Best of the Best – The Good in Comics

Deadly Class is probably my favorite current ongoing series. Written by Rick Remender with art by Wes Craig, the series follows Marcus Lopez Arguello as he attempts to navigate King’s Dominion, a high school designed to train the next generation of international assassins. Set in the late eighties, the series provides a window into the underground music scenes and various youth countercultures of the time. I cannot recommend this series highly enough. Remender has crafted one of the most diverse, three-dimensional casts of characters in comics today, and his dialogue practically jumps off the page and into the ear. Wes Craig’s art for this series is wonderful as well, making equal use of heavy shadow and exuberant color to make sure the over-the-top violence present in basically every issue never loses its impact.

Although the TV adaptation of Deadly Class has been tragically cancelled, the comic is very much alive and well and returns on September 25^th with its fortieth issue. In honor of its return, I have decided to rank the top 10 single issues of Deadly Class so far. For those fans of the show who maybe haven’t caught up with the comics yet, I’ll try to keep this list as free of any major spoilers. There are some minor spoilers here though, so be warned.

Fables is one of the best comic series of the 21^st century. It tells the stories of Fabletown, a community of fairy tale characters driven from their fantasy homelands by the armies of the evil Adversary and forced into exile in present-day New York City. Pretty much every character you remember from childhood or Disney movies is here, but not in the forms you might expect. Snow White, no longer a damsel in distress, is quite possibly the strongest character in the series. The Big Bad Wolf goes by Bigby now, as he’s put aside his monstrous ways and taken human form in order to act as Fabletown’s only sheriff. Prince Charming is a compulsive womanizer, Cinderella is a deadly assassin, and the Three Little Pigs are Marxist revolutionaries. The series ran for 150 issues (plus spin-offs), with Bill Willingham writing all of them and Mark Buckingham providing the art for over 110 issues. The series has been reprinted many times, with collections readily available in libraries and bookstores. Fables is very much an arc-driven series, but since I’m a huge fan of great single issues, I went through Fables and selected the top ten issues from the main series. As always, I’ll try to keep this list free of any major spoilers.

Category: Best of the Best

Top Ten DEADLY CLASS Issues

Top Ten FABLES Issues