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Kickback Comics
"Deadly Class" by Rick Remender Issues 1-3 (Ep. 22)
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Episode 22 is here! Ben and Antonio dive into Deadly Class by Rick Remender and Wes Craig, breaking down issues 1–3. This week we explore trauma, survival, and the brutal world of King's Dominion — a Hogwarts type school, but your homework is to kill somebody fr fr.
Be part of the discussion on Instagram: @KickbackComics_Pod
Hey there everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Kickback Comics. My name is Antonio.
SPEAKER_02My name is Ben, and y'all are listening to a comic book podcast.
SPEAKER_03By two guys who have not read a lot of comics but are looking to get involved, read some cool stories, maybe become part of a school for deadly assassins. I don't know. Maybe something about the president. We'll talk about it. Yep.
SPEAKER_02We are murdering people this episode. That is what we're doing. So hang on. Yeah. We're doing a book club. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you. Uh this week we read the first three issues of Deadly Class.
SPEAKER_03Deadly Class, bro. This is, and this is one that's been on the docket for a little while. Like, but I think before we even started doing this, you were talking about doing this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. The the backstory um like reading history for me is I read the first, yeah, I read the first, I think, six issues a couple years ago and just went, okay, this book is so cool. Like I think I read it on my iPad or something. I was like, okay, when I see the opportunity to buy it, I'm I'm gonna buy all of it. And then I saw, I'm holding for you podcasters, this huge ass coffee say coffee table book sized like collected edition. Um, and it has the first, let's see, how many it says? It's gonna be like what, 15 or something like that. It's pretty big. Yeah, it is. It's it's what it's the first one through 16 issues. And what's crazy though, too, is I got these so on sale at Comic-Con, I have the first three of these. Wow.
SPEAKER_03So how long? How many issues of this are they?
SPEAKER_02Each one is 16. So how many issues of Deadly Class are they? I think like so there's more than three. I have it's exactly 56 issues. 56 issues. Yes. That's more achievable than invincible. Yeah. But this is one of those that I think we'll we'll try to read, we'll read through um a good amount of it over time, probably.
SPEAKER_03This has been this this was like a super fun read, and and and and we're doing, I guess, a couple less issues than we normally do trying something out, but I think that this is like it's a good, it's a good three. It gets us into the story, and it's gonna be exciting when we come back to it for the next for the next three or however many we end up doing for sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's uh it's a really cool story, and let's just let's jump into some some context. The uh the creative team of Deadly Class, the writer is uh Rick Remender, the artist is Wes Craig, the color artist is Lee uh Lowridge, yeah, or Lowridge or something like that. Lowridge, regardless that shout out. Shout out to Lee. Uh the colors in this book are incredible. Yeah, super fun. And then letterer is uh Russ Wooten, who we've been seen before.
SPEAKER_03We're recognizing names here. Yeah, this is feeling good. We're really we're becoming we're gonna have to change the intro at some point. We're gonna have to be saying like we read a reasonable amount of comics, but we haven't read them all.
SPEAKER_02We're coming up on our first uh first year of recording. Yeah, honestly. That's gonna be like when we get to this fall. So pretty soon we're gonna be like we've got season two. Season two is gonna begin. We'll we'll talk about what all that means when we get there. Yeah, we also need to have some conversations about what that means. But it means something.
SPEAKER_03That's all you gotta know.
SPEAKER_02But season two, yeah. Get ready for season two. You guys are not ready.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you're not ready. We're we're not ready yet, but you're also not ready to be.
SPEAKER_02We're all gonna get ready together. We're gonna find what it means to be ready.
SPEAKER_03It's gonna be super good. But they they all went crazy on this. I'm I'm having I'm having a great time reading this. I think it's just kind of like a I mean, just off these first couple of issues, it's I mean, it's kind of messed up to say in a way, because of how morbid a lot of the stuff is, but it's it's just a good story, I think for sure. And I think it's I think it's just fun in the sense that like I I don't know, I have a lot of fun with these types of things where it's like you I don't know, you it's kind of like uh it's a little bit darker, but it gives me kind of like some like Naruto vibes of like, you know, cool disenfranchised kid who's like coming up. He's I mean Naruto is way less about like I guess like revenge in the sense of like negativity, but it's like trying to prove something, coming up going up against um these systems that have like held you down, whatever else. That's always my kind of classic throwback one there. And we also talked about um Catcher in the Rye, too. That's like another I did not I do not remember enough of that, but I think that there were definitely some kind of parallels of just like this uh these disenfranchised kids, right, that are living in this world.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, this story definitely has a very intense tone. Yeah. It's kind of edgy, uh non like non-apologetic. I'd say it I don't know if this analogy works for everybody, but to me, it feels like how Tarantino movies feel to me. Where part of part of what the value is is this just kind of raw shock value, violent, um, you know, I I just said unapologetic, but yeah, you know, there it's sort of boundary pushing some some stuff, you know.
SPEAKER_03Right. I think I think that you know one of the things that we have even I think touched on before before jumping on the pod today was that like you know, you can and I think that probably even in a couple of um the forewords and things like that talk about like the the again the word that you use, unapologetic, which I think is kind of the perfect thing for this, but it's like we're getting the author, I think, pretty obviously in this story, right? It's like there are obviously things that are, you know, um for the story, but I feel like we're getting a lot of um there's feelings, there's opinions, there's whatever else that is that is seeping through, I think, a lot of what goes on in this story. Um and personal experiences too, right? So but this is gonna be a good one. Um this is also we're back at I can't remember if you mentioned this already, but we're back at image, bro. Image, they really do be releasing a lot of bangers. I don't know. It's it's tough to get away from them, I feel like, because they're just so good.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean the the medium of comics is vast as we've been learning. Yes. And Marvel and Marvel and you know, Iron Man and Batman are a narrow sliver of what comics have to it's like all of what we think of in the collective consciousness, and as far as the cool storytelling goes, it's just of just a piece of the puzzle.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's it's like the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg, yeah, is what we're really seeing.
SPEAKER_02Which is and people like, oh you know, say, Oh yeah, I'm reading comics, that's great. People be like, okay, so you like love superheroes. I'm like, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm actually beyond that now, bro.
SPEAKER_03I'm like on a different level. It's like those memes where the guy's like, you know, it's like the the space like brain, like he just is getting more and more like mind-blown type of whatever else. But uh yeah, we're on a different level now. We're into storytelling, yeah. We're into storytelling. Um they'd be telling stories in that's for sure, too. But we're we just we've expanded. So who knows? Maybe maybe season two we are changing the intro. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02We are reading a lot of superhero stories. I'm not trying to put any shade on superhero stories at all. We have a great one. That's part of the fun of this. We're like we fuck with superheroes. It's cool. Superheroes, it's superheroes and go check out our Invincible episodes. We're reading Invincible right now. Yeah, and Invincible is just like such a celebration of superheroes. It is. Uh definitely is. But Deadly Class is more just a examination of fucked up kids.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, fucked up kids and just like the things. Violence and the things that have led to um that violence and that shit being fucked up and these kids being either. I mean, our main main guy, Marcus, who we'll talk about in just a bit here, is disenfranchised, out on the street, very angry for um real tangible reasons.
SPEAKER_02Um and his family. Yep. Um that's good. Yes, let's see, uh jump into the dossier. Uh there's a little we got a little blurb prepared here about why Deadly Class matters. Deadly Class became one of Image Comics' defining creator-owned books of the 2010s. While its premise sounds like Harry Potter for Assassins, the series is really about trauma, identity, class, abuse, and survival. Much of Marcus's perspective is drawn from Rick Remender's own experiences growing up in the punk scene of 1980s California, giving the story an unusually personal voice beneath its violent exterior.
SPEAKER_03There you go, right? That personal voice. And this is also just uh and another way fun for me being from California. This is in the Bay Area, right? That's where all the shit is going down.
SPEAKER_02When I moved to LA, the my lock screen of my phone and my computer has been Deadly Class. It's it's like the gang from Deadly Class hanging out in front of a 7-Elevens.
SPEAKER_03It's so funny. I'm like, now it's like it's so funny that you guys are hearing this because I've just been seeing these like lock screens on Ben's like computer for the longest time, right? And now I'm I know I'm contextualizing all of the things that are going on. And even I actually don't even think it's in the part that we're getting into today today, but there are 7-Elevens are involved in this story for sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, 7-Elevens are a big part of our life here in the valley in in Los Angeles in general. Um But yeah, and then actually my phone, I guess my phone, I where's my my phone lock screen now is Yeah, let's see what it is.
SPEAKER_03Oh wow, yeah, we got it from our boy Silver Surfer. Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_02Yep, and that inspired me to change it. So um yeah, it's been but it's been deadly class for a few years. That that was sort of the energy I was trying to bring into my move to LA, you know. Just no fucks giving. I'm trying to I'm trying to kill people.
SPEAKER_03I'm trying to do drugs and kill people. Yeah, which uh which half of that will happen in LA. And I guess depending on where you're at, you get to pick what half, but you know, right, right, right, right. It's a good time. But so diving into deadly class, one thing that we'll talk about before we get into the actual issues, and I think actually I'm gonna I'm gonna probably hand this over to you just because of what you were talking about with the art, but just seeing like Wes Craig and Lee Lowridge are doing with um the art in this is just crazy. I mean, the first thing that I'll say here is like the color palette that is picked for this, I think does feel distinct than a good amount of the stuff that we've even read so far. And I think that um I mean there's a lot of really, really cool art. It's it's funny, it's it's one of these things, and I it's kind of fun for me and Ben because there's a lot of times where when we come to this um come to do this podcast together that well, you know, Ben will be like opening up a book and being and saying, Hey bro, you gotta check out this like thing, and I'll like turn my computer around and we've taken like a screenshot of like the same thing, and there's a lot of that that goes on here, but there's just a lot of really, really cool, not only color usage and stuff like that, but um just the way that the panel panels play with each other. We're gonna have to talk about our boy Scotty again, of course, um, and just the kind of these moment-to-moment things and whichever else. But um, I've enjoyed this so far, and I think that especially like the action that we end up seeing. I don't know if you guys heard the fireworks going on. Yeah, it's it's a it's the fifth of July. We're still going. Um, but uh I I really enjoy, I think, the way that they do like the action and like the choreography of this stuff. There's actually a specific scene that I think I think we'll get to talk about in this, but um yeah, it's just it's choreographed. Like that's the word that I want to use. It's choreographed very, very well. But anyway, that's kind of the intro to the art. What what else do you got to say, Ben, about the art?
SPEAKER_02About the art in general. I mean, I think one thing uh that's really striking about this is the way they they set up the panels, right? That's our big thing from uh the core thing where I was trying to talk about from Scott McLeod, understanding comics is their use of storytelling through these panels, right? Um, right off the bat, all the panels are just white negative space that cut these lines through the art that is taking up like the whole page, basically. And that they never break that. Uh at least in in what we have so far, what we've looked at, it's entirely that way. So it feels so uniform, it feels super like designed in that way. Um, all the panels are usually just like rectangular, but they're in all sorts of different directions. Uh when action is happening, they'll have them slanted to the side. When something chaotic is happening, they'll have them in a jumble. One of the coolest uses I've seen so far is they'll have these huge splash pages that are of a really zoomed out like overhead shot of the scene. Right. Almost looks like a Where's Waldo type page.
SPEAKER_03Yes. I mean, it I that was the first, like the first thing that came to my mind with some of these was Where's Waldo for sure.
SPEAKER_02Right. But then and then in within that larger picture, there will be zoomed in smaller panels that are telling our story and letting time pass across this larger picture. They do that a couple different times, and that's just remarkably well done. Um, the biggest thing though is color. I mean, the the the use of color is just just phenomenal. It's so stark, there's very little shading. Everything is just these uh block, uh block fill sort of um sort of techniques. It also each page is thought of from like a color perspective like as a whole. Uh, and that energy really carries through what's going on in that scene. Um it and it will be with it's not just like setting to setting, they'll change the the color palette. They could be in the same setting, but what the energy, like whatever energy is happening, um, is what it's going to be depicted in. I'm looking at some of these pictures here, like we've got a motorcycle chase, and I was just see again, this is what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_03I was just literally looking at that right now, thinking the same thing.
SPEAKER_02Everything is maroon, everything is burgundy, like these really dark specific reds. Um, and then you turn the next page and we're inside the cop car, which is all blue. And then they do they crash and they're fleeing, and now everything is yellow. Um, so it's just really fresh and and cool. Again, this is guys, we're trying our best to convey beautiful art through us just you gotta go pick it up, saying words like you gotta look at this. You gotta look at it.
SPEAKER_03Um obviously check the IG, check the IG, it'll be up there too.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, go get the book. At the very least, check the IG, which is kickback comics pod underscore, underscore pod, maybe on in on Instagram. And I hey, I try I I try to carefully select, I can only post 20 at a time. It doesn't matter. But I try to carefully select the the 20 most relevant uh pages, and I pick uh some cool ass music that fits the tone. That's true, and you can listen to the snippet of that song and look at the art. And it's gonna feel good, it's gonna feel good, and you're gonna be like, that's what they're talking about.
SPEAKER_03I get it though. You know, okay, random thing. This is this is just a random interjection before we get into the the the realness of it. So, first thing, I was looking up Where's Waldo just because just I wanted to see again 1987. That's when the first book comes out, which makes sense for also the timing of when the story is going on. Funny thing, I also just learned it's called Where's Wally originally. I did not know that. It's literally, bro, we're getting like translations from like you like UK and Australian English into North American English where it's Where's Waldo, bro? Who is Waldo? But we gotta find it. We gotta find there it is. But anyway, Where's Wally? That I I almost felt like I was having like a what do they call it? Like the Mandela effect or whatever else you're like misremembering, but Where's Waldo also existed?
SPEAKER_02So that's funny. I haven't thought about that in a while. I am I I I've spent a lot of time living and uh traveling and stuff in Europe, and there's hella stuff like that that I forever forget about where it's like, oh, you guys just have a oh we there's a different word for that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. But anyway, shout-out Wally. Shout out Wally, shout out Waldo. Yeah, the boys. All right, let's get into it. Deadly class issue number one. Um I'll read our little issue summary here and then we'll we'll get into the deeper parts of this. But so our protagonist, Marcus Lopez Arguello, um, is homeless in 1987 San Francisco, the year of Wally, uh, or yeah, the year of Wally, 1987. And in the year of our Lord and Savior Wally, 1987 San Francisco, living with the weight of a violent past. Um, after a police chase, he's rescued by students of this school called uh King's Dominion. It's got a longer name, which we'll talk about, but it's a secret school for assassins. Um the uh master of this uh schoolmaster, Lynn, offers him a place at it, uh, seek potential in his anger, survival instincts, and also the um revenge that he wants to uh enact upon specific individuals. Um and this issue ends with Marcus stepping into this kind of dangerous new world where he's been homeless, and a lot of this first issue is him experiencing that and just dealing with the shittiness that is being homeless. Um but then yeah, he gets into this new world unexpectedly, and uh it's gonna be a crazy ride from from the beginning. But so this was an interesting first chapter. We get a lot of the lay of the land of who Marcus is, just the things that he's experiencing. Um being homeless, uh the the the death of his parents, which is I mean, just it's it's pretty like horrific that whole situation.
SPEAKER_02But um Yeah, it's not cute.
SPEAKER_03It's it's very uh cute, that is correct.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's it's it's again unapologetic. It's brutal, it's a pretty brutal snapshot of what life on the streets could be like for a teenager, uh for anybody, realistically. Um but yeah, that we we get sh literal shots of him just begging for money. He's saying, uh, I've been paranoid lately. I feel like I'm being watched, but nobody sees me. Not really, do they just look through me? Um they wonder if I let this happen, they must think I'm weak. Can't imagine that they would end up here.
SPEAKER_03That's always always such a classic. And I think I'm gonna even keep reading the thing that you did because it was one of the quotes that I wrote down, but he says, you know, someone walking by them in their shanty home ignoring their existence. It's just way easier to judge the poor than to be charitable. Easier to think I've done something to deserve this, and in my case, maybe they're right. And they got this really like devious image of him when they say that. So there's something that we're gonna learn here. We haven't learned it yet, but maybe there's some shit going down with Marcus, um the complex idea of deserving that, but uh, you know, Marcus is a complex guy, as we'll go on to to learn. Um he ends up uh he's trying to get some money from these uh guys and he gives this guy gives him like a paper. I think he gives him just like the job section of the paper, um, and Marcus steals his wallet and thinks about even going and paying him a visit later. But the big thing that we get here is going through these months where Marcus is sleeping in the rough, sleeping outside, um, and we get this memory of basically how his parents uh ended up dying. And we get I might actually end end up reading kind of the whole chunk of this just to give you guys the background of his parents, but um he talks about the thing that's keeping that's uh keeping him awake is not the cold and in uh and him thinking about the winter, but he says it's the dreams of sunshine. Seeing the two of them again makes the cold that much harder to bear. Uh Marcus Lopez Arguello, he had to change his name after we took it. Uh we came here, so I took it. So this is about his dad and mom. He says his dad was a cop, a cop who was tricked into helping Reagan CIA smuggle arms to the Contras. The Sandististas or S um Sandinistas uh blew up our home in payment. Uh this isn't a dress rehearsal. This is uh what his dad sent him uh said to him. This isn't a dress rehearsal, Marcus. You you only get the one turn. Life is a series of unique opportunities. It's our job to find the happiness in each one. Um when when uh Marcus was five, they fled Nicaragua. Uh, they were given refuge in San Francisco, and after years of turmoil, his mom and dad were finally happy. Um and Marcus was trying to, but what ends up happening, um, you know, he ends up saying that he starts kind of realizing that everybody's gonna die at some point and that bad things are waiting around the corner. Um and in the end, all of that anxiety, all that worrying about the future, it doesn't change anything. What we end up learning is that and this is actually goes into what his whole revenge story is later on, but he says Reagan cut funding to U.S. mental health facilities, releasing hundreds of mentally ill into the streets, including Barbara Salinger, suicidal schizophreniac, um or schizophrenic, um Barbara Salinger, who made every fear I ever had come true. And one of the things that um he doesn't say outright here, but we end up seeing through the panels is this woman basically ends up committing suicide. I'm assuming this is off of uh Golden Gate, which is uh very much a thing. Um but she ends up committing suicide off the edge of that bridge and she lands on top of both uh Marcus's parents and killing them both immediately. And so this is uh uh yeah, terrible. I mean, this all of these panels are also just like horrifying. Yeah, horrifying. It almost I don't know if you've ever actually seen you ever seen the movie Schindler's List? Oh, yeah, with the red with the red. So there's a little bit of a kind of thing right there, but this a lot of this these panels here in the memory are gray, except for this kind of red balloon, and then the only other red that appears after that is all of the blood after the the suicide ends up happening and killing both of his parents. So really intense off the bat.
SPEAKER_02And so yeah, so that's really the origin of our main character here is he uh wants to kill Reagan.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02And a big part of that is Reagan cutting, I mean, he cut funding and changed regulation all across America for in in many ways that we're still grappling with now in the real world. Just Google that shit.
SPEAKER_03Google Google Reagan and you will have a very sad time, probably.
SPEAKER_02But um, but regardless, uh yeah, one of the things Reagan did was uh release all of these homeless people that had been in mental health facilities throughout the country, just kicked him out, and then this lady, schizophrenic lady, committed suicide on top of his parents.
SPEAKER_03Yep.
SPEAKER_02Um what a what how wild, how novel. What a crazy background. And then he ends up like going in and out of different foster homes, have r living rough, and then ending up on the streets as a teenager.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_02Uh, which also just relates, you know, part of the thing we're examining, homelessness tied to um you know, Reagan putting all these people back on the streets who were in facilities and whatnot. Um clearly something that the author is trying to examine. Also him being from California, the homelessness and housing problems Yeah, the epidemics that are happening. I mean, still a lot of this stuff is going on, right? And it's it's which is part of what makes what makes this book so cool to read is this book was published in the 2010s. Right. Uh it's set in the eighties.
SPEAKER_03We're reading it in the tail end of the 2020s, and it's all relevant, which is I mean, it's like it's cool in the fact that it still feels fresh, and it's also terrible in the fact that it is still very, very relevant, right, of what's going on. But Yeah, so uh Marcus is is definitely not a fan of Reagan, and we kind of continue to go through his um kind of day-by-day existence of getting his shoes stolen, where we kind of see the first moment of Marcus's possible violent tendencies. Um I mean he's getting his stuff stolen, this guy's stealing his journal, which is something he really doesn't want to lose, but he basically almost ends up killing this guy until he learns that the guy has an in uh an infection. He actually ends up giving him uh the shoes, uh, but he just wants his journal in his backpack, and so he keeps that and keeps going on. We also start seeing that somebody is definitely um watching him. And he he actually realized this a little bit earlier, but somebody is watching him, and we're starting to see um somebody with tattoos kind of in the background of some of these uh images here, which is pretty interesting. I definitely did not know who this was. Um Yeah.
SPEAKER_02We're getting we don't even know it yet, but we're getting introduced to some who are gonna be some of his clique when he ends up at the school in the deadly class, as it were.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, as it as it were.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, it's some other big moments from the first first chapter. Is he it looks like he is actually gonna commit suicide himself. Yep. Um, he is like when things are bad enough, uh, you know, he's like, I I need help. Need to find some kind of reason to keep fighting no matter how hard I try. The bad voice won't rest, and I'm losing the fight. Um so and then this woman, he hears this voice basically tell him to not jump, uh, which ends up we realize later being one of his future classmates. Uh then he we we have this whole scene where uh police are sort of after him and start start chasing.
SPEAKER_03This is actually, I do love the scene. This is the one that I was thinking about when I was thinking about choreography. We have this is um during Dia de los Muertos in um and I guess obviously I think this is in the mission district in in San Francisco. Um and the way that the action is interwoven with the dancing of I think what we actually end up learning on uh uh later on is another member of the deadly class, but the inner the um inter kind of splicing of the action and her dancing and the way that they do all this stuff is actually really kind of um really beautiful the way that they go uh in between this. And I I like this piece uh piece of this a lot for sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's amazing. She's got the full makeup, uh like her face is like one of the sugar skulls or whatever. Um and yeah, so we see she's there dancing, she's causing the distraction. Uh we've got our boy Willie tells him, hey, it's a sting, basically give him the heads up he needs to run. We don't even know Willie yet. We don't even know him yet. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_03But he says, Hey brother, you gotta get out of here.
SPEAKER_02Uh then uh the character that we later learned is named uh Saya Soya, right? Yeah, I think Saya. Saya, she has a motorcycle, she's just like get on.
SPEAKER_03It was kind of like Girl with the Dragon tattoo kind of looking.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we she's Japanese, we learn, and she has hella tattoos. Yeah. Um, which is sick. He jumps on the motorcycle. That we have this whole amazing police chase.
SPEAKER_03Uh this is some interesting panels in here for sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, oh my gosh. At interesting angles, making it feel like they have momentum. Also, like the similar use where there's larger pictures, and then our characters are like pictured multiple times, leaping throughout the artwork in ways that are crazy. Um, but yeah, she she is really on some some X Games mode. Yeah, bro. I I wrote in my notes, I was like, this girl is a ninja. I was like, goddamn. Yeah, she's like doing flips, busting through windshields, kills a cop. Um, it's wild. Our main character is just barely making it through all the stuff. Yeah, just holding onto the motorcycle. She ends up stabbing a cop who's gonna shoot him with a katana. Um, and so basically this whole thing, it's it's real violence. It's not like PG 13, whatever violence. So the the violence depicted in these books is uh in some in some ways realistic. Obviously, people aren't always like front flipping between cars and stuff, but yeah, um, but they stab people and shoot people the same way. Yeah, they definitely do. All do.
SPEAKER_03And this is also where we start to get, I mean, within kind of these uh probably like 10 pages altogether, there's like moments where kind of what Ben was talking about earlier, where there's color, right? There's like red, which is like kind of takes over for a moment, then we have these moments of blue, these moments of yellow, where like everything is tinted this way. Um and it's it's it's it's fun. I I you know, I feel like this is something that maybe I I probably have thought about it in some ways, but like you know, using color as like a storytelling device, right? Like this is to a certain extent kind of giving us um the separation of the moments, right, through color. It's like these each of these beats that are happening are like there's like the the beat that's red, there's the moment that's like yellow, there's the moment that's blue, right? And each of these are distinct moments in their own right, and that color palette gives them even more of the vibe. Like it kind of works for actually where they are too. It's like you're underneath these bright lights and you get this yellow tint to everything, but it also works very, very well for the feeling of what's actually going on in the scene as well.
SPEAKER_02Yep. Yeah, it's amazing. You guys just gotta look at it for yourselves. Yeah, you really do. Um, narrative-wise, this guy, what's his name? Mr. Lynn. True. Master Lynn. Master Lynn. Master Lynn pulls up. They've kidnapped him, all his all his classmates.
SPEAKER_03He gets kidnapped, and that's when we learn that all these people that have been helping out with this escape are part of the deadly class, as it were.
SPEAKER_02Right. And he's basically this guy pitches Master Lynn's like, hey, your life sucks. You should come be in my school, and we're gonna train you to be one of the world's greatest assassins surrounded by other assassins. Um, and it's gonna be sick. It's gonna be on some John Wick shit. That movie's not even gonna come out. But yeah, for a minute. And Marcus is like, nah.
SPEAKER_03Yes, and then you know changes his mind. Yeah. Girl comes out, she says, Hey, what if you did do this? And he's like, Alright, you got a good point.
SPEAKER_02Also, same same woman, same, same girl, Pierre, who told him not to commit suicide, uh, got him on the motorcycle. She's really the one made like turning his life around here.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and she's or at least turning it, turning it in some direction. In a direction. Yeah, in a direction.
SPEAKER_02It's not like they're getting it right. It's not like, hey, come, come come be happy. It's like, bro, your life is already so bad.
SPEAKER_03At least you can sleep somewhere, am I right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we'll give you a bed and make you kill people.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and so that's that will be better than what you have going on right now. Yeah, and so she actually one of the things that Master Lynn says is, you know, his choices are now on your head, Saya. So um, she's gonna be kind of the one who's uh uh uh taking control of this stuff. And we learn all the rules of their um society that's in there, basically that if they ever, you know, if he ever reveals the location of the school, uh Master Lynn says you will be eviscerated in your sleep. Um there's no insine killing, no sex, no drugs. Tough first couple of ones. Uh they don't really follow. They don't follow that at all. No disobedience, you know, do what your instructors say. Um and they see a lot of raw talent in him, but he he gets introduced to the school, and I guess this is underground, I guess it is. Yeah, I think it is.
SPEAKER_02They go through all these, all these like tunnels and stuff. So it's like a whole park, uh, like a it's like a Hogwarts adjacent looking. Yeah. But I guess underneath San Francisco.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, the King's Dominion School of the Deadly Arts. And we get this full big splash page that shows us what this place looks like. It's kind of like a it's kind of like a haunted mansion type of thing. They got the Grim Reaper statue out there, but we get this really kind of crazy blue hue of being underneath. But that's what wraps up issue number one. Crazy. I mean, it's it's intense off-rip. We're getting a lot of action, we're getting a lot of violence, we're getting a lot of important backstory to who Marcus is um himself. And uh yeah, I mean, we're about to just get deeper into it. It's this it ramps up pretty quick. And so I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna dive into issue number two. Do you want to do the summary for this one?
SPEAKER_02Sure. Yeah, I can read it. All right, so issue number two. Marcus begins adjusting to King's Dominion and learns how brutal the school's social structure really is. High school. Yep, it it's ex yeah. Um, it's tough. He meets different cliques, including legacies from major criminal families and other outsider rats like himself. Uh, he starts forming connections with Willie, Saya, Maria, and Billy. The issue sets up his first real assignment to kill someone who deserves it. Yep. Uh, which is which is wild. Um, yeah, we get, I mean, basically, this is him getting acquainted with the school, right? Uh we learned some like like we sort of mentioned, uh, every student from Dominion sort of comes from a different criminal tradition, and it's referencing a lot of that. Like we've got the Yakuza, we've got cartels, we've got the mafia, street games, yeah. Spies, cults, um, you know, all these different tropes that we could think of that are like spy under underground, underworld, uh gang affiliated, mob affiliated. We've got sort of like stereotypical um students that are all sort of clicked up like that. Like it's if this is Hogwarts, it's like the houses are literally just uh like split up by like race and right.
SPEAKER_03It kind of reminded me of like until I started seeing actually because when you see all of the groups, there's it's a little bit more nuanced than than race a little bit. Um, but they're pretty like it's kind of like prison type of situation where you go into prison and there's like you've got the Aryan gang, you've got the black gangs, you've got the Latino gangs, and everybody keeps separate like that.
SPEAKER_02I found their names in here. It's a the preps, the Dixie mob. So it's like it's like the the the white New England kids, the redneck white kids, uh Sotovatos, yeah, Jersey Kings, the Italian, Sotovatos is like different um Hispanic, like Latin gangs.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. The Final World, yeah, F FWO, the Final World Order from South Central Los Angeles, um leaders Willie. NWA is like the reference there, I feel like, right? With the FWO. I think you're definitely right. And then the Kuroki Syndicate, who are the Japanese gangsters, definitely um yeah, related to like the Yakuza, like you said. Um and you know, one of the kind of funny things about kind of stories like this, right, is it's all this crazy stuff that's going on, and it's still very much again, high school clicks, people got their friends, everybody's I mean, in this one, it's like he it's kind of funny. Every room that he walks into, everybody's just mean mugging the shit out of him because he also all of these kids um, and one of the things that Master Lynn actually says to them is that all of these kids are basically like um legacy, like all of their families have done something, and he's like the only kid in there who doesn't have legacy, and now all these kids are like um Master Lynn says, they're either afraid of you or they're gonna try and like fuck with you to see if you're for real.
SPEAKER_02Right. Here's some stuff that that Lin is saying to him. He's saying he said, assuming by leaders you mean crime syndicates, right? He says there's little distinction. My ancestors started this school when we Chinese were treated lower than cattle, a school to train the oppressed in the deadly arts that they might shape a world more to their interests. Time passed, our reputation grew, and our focus broadened. Since then we have trained the world's most famous and notorious assassins, but I have always remembered the true reason we exist to ensure those at the lowest level of society also have power. I know your history, Marcus. I know who has done you harm. I know why you joined us, I know the revenge that rests in your heart, and I would like to nourish it and sharpen it and teach it precision. I would like you to accomplish your great desire, but first there's much to learn. So that's part of the thesis we're getting about the school, right? Is he saying this isn't just about, oh, we're training people to kill people like James Bond type shit. We like the essential function of our school is to ensure that the people at the bottom of the all these pyramids have the ability to fucking kill some people and make the chin set the world up the way they need it to through violent action.
SPEAKER_03Yep, yep. And uh we kind of this this whole issue also just gives us an introduction to the school as a whole, right? We see the classes that Marcus is taking. His first period is assassin psychology, his second period is beheading. I don't even understand how you make a full curriculum out of beheading. I'm not gonna lie to you. That was the first thing that came to my mind. I was like, how are we gonna talk about beheading for like three months? But who knows? Um he's also his third period is poison. I don't know, a little bit of a Harry Potter thing going on there. You know, they got their poison class, whatever else. But um they're learning through all of these uh insane methods. We see Marcus in the uh cafeteria, bro, literally the entire school is mean mugging this kid when he walks in there. And I think one of the funny things that he brings up is he talks about how even in this like crazy society of assassin kids, everybody's trying to like look cool, everybody's trying to look the hardest, everybody's trying to look whatever the fuck else. And his kind of thing that I feel like he brings to this is that he, yeah, some people are hard like that or whatever else, but he doesn't believe a lot of that shit. He's like, everybody's fucking pretending and trying to put on this shit so that their clan, their group, whatever else thinks that they're really part of that shit.
SPEAKER_02And we don't know the full story. Also, to be clear, we've read like the first five or six issues, right? We were further than we're gonna talk about today. We don't even fully uh have all this kid's background figured out. We just do know that he he is also like in some ways is just way harder than some of these kids. Obviously, some of them have uh maybe potentially killed some people or whatever, we don't know. But he's literally been homeless, been a drug addict, been in violence his whole life. Um his parents also were involved in some kind of espionage. Uh they died violently right in front of him as a child. Um, you know, he just is like, oh, look at these fucking preppy kids. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's also interesting. He gets approached by the the Latin squad pretty quickly. They're basically like, yo, you're you're Latin, you got you're with us, right? And he kind of is like not he's like not, yeah.
SPEAKER_03I'm not much of a joiner.
SPEAKER_02Um, and what he ends up doing, who he does sort of join with, is everyone else who doesn't want to join, which is instead he takes his food outside instead of in the cafeteria.
SPEAKER_03He walks way back into the back of the school, into like the semi- I didn't there's like a cemetery back there, goddamn.
SPEAKER_02But um And it's all the freaks that are smoking, smoking weed and smoking cigarettes and like punks with their hair spiked. We got a emo girl, we got some black kids, they're all just out there vibing in the cemetery.
SPEAKER_03He describes them, he says, you know, that these people usually congregate at the back of the school, the disenfranchised substance abusers, the freaks, the subculture elitists, those who in general don't mix well with others, my people. Um but yeah, so he goes back there and he ends up talking about talking to all these people about um what it is that they're trying to do, what it is that he's trying to accomplish. He uh ends up admitting to all of them that he he says, the piece of shit who ruined my life, I'm gonna kill Ronald Reagan. Um and it's kind of funny, they all think that he's super delusional. Um, you know, I'm sure that they all have their own things that they're delusional about, but they're kind of you know going back and forth about who's actually killed somebody, who's done this, um, you know, these people are gonna assassinate bankers, oil company executives, all that kind of stuff like that. What is Banana Rama? Where in what is the text? He says, Um, you know, you could change the world of the bullet. I plan on changing a proper bit of it. Lex and me were going to assassinate bankers, oil company executives, and then the guy in the background says banana rama. Don't forget bloody banana rama. And then they talk about making the world a better place. So now I feel like I have to look at banana rama. Um, that's a pop group? What the hell did they do? They're an Irish-English pop group. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, this guy's supposed to be a pop, like I think he's supposed to be like a London punk. So he's he's like a sex, he's like a sex pistols guy or whatever. He's from that, he's from that scene. He's got the spiky, spiky short, bleached hair. He's got like the spiky leather jacket. That's hilarious. Uh, and this other guy looks like he's like a skinhead or something. Um I think this guy's like, I think he's just he's like, we gotta kill, we gotta kill these bloody pop stars in it. Yeah, we gotta kill him.
SPEAKER_03I love I I love the accent. Yeah, but so that's they're talking about all the things that they're trying to accomplish, and then we get into our next period, fifth period, hand-to-hand combat. Marcus gets pulled out there with the teacher, he starts fighting, gets his ass kind of whooped, and then we end up seeing what leads into actually, I think, a big character moment for Marcus where um this guy who's kind of in the back of this class basically ends up kind of egging on a um sparring match between this guy who's very obviously like kind of like the bully of this um It's like a huge Russian guy. Yeah, huge Russian guy. He's kind of the bully. This guy in the background, this kind of like Chubby guy in the background, basically says something that leads to him, the Russian guy, having to go actually spar and and get his shit rocked, probably too. Um and then when Marcus is uh basically getting dressed again in the uh locker room, interesting thing, we definitely see what I assume are a lot of burns.
SPEAKER_02Burns and scars, yeah. Our main Marcus is covered. He's covered in them. Um and we see all the other boys have their clothes off too, so it's not just it's like showing again, whatever his crazy back homeless background is. He's been through a lot of a lot of violence and trauma of some kind.
SPEAKER_03Right, and all these guys are basically beating the shit out of this um chubby kid who was saying stuff, whatever else before. Um, basically, you know, trying to teach him a lesson about keeping his mouth shut. Um but Marcus basically kind of stands up, not even I don't even know if it's necessarily like for the kid, he's just like, yo, you're stepping to me like fuck you. Like I'm not the guy to play with. Um and he ends up saying, This is kind of another one of these moments where Marcus says, you know, this doesn't end in a fist fight. You could probably beat me in a fist fight, but it ends with a knife in one of your eyes. Right. Right. It's crazy. This motherfucker's no joke.
SPEAKER_02And then uh the kid that again, the sort of like subversion of heroic stuff, instead of the the the kid who's getting bullied just shits all over himself in the shower, and that's what ends up getting all the boys to leave him alone. Is he just shits.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And then, you know, we go through this. This is one of the parts where we actually learn about um all the different groups, the preps, the Dixie Mobs, Sotovatos, all these guys. We also get a little bit of like a weird I didn't understand exactly how this happened, but basically he gets um put into this uh AP black arts class, and the way that he gets basically selected for this is some person in a cloak like walks by and hands him this like little ornate box with like a I don't know, it's like the skeleton of like a rat inside it or something like that. And like a heart, like doesn't that look like a heart cover? It does or something. It does. I'm like, but anyway, it's like, oh, you know, you're someone must think very highly of you. So we're also learning again what other people think of Marcus. Not only do the kids kind of want to fuck with him because they think that he's you know, he's hot shit for some reason, but um whoever is I think this is again his master Lynn who's putting in in these advanced classes.
SPEAKER_02And I think people are interested because everyone else is like, oh yeah, my dad's it from this gang, my my mom is this assassin, like my family is involved with this, versus he's just someone who in the middle of the school year is just getting scooped off the streets and they're like, oh shit.
SPEAKER_03Yep, yep, exactly. And so our last class here for the day is AP Black Arts. Um and uh this is all about the art of ritualistic execution, which is pretty interesting, and I do think that that'll definitely come back for probably the way that Marcus wants to do things in the end. But um there are a couple of guys that are making fun of him for what it is that he wants to do. And this teacher actually ends up standing up and saying, you know, you'd be wise to learn respect for a man's thirst for revenge. Uh it takes an iron resolve to actually follow through on that. So even the teacher here uh is standing up for him as well.
SPEAKER_02But uh they get their first school assignment, yeah, which is absolutely wild. It's you have to kill someone. Tonight's assignment, you will see um uh he says revenge can fuel that resolve. As you will see on tonight's assignment, as you will see when you attempt to kill a vagrant, your victim must have committed some evil in life and earned this end. You will judge them and you will execute them. Ensure the vagabond is dead, take pictures, hide the body, and if you are caught, kill yourself, or one of your classmates will be sent to do so. Are we clear? No more laughing? Good. Have the assignment completed by tomorrow's class. Select your lab partner and go. Lab partner. Hilarious. So he's literally, I mean, that's crazy. Like the schoolwork they're getting is go stalk some homeless people, pick one who you can determine, like find some proof that they did something bad, and then kill them. Yep. Prove it, hide the body, get away with it.
SPEAKER_03And uh by tomorrow. Yeah, by by tomorrow is crazy. And it's like, I mean, uh, who knows if it's day or night and down here, but this also sets up the first, I feel like, kind of friendship that Marcus uh ends up happening, which is with this kid Willie, the dude who's from South Central, who's kind of the leader of that um uh the game, what are they called? They're called the the final world order FWO. Um he basically says, you know, I don't know who here's got the nerve to pull this shit off, but my money's on you, my crazy new Nicaraguan lag partner, right? And so this is the beginning of their friendship. And then we get what I actually didn't even realize is at the beginning of this issue, we actually referenced this guy. I wasn't even I I had to piece it together. But anyway, so at the end of this issue, we see this police officer pulling up to this um farm in Oakland, uh, which I'd have to go check and see where the farms are in Oakland. I can't think of one off the top of my head. But anyway, farm in Oakland, um, he's hearing this ba of this sheep, Oakland Police Department, he yells and breaks in, and he looks in there, and we see this guy who's like patting one of the uh goats, I guess, in there. And very menacing, very menacingly. And the guy says, you know, I ain't hurting no one, officer, spreading some love. Wouldn't shoot a fellow for that, would you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and this guy's got his belt buckle undone, bro.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02We think this guy was fucking this goat. We're pretty sure.
SPEAKER_03I think he was definitely fucking this goat, but he drops this whole load of bricks on this cop. Um and what he ends up asking this guy says, Rumor has it that the son of the bitch who torched the boys home a couple years back, and so we're learning that this is a kid that Marcus knew from before. This is definitely not a kid anymore. But he says, I got some personal feelings, you see, so you need to tell me everything you know about that homeless kid. And offer officer, if you think I was fucking that goat hard, wait till you see what I do to him, which is just a crazy fucking sentence. Insane.
SPEAKER_02And then we get the we get the we get the look at him, we get this huge whole page shot of his face holding up this Polaroid of Marcus. Yep, and he is uh deformed and burned. Yeah, he's definitely gone through it. We can one of one of we can learn now, one of Marcus's past adventures was burning down a boy's home that he was living in and at least doing uh catastrophic burning. To this guy, at the very least. We also, uh uh Antonio's pointing out, the very this this uh chapter begins and ends with him. We got this uh flashback to um The Sunset Boys Home in 1986, so the year I guess before. Oh my god, and the kids jerking off looking at the dog.
SPEAKER_03That was the shit where I was like, because when I first saw it, I was like, is he like and I was like, maybe he's just like chilling. Like, you know, some people just chill with their hands and their pants, whatever else, right? When you're lying down. But this kid is talking about this dog, basically like, good dog. I had a good dog like that. Dad took her away for a while, but she was a good dog, all this weird shit, whatever else, right? What the also it's it's crazy. He like says something to Marcus, being like, What are you doing over there, put pounding to this sweet dog show sound? Right? It's like he's almost making fun of I mean, this kid looks like a big thing. And Marcus is making a bomb. Yeah, he's making a bomb.
SPEAKER_02We just we could put that together now. I didn't understand what he what that was uh when I read this paper. He's definitely making a bomb for sure. Yeah, so Marcus's arch nemesis seems to be this uh crazy fucking kid who bullies him and brags about jerking it to animals and fucking goats and shit.
SPEAKER_03I don't know, bro. He sounds like the kind of guy that's they could probably kill. He could probably get away with that for sure at some point.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_03We'll see.
SPEAKER_02Uh but again, this is Tarantino-y, right? It's like it's it's kind of gross. Like, I'm not it's like, why are you putting this in here, bro? Like, why are you I know you're like which is I think is interesting. It's like I think Tarantino has some of that same energy in his movies. Uh like there's things that people really don't like about them, or yeah. Um, but again, it's like, hey, at least the author is uh going to such an extreme. Like there's things that we maybe don't like because he's swinging for the fences so hard. You know, he's like, this shit is gonna be gross and edgy and insane and violent, and if people fuck with it, they're gonna fuck with it. And like, I'm gonna do it that so hard, I'm gonna commit to such an extent that it might be off-putting. That's always the hard thing about art, right? How far do you go? Yeah, we feel that in in music. All I mean, especially both of our lanes that we work in mostly is sort of uh like pop, hip hop, adjacent type stuff. We're definitely trying to find stuff that it will appeal to people. That's one of the things that we're considering while we're making the art.
SPEAKER_03Um But sometimes you also make art that's like you just are not sure if people are gonna like it. And that's that's kind of like one of the beauties of art in general. It's like that moment where you put something out in the world and it just you just have to accept that people are gonna see it for what it is that they see it as.
SPEAKER_02Yep. Everyone gets to interpret it.
SPEAKER_03Um we're that yeah, anyway. All right. Sorry, my fault, my fault. No, no, no. Issue number two. Issue number three, we're into now, deadly class issue number three. So we've got a couple of new characters, we've got um our kind of main antagonist, right, set up for what's gonna be going on in the story, and now we're getting into um Marcus and Willie going on to complete this assignment. So Marcus and Willie go into San Francisco to complete their assignment. Um, when it's time to actually do this thing, Willie actually ends up freezing and doesn't kill him, he doesn't pull the trigger. Um, and he goes on actually later on to reveal that his kind of whole backstory, which he talks about in this, where he supposedly killed five guys before he was 12 because they killed his dad, we end up learning that that's actually a lie. Um and desperate not to uh fail out of King's Dominion, Marcus actually ends up killing this homeless guy that he knows. This guy's name is Rory, after Rory kind of casually ends up admitting that um to these atrocities in Vietnam, and we'll get into it a little bit, but Rory basically tries to pin it on this other homeless guy, and that's when Willie freezes, and then Rory ends up telling them um kind of I don't know if it's accidentally or whatever else, but he ends up telling them about Vietnam. And this issue kind of ends up showing that Marcus, when he's like pushed into a corner, feels trapped, feels whatever else, right? One of his big things is that he doesn't want to go back to sleeping uh and uh in the streets and being homeless, um, is that he is willing to kill this guy who he knows, who when they go to this area and he's asking this guy for information, this guy knows him. They've you know, it seems like he's you know dealt him drugs or whatever else before. Um, this guy recognizes him and and Marcus is still willing to make the choice in the end. Um so this starts off with this kind of uh fun like ninja scene of them like running across like uh the top of buildings, and it's kind of this interesting moment where I first actually started realizing that maybe Willie's not like who he says that he is. Um Marcus and Willie are jumping across this um this building gap, and Marcus has done this a bunch before, um, or at least he's uh he says that he's jumped before, and he ends up uh basically betting Willie, and Marcus makes it and Willie almost doesn't, or he doesn't, I guess really, and Marcus has to pull him back up and save him. And Willie is like super scared, he's like crying, don't let me die, all this stuff like that. He saves him. Um and we basically end up learning later on what uh Willie's backstory is. We also get a lot of I think interesting character moments about um Marcus here, um, where he goes on to basically say, uh I mean he says a I'm trying to think of where even the best place to start is here, but he basically actually ends up talking about his anxiety, which is I think is a very interesting thing. Um says it's me, my anxiety. I do this thing after I'm around people where I obsessively overanalyze every interaction to see where I went wrong or who I offended. Um Willie goes on to call this emotional paranoia, is what his therapist at home called it. So or therapist in the home. Funny that they even have therapists, but he goes on to say, uh Marcus says, I sit up at every night, I didn't uh worrying, I didn't catch the cues or I said the wrong things, trying to figure out why I never fit in anywhere. Um it's funny, Willie says, damn, you are crazy, right? Um and Marcus is mine, everybody else is crazy. And he goes on to this kind of tangent here, basically saying that um he believes that all this polite human interaction is all just manipulation to get what people want from each other. And Willie kind of takes that in a funny way personally. He's like, You're just like being nice to me to be my friend. And Marcus is kind of like, yeah, bro, like um, you know, that's just like what people do. Uh and I don't know, it's interesting.
SPEAKER_02It is really interesting. Uh part of what it wants us to be examining is if he is like a psychopath or not, right? Or a sociopath. What's the what's the right what's the well?
SPEAKER_03So neither of these things, uh and uh the reason we'll talk about this too is because uh uh my my degree is in psychology, but neither of these things are actually in the DSM V, which is like the psychological manual, it's all under antisocial personality disorder. Oh, wow. Um yeah, so like psychopath and and sociopath are not technically scientific terms for what this stuff is, at least not in the sense of the DSM five and psychological. Like more like they're not real, they're they're like colloquialism sort of for antisocial personality disorder.
SPEAKER_02Which basically just means like you don't you don't relate you don't experience uh you don't you you just don't experience your uh existence in the same through these same parameters that other people.
SPEAKER_03Right, and there's a lot of like like when it comes to like a psychopath or a sociopath, and it's funny, Ben and I were just talking about this teacher that I had actually a little while ago before we started the pod, but there are these checklists um that they use for kind of determining whether or not somebody would be kind of falling into that like psychopath territory. And there's this checklist that's called the PCLR. It's a bunch of these questions, and you basically rate um, this goes on, this is not something that you could do in a short sitting. You'd basically be with, you know, you could imagine a therapist in like a prison or something like that, working with somebody over months and months and months. But they basically give all of these questions a score of a zero or one or a two uh based on severity zeros, right? It does is absence and two is that it's very much there. And a lot of these things are like callousness, right? You're um uh a zero sum game, right? So viewing life is basically like if somebody else gets something, you're losing something, right? Or if you get something, somebody else is losing something. That's also part of this kind of stuff. There's a lot of different things here, like not being able to hold down a job. Um, in the old version of this test, back in kind of actually this time period, it would have been like having like a bunch of um marital partners back to back, or like a bunch of people that you've dated back to back to back to back. Nowadays it's kind of more so like sexual partners just because of the way that things have changed. But you know, one thing that you could say here, right, is that we're seeing that Marcus feels this kind of like disconnect very much with other people, right?
SPEAKER_02And he also understand what like I've talked to, I mean, I have friends that are uh, you know, people in my life that are spectrum or spectrum adjacent or whatever. And some it's like reminds me of some conversations with them where they're just trying to, they're just trying to understand like what other people just do are doing naturally and they couldn't even necessarily articulate why they feel these ways or why they are interacting with people in a certain way. For some people, they're like they're literally just trying to unpack it, they're trying to understand it.
SPEAKER_03They're like, that's what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to be acting right? Exactly. And so Marcus is kind of experiencing this in a different kind of way. And one of the other things that he says here, right, which is very telling, is that he says all polite human interaction is all just a manipulation, right? It's like he that's the way that he views niceness, kindness in general to him, because the experiences that he's had is just people trying to use those words, use those things to get something from somebody else, right? So we're learning a lot of his uh I think kind of this the psychology that has been brought upon him through difficult childhoods. And this is a lot of where we end up seeing these these kinds of things. People talk about stuff like being young with a dark triad, all these different kind of things like that. But anyway, yeah, it's important.
SPEAKER_02I mean, yeah, it's it's cool, it's cool stuff for the story to be examining, you know. It's also then then classic Willie's response to this, right? So Marcus kind of is a little vulnerable. I mean, it's can be interpreted as him being callous, but he's kind of basically being like, Look, man, I really struggle with like connecting with people. Yeah, I don't know how to interpret it. I'm you like we're trying to be boys, like I'm hard for me to figure this out. And Willie's like, fuck you, you don't know shit about me. Yeah, um, he's like, fuck you, you're just being civil to be my friend. I capped five hardcores before my 12th birthday in my own house after they murdered my pops in front of me. Ain't no mystery why you ain't got no friends, motherfucker.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, like he's really just like, fuck you, I'm the shit. And his other thing is that he says that nobody likes honesty, right? And that's kind of the funny thing about Marcus too, is that with some of these people, right, they they view like like that this is their callousness, right? Like they they view that as like honesty, right? It's like I'm not I'm not being a dick to you, but I'm just being honest with you. But you know, with most people that are not like this, right? We understand the social cues of like you can be honest with somebody and also not be an asshole. And there's a you know balance there that ends up being struck, and Marcus is like, fuck that shit, right?
SPEAKER_02But honesty and authenticity are some of the most difficult things for us to be expressing, you know, it's uh it's this is all you know interesting human relation stuff, right? The next page talks about this in art in a in an interesting way. So we see Marcus has his headphones on, um, and he's like really, really vibing out. And Willie's like, yo, what are you listening to? He says the Smiths says, Ah man, that depressing shit, sort of gay, isn't it? And Marcus is like, if by gay you mean brave and honest, um, I don't know, it's hard to express honest emotions and be fearless about sadness. Most people walk around hiding it as if it's a weakness, acting tough as if they can fool people into seeing them as something they aren't. It's braver to be honest than to pretend. Uh acting hard, what good is that? And this is so fascinating now that like once we later get this context about Willie's background, because this is probably hitting crazy home. Yeah, for him. For him. But it's interesting, you know, it's just this is real now. Like it's some of the bravest shit is people being the most themselves. Yeah, I think that's I think that's true. It's crazy the extent to which we all just get shaped by what's around us, and also how many people in their lives just sort of even subconsciously just submit to the environments they're in and just like get taken in different directions versus uh living.
SPEAKER_03I mean, this is like this is one of like the big questions. It's kind of funny you talk about just like growing up, but this is one of the big questions of psychology is this nature versus nurture, right? It's like how much how much of who you are is kind of what you're born with, and how much of who you are is what is kind of developed through the experiences that you have. And I mean, in my opinion, I think it's definitely both of these things for sure. And I think that that's kind of the general opinion that there are you know pieces that come from each, but you know, what we're seeing here with with Marcus, and they kind of go on to talk about reputation, where kind of like what you're saying, Willie is like, you know, his response to Marcus being like, What good is acting hard? Willie's like reputation, you ain't got a rep, people are gonna see you as weak, and they come at you, right? And it's funny, I actually kind of love what Marcus says here. It's kind of this funny thing. He says, Better expose your ankles and see which snakes bite. Um and then Willie says, you know, he says, Well, let me save you some time at this school. Like, everybody bites, everybody's a snake.
SPEAKER_02And Willie's response to is interesting. It's not just like Marcus has it figured out and Willie doesn't, it's like they have different different takes on it, right? Like Willie's Willie says, Um, you know, the whole thing is about reputation. Um, if you wink out a rep, people see you as weak and they come at you. Um, which is, you know, is the and then Marcus' response about the snake bites thing, right? But it also he's talking about it in terms of the music he likes. Like he's like, You need to you need to get into hip hop.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And he's like, nah, that's old shit. Um, you need new science. You heard Eric B and Rakim, Public Enemy, L Cool, J Super So.
SPEAKER_03That was some new shit, bro. Eric B and Rakim. That was some crazy shit.
SPEAKER_02But then this is interesting where where then they're smoking a joint and having this conversation, which is which is fire. Um just shout out bonding with people to discussing art that you love over a J. Over a J. That's like that's a hack for life. Yeah, it is. Um, so if you're one of those people who quit like so you're one of those people who quits bands when they aren't popular anymore. Uh so you're trendy, you need to follow the trends other people dictate to you, like uh the girls in those leg warmers, which is interesting pop criticism, right? And then Willie's like, nah, I just like the new shit, man. Um enough of this. Uh what do I care what you listen to and where the hell you're taking um uh and where the hell you're taking me. Uh he he likes being up to date, and Marcus sees it as you just abandon following trends, versus he's like, no, I'm interested in the new. I'm always trying to understand what the be able to feel what's coming, you know, predict what the current like understand the now. Right. And I definitely relate to that in some ways where like I listen, like in my music consumption, especially back when I used to DJ full-time, right? It was like I had like everything that came out, I had to listen through at once. Right. And then I did and then I'm building a mental model of music, yeah, right? Of like of current music, what people are trying to listen to, right? And that's a different component than just seeking out what most relates to you and your own experience, and then listening to that. It's like you're kind of listening for what is most voicing the experience of the zeitgeist of everybody right now. You know, it's an interesting psychology. I don't know if I don't know if I articulated that makes sense well at all.
SPEAKER_03Well, it makes sense to me. If you guys didn't understand, you will. You will. Um, psychology. My understanding with all this stuff is I think that psychology is everything. Everything involves psychology, the way people think, the way they act, the way whatever else. But anyway, this next part of this here, they go to this homeless encampment under this bridge, and this is where Marcus runs into this guy, Rory, who he knows, and he this guy asks him how he's been, right? This is, I think, another great contextual thing for what happens later. This guy asks Marcus how he's been. They kind of catch up, shoot the shit. This guy also warns him about the guy who is coming after him. That's from um the the boys home. He says, you know, uh, monster with no face came through camp, and Marcus is like, no face. And he says, Um, what I say wasn't anything I'd call a face. Stirred up the locals, gave us some terror. I know bad energy. I certainly know the foremost face of Satan, which is pretty, pretty fucking crazy thing to say. Um, and then uh this guy also Rory ends up telling him uh basically this guy used to tell Marcus stories, which is another, again, crazy thing for how this ends. But this guy used to tell Marcus stories of this guy who um I suppose this guy knew from Nom who had uh you know women and children burned alive, all this kind of stuff. And so Marcus and Willie go to hunt down this guy. Um the guy jumps out with a knife. Marcus actually ends up realizing it's the same guy who stole his shoes before, and there's this moment where Willie has a chance to shoot and kill this guy, and he doesn't. He actually has multiple moments, and they make that very that's shown again throughout these panels. Um and I'm actually sorry, I'm just looking at the way that all the the um brick and stuff like that bend as this guy is running away.
SPEAKER_02But um, because it's like his anxiety and like everything's distorting the way time is moving differently.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. It's all kind of like slow momentum. There's so many moments that he had, and again, he it shows a lot of things about Willie here. One, he doesn't shoot, and then he throws the gun afterwards, which just crazy amateur, not yeah, not gun safety at all. And the gun goes off and almost shoots Marcus's Marcus in the head. Um, and then Willie goes on to admit he says, I'm no killer, and uh he says, you know, what about all this stuff with your dad? And he says it was true, but not like I said it. Basically, the these guys ended up coming into Willie's home and and they did kill his dad, shot him so many times in front of him. Um, and then uh his uncle basically actually ended up showing up, and um it is his uncle, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, his uncle uh killed those guys.
SPEAKER_03His uncle killed those guys and basically gave uh Willie the gun and said, You gotta take it and so you can have some credit and and some rep and be safe on the streets and shit like that now with whatever goes on. Um and it's crazy because Willie's crying through this and whatever else, and it's interesting. Marcus understands, he says, you know, you know, I you were just a kid, a kid who drew a bad hand, nothing to be ashamed of, I'm no different. Um and we also see that the same guy interesting thing about this guy too, this guy is like the the I'm talking about the guy, the faceless guy who's chasing after him. This dude is like super homophobic for no reason. Like he I mean, sure there's some reason whatever else, but he keeps calling all these guys like the F-word and whatever else. He calls Marcus an F word the F-word when he's um with him in the boys uh the boys' home, then he calls both these guys the F-word when they're having this emotional talk together. Um so I don't know if that's gonna be something that comes up later on. Maybe it's just a thing for the time. Um also obviously San Francisco is a very big LGBTQ center, so there's maybe some kind of interesting stuff that could go on later on with that. But um we're learning a lot about Willie, and then we go back to uh Rory. They sit down and end up talking with him, and I don't know, Ben, if you want to take kind of what uh goes on with this, but unlucky.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, basically Rory is uh, you know, he's the homeless friend of Marcus's, right? Uh they're at least they had some kind of rapport or whatever. Um they grew up around him at the very least, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh but basically they share food. He gives him f uh like expired, expired chili from a can, which Marcus is eating, and Willie's like, that's disgusting. Yeah. Um he talks about being in Vietnam. Um basically says, let's see, let's find some good stuff. Um I most uh Willie asks him, How did you end up out here? And he says, I watched most of my friends die in Nam. I lost my little girl to a car wreck while I was over there. Came home to Venom, people cursing and spitting. Parents died not too long after that. But you know, it's impossible to describe it all. It just broke me, broke my soul. And when you go through shit like that, Zippo Torch a Village, well, that shit don't ever leave you. And it shows this picture of them in Vietnam, and it's him and their boys. It's this they're even younger looking than Marcus and Willie, which is really again part of what I think there's like parallels between what was going on in Vietnam and the ridiculousness of this school for assassins, right? Right. Where we go, oh what, Hogwarts for kids doing murder? That's stupid. And then it's like, oh, that's yeah.
SPEAKER_03That's actually such a great, great point that you're making right there.
SPEAKER_02I mean, that like this school is going into the you know especially us us being Americans, like we we were we were sending people to die before they were allowed to drink.
SPEAKER_03Yep.
SPEAKER_02Uh what are we talking about?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, there's something, there's something broken, there's something wrong there. But they have this conversation.
SPEAKER_02Like, what the hell? It that's goofy, like that's goofy like Assassin Hogwarts.
SPEAKER_03Yes, it exactly. It is goofy like Assassin Hogwarts. Um also shout out this guy's wearing a San Francisco Giants hat. We're definitely we're we're in the place. But um, Marcus says that he has to go take a piss, and then uh Rory is telling Willie some more stuff. He says, you know, I ain't got shit going for me, no skills, sort of done my ugliest in. Hell, face like Marcus says, I could have done something. So he's he's complimenting Marcus. Um, and then he says, But I sure I know pretty boy like you, pretty boy. And we get this first moment of uh maybe not the first moment, but the first moment of this part of Marcus's trauma, where we see somebody touching his hair and his head as a kid saying, Such a pretty boy. And so what I assume is going on here is definitely some either molestation or something like that in Marcus's past. Um and it really sets him off. He's hearing these stories about Vietnam and he's he's getting upset, and then this guy Rory is saying, I can still remember life before the war, sunny, normal, perfect. I just never knew what I had until it was gone. And we see in the background, Marcus is coming up behind him, and Marcus swings this metal pole and kills this guy, Rory, right in front of Willie. And we see again, Willie is like distraught by this. This is not like his everyday. He's at the school for assassins, but it's not his thing. Willie couldn't pull a trigger. Marcus just beat someone to death with a metal rod. Yeah, he doesn't even just hit him one eye, he hits him hard like from the side one time, and then he smashes down on him again, and this guy's lying in the pool of the blood, and Marcus just says one thing. He says, We got nowhere else to go. And then we get this crazy, and then this is actually what I described to Ben, it feels like the ending of like a TV episode or whatever else, where we see this kind of zoom out of like the moment, it gets further away. We see also the American flag in this as well, which I think is definitely like a kind of again that that um metaphor of the school of assassins versus like you know being in the military, whatever else, right? Uh, I think it's definitely being shown here, at least in the US military, and then we zoom out, we get this great moment of um again being in San Francisco, we see the bridge, um, and that uh is what wraps up issue number three. Um the boys did their homework assignment. They did do their homework assignment, uh, as far as we know. And um, I mean I remember reading that, bro. I did not think he was just gonna whack him like that. I was not, I was like, my mouth was open when I was actually reading that part. And it's it's um it's it's tough, bro. And it's also just like I think it also just upset Marcus because this guy obviously had like lied to him his whole life about who actually did these terrible things in Vietnam.
SPEAKER_02Um Right, which we get in the in in the next issues, we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up here um for now and just do this little little three issue conversation. Um but yeah, we do we do get a little more context later on about uh Marcus's decision here. Yes. Um but it It um you know, I think a lot, like you're saying, it's it's really dope how much psych type conversation we can have through this. Yeah. It's everything. It's a cool, there's a lot, like Deadly Class is really uh like the themes that it's trying to discuss are cool. And the art is incredible.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's I mean this is a very thoughtful, this is a thoughtful book. And I think I mean this I think is another one that uh it lends itself to actually conversations like this, right? It's like there's a lot of things I think in here that some of the things that make them so I think fun and interesting for us is the fact that we do get to talk about them and explore them in a deeper way and bring in stuff about either psychology or about you know what we know about the military and things like that. And um it's cool to find these like deeper meanings to everything that's going on here, right?
SPEAKER_02Other than a cool story, just being alive, relating to people. Yeah. Um yeah, I mean these stories too. I think maybe if you guys are thinking about what type of like if you want to dive into this and check it out, maybe one thing I could say is it's definitely seems, even having read a little bit more, uh, the type of story where you're not necessarily supposed to be like in love or super relate to your protagonists necessarily. It's more on on that sort of like Game of Thrones line where everything, everybody is gray to such different extents that it's more sort of like picking and choosing what you know, you like you just like moments.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you relate to not even people, it's like moments that you relate to, and and that may extend to the person, but you know or also characters that you like you root for characters in super in certain contexts, right?
SPEAKER_02But you they're bad people the whole time, you know. Even in comedy, sometimes like uh like always sunny or something, you know. Like some people just don't, they're like, What? Like this show is endorsing what you know, you're like, no, you're supposed to hate all the main like you love them, but like you're not supposed to like they're making they're not supposed to be role models, no, yeah.
SPEAKER_03The point of this is to laugh at their evil and stupidity. Like how bad they are, right? Exactly, all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_02So I think there's some I mean, obviously, I think we will, as we get to know our protagonists more, we're gonna relate to them more, we're gonna like them more, but it's also like you know, Marcus is a fucking bastard.
SPEAKER_03It's yeah, he's he's hardcore.
SPEAKER_02I mean he's been through, clearly been through.
SPEAKER_03He's been through some shit and it's hardened him into a person that is willing to do whatever it takes to keep moving.
SPEAKER_02Right, which again circles back to your uh um why am I blanking on it? Circles back to uh Oh yeah, oh, oh, oh, oh um nature versus nurture. Nature versus nurture. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03It's uh it's a very interesting thing. And so yeah, we'll have I mean who knows what we'll learn more about Marcus's family too.
SPEAKER_02Um but at the very least, the trauma, I mean, he had the trauma's there. The trauma's there. A lot of different types of nuts.
SPEAKER_03But anyway, this is Deadly Class Issues 1 through 3. Very, very soon. Uh maybe it'll even be next one, but very, very soon we'll definitely be doing four through six, um, or maybe even more. So be there for that. Go pick this one up. As I always say, go pick this one up. Go take a look at the art, or at the very least, look at it on Instagram.
SPEAKER_02Um and whoever of you guys are still listening at this point, you are just real ones.
SPEAKER_03You are real ones. I just want to let you know. Yeah, real. So we appreciate you.
SPEAKER_02Um, but yeah, thanks for listening, guys. Uh give us that we we really shouldn't be saying this at the end when no one's still here.
SPEAKER_01I know, but but review that shit, follow on that shit, share the shit with other people. All the good stuff.
SPEAKER_03Um hit that like and subscribe. Hit that like and subscribe, hit that thumbs up, you know how it goes. Hit the bell. Yep, and uh and we'll we'll come back soon and read some more Deadly Class and get into some more cool stories. Peace, everybody. Thanks.