Deadly Class #54
As Zenzelle tries to reveal the truth about Brandi, Marcus’s dreams all come true in Deadly Class #54, by writer Rick Remender, artist Wes Craig, colorist Lee Loughridge, and letterer Rus Wooton. This issue is entertaining, but it also feels very much like Rick Remender talking to the audience.
In New York, Zenzelle tries to get the New York Times to look into Brandi’s past and her ties to white supremacist groups. The paper basically refuses, and she and Tosahwi leave in a taxi. In San Francisco, Marcus talks to his agent about selling Lone Star as a TV show. He talks to Maria about it later, and she tells him to get over himself and do it. Three months later, he’s in Vancouver, working on his show, and gets one bright shining moment. The next day, he goes home to record a Honda commercial because the company is a sponsor and realizes that his life right now is exactly what he wanted it to be, regardless of the specters of the past.
So, reading this issue feels like Rick Remender talking about his own life. For example, Lone Star, a sci-fi book, gets its adaptation on the Crime Network, a network known for cheesy genre stuff. It’s not hard to see the art imitating life there. There’s no bitterness about the end of the Deadly Class TV show, just a man questioning if this is what he wanted. An old punk rocker who has to deal with the fact that he’s possibly sold out.
There’s a feeling of just how hard the showrunner life is, a glorious moment of clarity getting to see someone’s imagination brought to life in reality, and the answer to the question of whether Marcus has sold out. This book and Black Science both dig into Gen X ennui and the effects it had on Remender’s generation. That’s pretty much the entirety of this issue after the opening sequence with Zenzelle. Just Rick Remender talking about that moment where the teenage ghosts he used to know tell him he sold out and him realizing that was the whole point.
This issue is yet another one that depends on Craig’s character acting, and it works so well. This is all just watching Marcus react to his life, and it’s brilliant. Readers get to feel what he feels masterfully, with Loughridge’s colors complementing the line work beautifully.
Deadly Class #54 is all about an aging punk asking himself the hard questions. Remender using Deadly Class to talk about Gen X isn’t exactly new, but this chapter has some moments of happiness that readers don’t often get from this book. Craig and Loughridge do a lot of heavy lifting to make this very dialogue-heavy issue work better than it has any right to.
