Deadly Class - Tome 10 - Save Your Generation

Deadly Class

by Rick Remender, Wes Craig (Illustrator)

Depuis leur retour à l'Académie Kings Dominion, rien ne s'est passé
comme prévu pour Marcus et Maria. Derrière les sourires, les
alliances se sont rapidement mises en place pour éliminer le couple
un peu trop désinvolte au goût des uns et des autres. Alors, déjà
fragilisé par la dépression et l'abus de drogue, Marcus poursuit sa
lente et douloureuse descente aux enfers lorsque Saya réapparaît dans
sa vie et que Maria le trahit pour Stefano, l'héritier de la mafia de
la côte Est. Le doigt sur la détente, il prit sa décision. Saura-t-il
seulement en assumer les lourdes conséquences ?

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Comic Book, Graphic Novels Comics, Young Adult, Thriller

Kindle Edition

First published October 20, 2021

About the author

Rick Remender is an American comic book writer and artist who resides in Los Angeles, California. He is the writer/co-creator of many independent comic books like Black Science, Deadly Class, LOW, Fear Agent and Seven to Eternity. Previously, he wrote The Punisher, Uncanny X-Force, Captain America and Uncanny Avengers for Marvel Comics.

Reviews

[Jayson · Rating 4 out of 5]

(A-) 80% | Very Good
Notes: Bloviates, might aggravate, it's talk-inflated, future-dated, end reveals are great, bear weight: past-1980s fates related.

[Baba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without doubt on second and third readings this series can only improve? It was 198, now time has passed since the carnage and savagery of
Deadly Class, Volume 9: Bone Machine, and as we follow Marcus, who has a plan, we begin to to get a picture of what's happened between then and now, the reunion.

With so many nods to the decade, such a breakdown of rock bands who 'sell-out; the (subjective) truth about Grunge rock; the nature of being cool, and above all the class of generations and how this has been played throughout this super series. Another Four Star, 9 out of 12 volume.

2023 read

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 2 out of 5]

More wet farts than you can shake a stick at!

And still unforgivable:

[James DeSantis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this makes me want to re-read the entire series.

This is a long series and it's been around years. I remember not loving volume 1 but really got invested with volume 2 and especially 3 and 4 I remember clearly. But reading this makes me feel like a re-read is 100% madatory to catch everything.

Marcus is still a POS but he's also fascinating to watch. He's a screw up, he fucks over people, yet he has this sense honor and loves people close to him. This volume jumps around a lot with different time periods, and sometimes hard to keep up, but by the final chapter I was 100% on board.

The jumping around can be confusing. And the sense of some characters not growing outside their fuckups can be annoying. But I really enjoyed seeing the far future and excited to see how this all ends soon. A 4 out of 5.

[Dustin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3⭐️
Volume 10 is disjointed and frenetic. A lot of Marcus being Marcus. After the emotional powerhouse that was Volume 9, this was somehow a letdown, even as it featured some potentially epic moments.
Observations: I enjoyed the Saya chapter, at least that had a good ending.
And of course Marcus is a Jawbreaker fan

[Benji Glaab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another banger for sure. Easily one of my favourite series of the decade. Love the attitude of this series and Wes Craig maintains some killer style with the visuals. I'm a little surprised there is a Volume 11 forthcoming. I honestly thought this was a last Harrah.

[Lashaan Balasingam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice prelude to the chaos that's sure to come. Every key character is reintroduced under a new light of experience and trauma. Now, they must reevaluate their values and purpose in life as they go after what they desire most.

But, at what cost? A solid volume exploring one's search for closure in a world that constantly finds ways to put you down.

[isabela ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘’I’ve never felt like I deserved a single success, but I’ve taken total ownership of every failure.’’

Honestly... I don't know how to feel.

It's not that I don't enjoy the aging up of the characters and the jump forward, it's just that I don't feel it was the right time. Volume 9 still left much to be expected from their time at Kings Dominion, the fight for power, the dynamics of Marcus becoming a legacy and Saya becoming a rat, Shabnam's schemes to become valedictorian, Marcus and Maria's relationship after her betrayal, their next tests and graduation... so much to happen, and it was all skipped over, with only a few flashbacks here and there to give us much needed context.

It is still fun, action-packed and full of twists and turns with awesome art, and yes, I did enjoy it, but I'm sad for all that was left at Kings Dominion that we'll never get to see.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the biggest fan of the flash-forwards as the execution in terms of plot felt rushed and highly disorganized. Hopefully the next, final volume fills in the missing blanks and is a bit more streamlined. While chaos has been a recurring theme in the series, there always seemed to a method to the madness. In Save Your Generation, it seemed as if both the writer and the artist were trying to cram as much as possible into these issues due to the fact that the series is coming to an end. However, in doing so, the story lost both its direction as well as its appeal.

[Valéria. · Rating 5 out of 5]

S každým ďalším bookom čakám, že to začne upadať na kvalite, a ono je to proste furt bomba. Kopačky do emócií z rozbehu. Give me more.

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I own this book.

This volume features a major time jump from where we left the gang in Volume 9. We see Marcus and the remaining Kings Dominion kids older, and where their lives have gone. We see Marcus screwing up again and again. We see their successes and failures, their reminiscing of their past and how the past doesn't always stay where it belongs. It sets up for what is bound to be an epic ending, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

[Mateen Mahboubi · Rating 2 out of 5]

About ready for this one to wrap up.

[Chris Lemmerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like Deadly Class has lost a little momentum lately, but that's likely pandemic fatigue from the creators and the industry more than anything actively detrimental to the book itself.

These four issues flash forward a bit as we see Marcus attempting to live a life outside of Kings Dominion, all the while flashing back to the ultimate fall of the school at his hand. The inner monologue remains just shy of pretentious while still being entertaining, and the twists that set up the final arc of the series have been seeded for a long time.

Fingers crossed that the ending sticks the landing - I say that a lot when it comes to these long-running series, but I really do want Deadly Class to get it right.

[OmniBen · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Zero spoiler review) 4.5/5
I'm writing this review after reading the final few volumes as part of the library edition. These initial few issues of said edition were without a shadow of a doubt my favourite. About as far from the 'too fast', flat and infuriating ending. Not to mention Remender's sudden onset of 2023-itis. Yes, it is the main character being a wishy washy twat at times. And yes, I can certainly see how Remender's incessant need to overly narrate the pages with his dime store philosophical outlook might grate on some, but I didn't mind it in the slightest. I even found it, dare I say it, endearing.
I feel Remender captured that starry eyed reflective look back to your past really rather well. Those quiet times when you think that perhaps your best days are behind you. There is a wistfulness to this volume I find quite charming. That, and this is some of Roughridge and Craig's greatest work when it comes to the art.
This was without a doubt the final highlight of a very good series. One that unfortunately doesn't stick the landing with quite as much grace or slightly obnoxious aplomb. 4.5/5


OmniBen.

[deah · Rating 5 out of 5]

IF YOU LOVE SOMEONE ENOUGH TO DIE FOR THEM THEN YOU SURELY WILL

damn the way I have spent the last 6 years of my life adamantly not shipping marcus and saya bc they are SO bad for each other but now at this point in the story looking back really it was always them. not so much as a romance but they are bound and they are everything.

[CS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bullet Review:

As per usual, this volume wallows in navel gazing and then the final issue is explosive and thrilling. There are parts of this story that are agonizing and obnoxious - and then we get teased with these really great parts that keep me tuned in.

I could 100% have lived without seeing Marcus give himself an enema.

[Elisah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Saya’s chapter, but overall, it lacked the action I was looking for. Still good though! I need more.

[wiktoria]

13/05/2023

mam laga potężnego i jeszcze Marii nie było

[Pruett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love time jumps, and this volume is perfectly queuing up a reckoning with adulthood.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some closure but not all works out for the best. Is the school done for?

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The flash forward was a nice touch. It was pretty abrupt for Marcus and his allies to take down King’s Dominion over the course of a couple issues. I’m interested to see where else this book is going to go.

[Ilan Preskovsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

These past two volumes of Deadly Class have, unfortunately, seen this otherwise excellent series going a bit off the boil. There's still some terrific stuff in here - especially Craig's ever creative layouts and Loughridge's moody colours - but the constant time jumps in this volume give the whole thing a sense of bring rushed and more than a little disorientating. The biggest problem, though, is that while one can forgive, up to a point, Marcus being an unbearably pretentious douche as a teenager, it's significantly less easy when it seems that he has failed to have grown an iota even as we catch up with him in his 20s. The character has always walked a line between sympathetic and awful and, unfortunately, he falls right over that line in this penultimate volume. By shifting attention away from him back towards the larger cast in the second half of the book improves things immensely and that momentum will hopefully roll into the final volume.

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once upon a time, I marathon read this series. The last three or so volumes have made me wonder when I'm going to stop being so masochistic and just stop reading it entirely. Considering I have the last two comic issues after this volume, probably after that. But this is /not/ the series it started out as. It still has potent quotables, but it's doing the thing about comic continuity that I hate -- suddenly it was all a dream and everyone is inexplicably alive again and you're not entirely sure what is still canon and what isn't. So. Two more issues and I give up.

[Bill Coffin · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Chris Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one jumps all over the place through time, and it’s not very clear why it uses this narrative structure. This book is at its best in the second half when it focuses what happened at Marcus’s school. The early half features Marcus spouting his nihilistic philosophy as well as his issues with popular culture. This is Remender at his worst, which is why the book becomes infinitely better when Marcus isn’t talking about this stuff.

[RubiGiráldez RubiGiráldez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Encarando la recta final de esta excelsa serie comiquera, Rick Remender no duda en hacer unos cuantos saltos temporales en la historia que acaban resultando bastante frustrantes al comprobar que los 90" pasan en apenas un parpadeo en el que la revisión sociocultural a la que nos tenía acostumbrados en autor se vuelve a resumir en algún diálogo de su filia musical. Que se siente bastante reiterativa y que no considero que logre encapsular realmente la década (aunque el autor tira de todos los efectismos posibles como el particular "dormitorio" de Marcus en ese cuarto de baño y su ritmo de vida). También se siente precipitado la resolución de todo lo construido con King´s Dominion. No el cómo se ejecuta perse el plan de Marcus. Si no más bien el que no se hayan tenido un par de capítulos previos que se empleasen para aumentar el suspense y el ambiente de sempiterno peligro por el que se había caracterizado Clase Letal. Pero Remender se "salva el culo" con el juego de intercalar escenas futuras y pasadas para que no se le pueda achacar totalmente esto.

Sigue siendo todo lo que quieres meterte entre pecho y espalda de Clase Letal, con sus diálogos cínicos introspectivos, momentos descacharrantes como el "Peor Edema de la Historia" y acción y asesinatos a costa de las enseñanzas aprendidas en King´s Dominion con el siempre excelso arte de Wes Craig y Lee Loughridge a plena potencia. Pero sí que se siente el tomo más inconexo de su colección.

[Alex E · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the explosive vol 9, this volume feels like more of a reset to calm things down a bit.

So in this one, we fast forward a bit to see Marcus now trying to be a bit more "normal". He meets a nice young lady, and - don't get me wrong, he is still Marcus, so he is still a bit of scumbag. But after a lot that has happened, he kind of knows he is not good for people. He tries to not get close to this girl but cant, a little bit due to her as she obviously finds him intriguing, and so we get a re-introduction to Marcus and where he is mentally, at this point and time.

The book also flashes back to show us the demise of King's dominion. There's a lot of setup for that in this book, and it was cool to see the "gang" planning and trying to execute as best they can. Rick Remender is great a doing setup without really hitting you over the head with the details, so the book can speak for itself - so to speak.

And of course, the art by Wes Craig is great as always. There is a harshness in his linework that goes perfectly with the story. Even in calmer times, his line denotes the inner ugliness in Marcus, and I think Craig is so good for this book. Great job by the art team overall.

Of course, things don't stay calm for long as shit starts spiraling out of control towards the end of the book. Let's see how Remender wraps things up as well settle in for the final volumes of the book.

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder if story fatigue set in on the writers or the readers first...

This volume gives us several time jumps to show us the characters AFTER the fall of the school and how the fall came to happen. Thinking out loud, other stories have gone on 'hiatus' and let the writers and artists work on other things. Would this series have benefitted from a break? I feel like the pacing is off. It's still a good read, but it isn't hitting the highs it hit around the first years of publication.
-----
AAAAAAAAAND...
Jump cut. The start of this volume is in 1991. Marcus is just and moody and empty as ever. Trying to fit in without doing anything to fix the damage. He's trying to get the survivors from the 2nd freshman class to help him with some new project. They all claim to have moved on, but they're convinced to help him out (plus, a cameo by the 'Circus Circus' neon clown acid flashback clown)

Jump back to 1989 and we get the final days of the assassination school. It's time for finals to start again, and Marcus' plan will shake things up.
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Bonus: 'Kill the rats!' vs 'Kill the snakes!' ...the ongoing debate
Bonus Bonus: When you don't have anything to write about, fall back on poop commentary.. (still?)

[JCRD]

Este tomo me ha entrado mejor también con la relectura.

El latigazo cervical que me pegó la primera el cambio del statu quo nada más empezarlo me rayó tanto que creo ya no fui capaz de apreciar en condiciones el resto. En parte siento que Remender ya no sabe muy bien qué contar con estos chavales al cerrar de golpe y porrazo la premisa inicial y tirando adelante sin tener un objetivo claro, pero por otro lado da algunas de las conversaciones más introspectivas de su cocreación y las acompaña con un número de acción explosiva como no se veía desde el séptimo arco.

El último tercio de Clase Letal no deja indiferente a nadie, y creo que una segunda vuelta le está sentando mejor de lo esperado.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has long been one of my favorite series, but this collection was a bit of a mess, to be honest. With its flashforwards and glossing over of some key moments from the past (the fall of Kings Dominion), everything was just a bit too fragmented to really land and have the impact that it should. I guess it's hard to continually go over the top with the violence and the chaos and that was kind of the vibe here. But it looks like there's still more to come, so hopefully that final volume (volumes?) will wrap everything up successfully.