Deadly Class vol. 10: Save Your Generation

It’s the penultimate volume of Rick Remender and Wes Craig’s high-school-assassin-kids series, and I’m a little concerned that things may be going out with a whimper rather than a bang.  That’s because the narrative for this volume takes a circuitous, fractured path before it winds up at the fireworks factory.  In fact, those of you wondering about the cliffhanger ending from vol. 9 are going to have to wait a bit for answers as the first issue starts us off in 1991 with a broken-down Marcus dispensing pizza, drugs, and sanctimony disguised as wisdom in a Phoenix motel.  Then things jump ahead six years and he hooks back up with some old friends to take care of some unfinished business.  The point-of-view changes for our next time jump to 2001 as someone who is arguably the most lost soul of this series circles closer to the drain before an old friend extends them a hand (with a gun in it, of course) to help.  After all this, we jump back to 1989 to see the laws of nature turned on their head as the rats rise up to kill the snakes.

A great deal of the appeal of “Deadly Class” for me has been the fact that it’s the one Remender-written series where seeing him grind down his cast has actually been part of the fun.  That’s something which is missing from this volume as the bad things that happen to the cast here are more depressing than entertaining.  Worse still is that the way the narrative jumps around over the course of the first three issues keeps it from building up a real sense of momentum before the end.  The final issue does do a decent enough job of that all on its own as all Hell breaks out at King’s Dominion and Remender and Craig deliver some truly impressive action sequences to showcase the carnage.  I’m still left looking forward to seeing how all this wraps up in the final volume, even if I should’ve been more excited about it given how good the series has been up until now.

Oh, and there’s no way that sparing that character in the final issue was the right move.  No amount of moralizing can change that, Marcus…