Seemingly a lifetime ago now, I sat down with writer Rick Remender among the madness of San Diego Comic-Con at the busy Image Comics booth. The conversation was set to be about Deadly Class – his upcoming creator-owned series with artist Wes Craig about a high school for assassins set in the mid-1980s – but ultimately became about much more than that.

Here, Remender talks about the real-world inspirations behind his latest effort, the blood, sweat, and tears of making a creator-owned book, his desire (or lack thereof) to return to drawing comics, a Marvel project that never was, and what it meant to be a skate punk in the heart of the Reagan era.

The quick pitch is that it’s a high school for assassins. The story takes place in 1987. It was originally two books that I merged into one. I’d been developing a lot of creator-owned stuff during 2010, 2011, and 2012 while I was predominately doing Marvel work. To keep myself sane, I need to do both in order to enjoy the living of life. I was just developing creator-owned books and talking to other artists and getting the juices flowing. Deadly Class and another book called Reagan Youth were developing at the same time and they were both fairly similar. They were about high school kids, which was an itch I wanted to scratch; telling a lot of stories that happened to me and telling stories that I watched happen to people. I’m not Jim Carroll, but I had an interesting run for a few years there.So there’re a lot of stories that I’m itching to tell, and just to dig into the dynamics and how human interaction operates at that age. And really, to build it as a metaphor and how we react to the world for the rest of our lives. I realized that doing both of those books was a bit redundant, so I mixed them together. I took the 1987-era stories and mixed them with the high school for assassins and what came out of it was something that really got me excited, because it’s a lot of really human stories. It’s dealing with all of that stuff from that age, but it’s also set in an era that I’m incredibly interested in revisiting. That was when I was 13 and 14, so those are my formative and impressionable years that cooked me into who I am.I love the idea that I get to build character arcs and stories and hopefully put enough heart in this where people identify and care about it and then a midterm will be sprung on them where ninjas crawl out of the vents and try to kill the girl you had a crush on. So that all came together in an odd way, but I think the result, once Wes Craig signed on and Lee Loughridge signed on to color and we started putting stuff together, man, I lack the words. I’m really excited. We all hear that and it just sounds trite at this point, but it’s the truth. I’m reinvigorated in making comic books again. Not that I haven’t been, but it’s a whole new aspect.It does. I work really hard to put a lot of myself into the Marvel characters, even though they’re not mine. Even though the next writer will change it or ignore it. Even though it just goes on and on and on, I figure the only way to make my runs on these characters have an impression and feel lasting or impactful, is really to just dump your ass into it. To write the characters as you would a creator-owned book, where you take some piece of yourself, mix it with some fiction, and then think on the different circumstances you’re in at that point.With creator-owned, that doesn’t take a concerted effort. With creator-owned, that **** I build from the ground with my buddies. Wes and I will get on the phone, we’ll talk out characters; we’ll talk out how to make things work. There’s an organic-ness to that. My editor Sebastian Girner -- who’s editing all of my creator-owned books now, and we worked on Frankencastle and the Punisher stuff at Marvel – I’ll call him or Wes and there’s something wonderful about being able to develop something and once you’re happy with it, it’s done. And you go and do it.Beyond just the nostalgia of it, the politics of it are interesting. Marcus, our lead character, his dad was a cop in Nicaragua during the Contra Wars. He ended up doing what he thought was the right thing in helping the Reagan administration in a few ways that ended up getting him targeted for death. So he had to come to America. Not to give too much away, but Reagan did other things in San Francisco, where the story takes place, that affected the society and social fabric that also then affect Marcus.So Marcus’s life ends up being changed by these historical things that Reagan actually did. Some of the consequences are, in some cases, real world consequences that I’m aware of from people that I’ve known from my time in the Bay Area. So there’s that stuff, and being able to explore real history and things I actually know a thing or two about. There’s nostalgia of telling a story in San Francisco with a bunch of skate rats bombing a street, searching out Animal Chin, and reflecting on how things were in that period of time. That’s obviously going to be a lot of nostalgia as well as just being interesting to examine.I’m basing all of the characters on people or amalgams of people that I knew so that it doesn’t seem that it’s a cut out of, “Here’s a yuppie with his collar up! His parents are rich and he’s an ******* who likes cocaine!” I didn’t know that guy, so I’m not writing that guy. I did know a pious punk rocker who was an exclusionary dick who didn’t seem to embrace what I thought punk rock was about. I did know a goth girl who was promiscuous and a little broken. I did know a hip-hop kid who I became friends when we discovered that everything we loved about punk rock and hip-hop kind of came from the same place. I did know some people that were completely scene-less and didn’t choose a costume or scene to fall into. And of course as a high school student – I grew up in Phoenix – I did know a lot of alpha jocks with giant necks, who were quintessential boring ********.That’s just the tip of the iceberg, but I’m just drawing from things that were real and that I knew. But in some cases, that can be a cliché. We did know people that were stereotypical. I’m not steering away from that either just for the sake of it. I read in people’s writing where they’ll go, “Oh, the gang-bangers are reciting Shakespeare!” **** you. That’s a ****ing contrivance where you’re going, “Well I don’t want him to sound like this”! But would he? But did he? What kind of a story are you telling me? Are you telling me one where the writer is so ****ing lofty?I’m not changing history, I’m writing these people as I knew them, for better or for worse. In some cases, the language of the time and everything else, there are some points in writing that where you recognize that this is 1987, and where I grew up in Phoenix with these different kinds of people, some people were this. As ugly as it might be, as we get into the characters in the story, I feel like it’s my responsibility to appropriately [portray them]. Like there’s some rednecks that are directly connected to some people that I knew growing up. They will be those people, for all of their racism and ugliness and ****, they will be the people that I knew growing up in Phoenix. It almost seems cliche, but they were real.No, because it’s a fiction. In a lot of ways, I’m taking stories of **** that happened to me when I was twenty and then mixing it in with this crew. It’s a lot of mixing and matching to make it more exciting. It’s not a true account. There are some stories in here of things I saw; I did see a guy get shot in the head. I’ve been shot at. I have been jumped by gang-bangers and almost beaten to death.There are things that have happened to me as a punker in that era that I want to explore and dig into a little bit. But there’s never going to be a specific story – and I’m making sure to be careful of this and I’m not in contact with most of these people – so the stories will mix and match a bit to avoid any sort of legalities or whatever.Yeah, which really – oddly -- works perfectly. Because you’ve also got the secondary side of this, which is these are all children of world class assassins or the heads of crime syndicates who want to toughen up their kids. These are all kids who are already sociopathic and have taken a life, or are expected to learn to. So it’s not just the dilemma of climbing the ladder in high school and dealing with all of that ****; here, the knife in your back is not just metaphorical. I like that. It’s just kind of a weird chocolate/peanut butter mix. I do it a lot with my Marvel work. Like with Frankencastle; I like to take two things that have no business together, slap them together and see what it looks like, and if it’s interesting to me, really spend the time and figure it all out. This is very similar to that.So we’re dealing with kids that are expected to do things. Like this kid Willy, his old man is the baddest mother ****er in Compton. He’s expected to be that. Another kid, Lex, his dad is the head of a British crime syndicate, one of the most renowned, ruthless killers ever. So you’re seeing kids try to live up to what their parents expect, but in this case, it’s murder. And I want to make sure it’s not going to be a bloodbath. When there’s blood, I will have built you a character story that by the time blood is spilled, it should have a real emotional impact. It should have a “Oh, ****.” You should feel kids actually having to be faced with this. It’s a nice mish mash of those things.I approached Wes after they were mixed. Fortunately, he’s similar to my age and was in some of the same scenes. So he gets it. It’s the kind of thing where you had to have been there and been in a specific place and time to understand. Aesthetically, when you see three kids bombing a hill in San Francisco in the background, they’re legitimate mid-80s skate rats. You know, one them’s got a Jeff Grosso tee, one them’s got the suicidal bill cap up. That legitimacy was important to me.Because for me, at the time when I was reading comics in the mid-80s, the only skateboarding character was Rocket Racer and he was still on a banana board and he was like a Fat Albert caricature with a big ol’ headset. I remember thinking that he was created by a bunch of old men that don’t understand anything. Rocket Racer should be cool and speak to the scene. In fact, Khary Randolph and Tony Moore and I, that was the first thing we tried to get through at Marvel in like 2005. To redo Rocket Racer and make him a legitimate skate punk.But anyway, this is an artist who’s a weird mix of Mazzucchelli and Klaus [Janson] and Adrian Tomine and he gets the era so it feels legitimate. To me. The pages come in and I don’t even have to tell him stuff. He just knows the goth girls did this, and the hip-hop kid from west coast had the Raiders jacket that was still big. Whatever the thing is.I hadn’t, but I had followed his work. As I get interested in artists, I’ll start following them and track their work. It’s in a giant folder at this point. I was over at Lee Loughridge’s house, and he was coloring him on a Batman story, and I saw it and was like, “What the ****!” He was always great but this was mind bogglingly good, and then with Lee on top of it, it’s just high art. When you see this ****, especially the new pages, it’s a dream mix. And it never works out like that! It never does. But we’re really glad that it did.I make plans. Reagan Youth was this thing that had been bubbling in my head for years, and Tony Moore always would say, “Quit being a miserable writer **** and go back to being a human and draw your own story.” And he’s right. Writers and artists are very different people, and I miss it. I miss that world. I get along better with artists. I’m still an artist, but now I just tell much better artists what to draw.It’s no joke! I take a responsibility in structuring a good story with heart and I don’t **** off, I don’t give people Marvel-style scripts unless they ask for them, and even then I don’t like to do it. It’s oddly somehow more satisfying to go, “I told this ****ing genius this thing I came up with and then they made it.” And then I just there and stare at it and go, “Wow! Greg Tocchini’s crazy!” or whatever.Yeah, when I look at the stuff I drew all I feel is that I hate it. I kept getting job offers to be a storyboard artist in animation but I wanted to do comics. I wanted people to want Will Elder and Wally Wood and the classic EC aesthetic of cartooning in their comics and they don’t. It drove me ****ing crazy. I hit my head against that wall over and over and over and over. It made me miserable. I was writing on the side, and then the writing blew up, and step by step I was turning down art jobs and then I was a writer. Whatever that means. [laughs]Really, honestly, I’m more of an art director. My responsibility is to give these geniuses **** that inspires their soul because I know what it takes to sit for a day and draw a page. If that page is some mother****ers eating cereal, that’s not comic books.The book comes out in January. We pushed it back a little so that we could have four issues done before we ship the first so we can double ship for a while. The first issue is 30 full pages but it’s still just $3.50. Everybody’s really dedicating a lot of extra time and love to this. So we’re going to double ship for a bit out of the gate; I’ve never been able to do that with a creator-owned book. With the quality that Wes and Loughridge are producing and to be able to come out with two or three issues in six weeks, I’m curious to see if we can really catch lightning in a bottle on this. I hope so, I’m really enjoying making the book. I hope people will buy it.

Joey is a Senior Editor at IGN and a comic book creator. Follow Joey on Twitter @JoeyEsposito , or find him on IGN at Joey-IGN . He often wonders whatever happened to Billy's RadBug.