Deadly Class vol. 3: The Snake Pit

I only lasted one volume on “Low.”  “Black Science” is starting to wear out its welcome.  I’m not sure if I’ll be giving “Tokyo Ghost” and “Devolution” a chance when they’re collected in trades.  Yet I think “Deadly Class” may wind up being the one creator-owned project from Rick Remender that I wind up sticking with for the long haul.  Yes, a whole lot of bad things happen to protagonist Marcus Lopez and his friends, to the point where it could start to come off like a depressing grind.  The difference here is that it happens to be so damn much fun at the same time.  Like the way this volume hits the ground running from the cliffhanger we left off on as Marcus and maybe-still-kinda-girlfriend Maria outrun vengeful cartel killers through explosions and fire on the streets of San Francisco.  It’s a bravura two-issue action sequence illustrated by Wes Craig that fires at full tilt through the very end and is amped up even further by the emotions Remender has his characters pour into it.  Teen melodrama is far more entertaining to behold when it involves a girl in skull-face makeup setting her opponents on fire and lopping their heads off with a well-placed strike of her fan.

After that, the story shifts back to Kings Dominion and Marcus and his crew start dealing with the fallout from their nighttime raid in their own ways.  That is to say, the story doesn’t slow down — it just gets crazy in a whole new way.  With two deaths on his conscience, Marcus slinks into a drug-fueled haze that only serves to alienate his other friends.  Which is an even worse thing than it sounds as his paranoia and opportunistic classmates start to get the better of him.  There may be a lot of talking heads here, but it doesn’t stop Craig from investing the school scenes with the same delirious energy — and a healthy dose of psychedelics in one stretch — he brought to the opening arc.  While these scenes also find Remender up to his old tricks of grinding his protagonist down, the difference here is that Marcus brings most of these problems upon himself and is just unlikeable enough to be interesting.  So it’s a lot of fun to see him suffer, and wonder if he’ll eventually recognize his self-destructive tendencies and change before he winds up dead because of them.  “Deadly Class” ultimately proves that teenage angst is at its most entertaining when the kids are allowed to play out their desires to their fullest tilt (see also, “Battle Royale”).  It’s also a thrilling dose of over-the-top fun that leaves me anticipating the next volume — unlike Remender’s other above-mentioned projects.