Rick Remender and Wes Craig reunite one last time to bring everyone's favorite assassin undergrads into a new era, but old habits die hard--and old grudges die even harder. Festering rivalries come to a head, dark secrets are revealed, sins must be atoned for, and few have as many sins as the students of Kings Dominion. Can the latchkey kids of Generation X find a place to belong in a world that doesn't understand them, or will they drift too far into an unknown future and watch themselves fade away? Collects DEADLY CLASS #45 - 56
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Consider this a review for the whole series. Overall, the art, story, direction etc were good. I genuinely enjoyed reading it, almost in it's entirety (we'll get to that). The characters are developed decently, though occasionally make slightly out of character decisions to move the plot forward imo. The story being told through years, and in the last few issues, decades, was intriguing and it was interesting to watch the characters grow up from teenage killers and turn into regular people (ish).
However.... (spoilers ahead)
The last few issues were a paper thin veneer of neoliberal Gen X simpering for the establishment. The idea that after all of this punk rock/shitty childhood/teenage angst/assassin school buildup we essentially get a “and then everything was good because our ghoulishly evil standin for conservatism and racism was arrested” is just so incredibly toothless I found it laughable. A weird dig about “post-liberals” online, hamfisted “orange man bad” political analysis, the last few issues just felt forced and weak. It's clear that for Remender, its easy for him to look back and decry Reagan and the conservative movements of the 80s, but the whole thing just feels depressing and like the message is “eventually you grow up”. With the amount of anger the characters start out with, it feels like a betrayal to turn them into people who let the system decide what justice is, and more importantly, to allow them to embrace the system as it is, without making any meaningful difference.
