7 Comics To Read If You Liked ‘Deadly Class’

During a recent visit to Vancouver, the brand-new In Vitam Mortem podcast about Deadly Class, stopped by Golden Age Collectables to talk to the staff about what comics might be the best ones to recommend to fans who are excited by Deadly Class, SYFY‘s new TV series based on the hit Image Comics series.

The conversation has been on YouTube for a while, and ran on the podcast in question, but since Deadly Class is now out there in the world for all to see, it seemed like a good day to revisit what one of the best comic book stores in Vancouver had to say for fans of the show that was, at that time, filming just a few miles down the road.

Golden Age’s Hank Pattison provided some insights for the podcast (which you can hear, or read, below), and managed to keep the conversation grounded in the creator-owned comics world — even if some of them are still pretty big commercial successes.

Pattison told In Vitam Mortem that he was looking for “things that have sort of a thematic connection or…and I tried to pick some things that are a little lesser known…..I also tried to go with some real creator-owned stuff. Deadly Class is, of course, Rick Remember doing it for himself. And yeah, I think create our own comics are something you should really push.”

So thanks to Hank and Golden Age Collectables (no, this is not a sponsored post, they were just really helpful) — and check out some of his suggestions below.

If you’re a superfan or a comics retailer and you have some ideas for this or other “if you like this, try that” kind of conversations, feel free to hit me up at @russburlingame on Twitter or in the comments below!

Street Angel

Street Angel by Jim Rugg.

Street Angel is a story about a young girl who is a homeless Kung Fu expert and the greatest skateboarder in the world. And she fights Ninjas and, also, super villains, all while staying homeless.

And it’s kind of cynical and crappy. It doesn’t have a lot of optimism to it, and at the same time it’s also about a young girl with a skateboard who beats up Ninjas. So it’s really rad, like a very literal Rad.

Kill Them All

Next up, I got Kill Them All by Kyle Starks.

Kyle Starks has just been doing stuff for a few years now. It feels like he really just burst onto the scene with his first book, Sexcastle. Kill Them All is like an ’80s action epic but done through the guise of like a Scott Pilgrim, Bryan Lee O’Malley, that sort of a vein.

It’s basically about an ex-cop, his partner, and a deadly assassin. They enter a building that is full of people they need to kill to get to the top of the building. And this book is them killing their way from the first floor to the top floor. It’s awesome. There’s no other way to put it.

We3

We3, a little bit of an older piece.

This is Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. This is originally a Vertigo publication. It’s basically animals turned into weapons, weaponized critters, and made not super intelligent. The cool thing about it is that the animals talk, but they retain a basic animal intelligence.

The reason we’re pushing this one is that we were talking about the violence in Deadly Class. Frank Quitely has a way to draw textures and sequences that are, I want to say, similar to the French artist Moebius. He influenced a lot of things like The Fifth Element. So that kind of grandiose sci-fi. So when he draws a head exploding, he really draws a head exploding.

So if you want to see an exploding head blown up by a little bunny rabbit, a wonderful dog, and a very mean cat, We3 is wonderful.

[Editor’s note: …and seriously, who doesn’t?] 

The Boys

Next up, we have The Boys, created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Specifically, again, talking about violent books. The Boys, which is currently being adapted into a live action TV series like Deadly Class.

The Boys is probably one of the most brutal comics you’ll ever read. It’s about a team of CIA backed operatives whose job is to police super humans. So it sort of has that Watchmen vibe of superheroes in a real world.

And at the same time … This was specifically Garth Ennis’s post-Preacher project. And Preacher being such a big deal, it had broken a lot of ground for just being known for being outrageously violent. And with The Boys he wanted to basically take that to the next level and managed to succeed. I mean, he got a little bits of The Boys. If you kept any of the art from inside of it … It succeeds at what it is. And at the same time, it is a character driven story with just some incredible impact, especially when he starts talking about historical artifacts.

There are a lot of aspects of the book where he will just be talking about World War II history, Vietnam history, talking about the way that the open market influenced politics. There are points where it almost leaves behind being a story about The Boys and becomes this thing about social-economic politics, while at the same time being this outrageously funny, violent, stupid comic.

 

Kill or Be Killed

Kill or be Killed, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

This is basically just a very realistic take on the idea of a masked vigilante, that if you simply put on a disguise and went out at night with a gun, trying to solve the problems of society, this might be kind of what it looks like, a little bit more than say The Punisher or Batman.

Saying too much about it gives too much away, so simply saying, it’s a really good book.

 

The Goddamned

The Goddamned, Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera. This is basically the world right before God caused the flood to happen. And now it sort of goes into that concept that God caused the flood to happen because the world was a really bad place. But this takes, because this is a very trite thing to say, but it’s a very Game of Thrones perspective on it. It’s taking a look at those things with a lot more of a realistic eye towards abuse and suffering.

So it is a very heavy and cruel series and definitely just a disgustingly depraved and violent series, I want to say, but with a good heart deep inside of it. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just a really harsh read. But it’s a really good thing to check out for that.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The last is the original Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If we’re talking about violence, and we’re talking about 1980s, and we’re talking about comic books, this is the violent ’80s comic book. This was before, of course, it got turned into a cartoon and became the huge pop culture phenomenon that it is known as.

But they’ve done a really nice reproduction of it in the past few years, where this is in full color. They’ve retouched it since the last time. And it is the original violent teenagers killing stuff with swords, which is a really fun aspect to what Deadly Class is. I wouldn’t say that Deadly Class was looking to the Ninja Turtles for inspiration, but in terms of looking at the history of comic books, it’s really easy to overlook what the Ninja Turtles were, especially because of the movies and the cartoons and everything else that’s followed.

These original comics spawned all of that stuff for a reason. They did it because they were really quality books, not necessarily what the Turtles became famous for, but this stuff really manages to stand on its own and be a really good, sometimes intensely violent, story. So, yeah, for fans of Deadly Class.