal world with quite the cast of characters. It does not disguise the grittier and terrifying parts. The back stories of the characters we get really force one to think about the ways in which people are affected by traumas and violent experiences. It was especially impactful to read the afterword and realize that, while the story itself is fiction, a lot of the things that take place in the book were inspired by things that the author had actually seen.