A comiXologist Recommends:
Jonah Chuang recommends Deadly Class #6

I’ve been really enjoying Rick Remender (rickremender) , Wesley Craig (wescraigcomics​) and Lee Loughridge’s new series, Deadly Class. It feels like a cross between X-Men, Harry Potter, the Breakfast Club, and Game of Thrones in that it’s a school for exceptional teenage misfits to learn a special set of skills, but everyone’s either brutally killing or having sex with each other.

Deadly Class takes place in 1987 at a school for assassins. The students are the children of the most over-the-top caricatures of the world’s most violent archetypes– Neo Nazis, Cartel leaders, drug dealers, gangsters of all kinds– and they takes classes like Beheading, Poison and AP Black Arts. The main character, Marcus Lopez, is a crazy wreck that you can’t help but love, despite the terrible things he sometimes does. He’s a struggling, lost kid in a hostile world who’s in love with a girl who’s way out of his league. If twenty years of reading comics and watching TV and movies has taught me anything it’s that you can’t go wrong with this formula.

“But if it’s been done before, why should you care?” That’s a good point, reader. My response would be because it hasn’t been done exactly like this before. Marcus is no Peter Parker or Aladdin, he’s a desperate homeless kid with a horrifying past who gets high and kills people. Also, when you pick up early issues of Amazing Spider-Man you never get the sense that Flash Thompson will kill Peter Parker in the course of his bullying, but you don’t get that sense of security with Deadly Class. In this closing chapter of the first story arc, students are shot, stabbed, beaten and slashed on almost every page, so the stakes are noticeably higher.

Deadly Class is one of the most exciting, gripping and dynamic stories on the shelves today. Don’t let it slip through the cracks!

[Read Deadly Class #6 on comiXology]

For fans of: action

_{Jonah Chuang is a production coordinator assistant at comiXology. He lives in Queens with his two rescue dogs, Baby J and Li'l Sebastian.}