Rick Remender knew what he wanted when he created his graphic novel, Deadly Class (with art by Wesley Craig), and he wasn’t about to compromise that vision for TV. “I said, ‘look, I'm not handing this over. I'm going to be writing it and running it and doing all the music.’” And that’s exactly what Syfy and his producing partners, the Russo Brothers (you may know them from those tiny little Avengers films), let him do.

Deadly Class is the ‘80s-set story of orphan Marcus Lopez Arguello (Benjamin Wadsworth) and his classmates at King’s Dominion High School for the Deadly Arts. A training ground for the deadliest assassins in the world, run by the mysterious Master Lin (Benedict Wong), Marcus must survive not only his lessons, but his classmates, and the people seemingly always out to get him after he burned down his old orphanage. Oh yeah, and Marcus — by the way — wants to kill Ronald Reagan. (It’s a whole thing.)

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If you’re a fan of the comics, or just of nostalgia for the neon-flecked, crust-punkian era, you’ll no doubt appreciate the series’ visual language. It is slick and engaging, true to Director of Photography Owen McPolin’s (Vikings, Into the Badlands, Penny Dreadful) form, with exactly the sort of flair you’d expect from a Russo Brothers production (the fights! The pace!). In fact, it is thanks to the Russos' ability to help Remender “reimburse and re-adjust and to make everything as perfect as I possibly can,” that he feels the series is a more well-rounded version of the story he previously told. “I'm able to add shading and nuance and find other aspects of who they are [by] working with all these great people.”

And his aspirations for the TV show are lofty. While on the Vancouver set of the San Francisco-based series, Remender told IGN that he hoped the series would do “what Mad Men did for the late fifties, early sixties; where they take you back and interweave the story into that period of time. [That] was really important to me.” To that end, Remender has been “rewriting every script and that breaking every story” as well as managing the duties typical of a co-showrunner (alongside Mick Betancourt who took over from Adam Targum after the pilot) and executive producer.

So what can comics fans and newcomers expect from the show? A nearly direct-from-the-page adaptation, just expanded. “In a comic book, I get 22 pages every month and I have to be so compressed,” Remender explained, so “every bit of fat in your story has to be cut. And so in this, it's not that we're adding fat, but I'm now able to open things up — where it's not just the cream base. I can boil other pots of cream and get into other characters and unpack all of them, as opposed to only a core two or three.”

Deadly Class: "Reagan Youth" Photos 19 IMAGES

What does that look like? Bigger backstories for smaller characters and more motivation, like Lex, Marcus’ classmate at school. “Lex (played by Jack Gillett) never had a backstory in the graphic novels; he became a pretty big player in the TV show,” Remender said. “That one was surprising … [and] is now one of my favorite backstories of all of them; we'll get to tell it in episode 7 or 8, I think.”

There have been changes though — namely when it comes to guns. Remender posits that there were far fewer school shootings when he wrote the comic, “six, seven years ago.” But now, “whatever's going on in our society ... makes it abundantly clear to me, as we're developing this, that I don't want to see a gun in the school. In the book it's just a drawing and it's beautifully illustrated. But that sort of graphic imagery can mean a lot of different things. And while I think it can be metaphorical and iconic in what it's representing [on the page], in live action that's a bridge too far.”

“Fortunately,” he added, “that really works to heighten the reality. Because it becomes something where the metaphor for violence is heightened by what they're using — maces and Ninja swords and katanas and things like this — which allows you to immerse [yourself] in it, as it's a separate reality from our own.”

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Given that Deadly Class is a story about ‘80s assassins, there’s plenty of violence, bigotry, sex, drugs, and stereotypes to go around. But for Remender, this array of personalities and ideologies was purposeful, meant to render his own life experience heightened for entertainment — right down to the overt racism of characters like Brandy (Siobhan Williams), a white supremacist. “I was a dirty punk rock grommet living in downtown Phoenix and my parents moved me to a town in the middle of the desert, which was literally like the 1950s," he said. "I grew up in a place where I was surrounded by racists.”

So he put a racist contingent in his school filled with characters of various ethnicities, many of whom came to King’s Dominion thanks to their family’s gang connections (think of that what you will). For Remender, this was necessary for the sort of story he wanted to tell. When asked if he wanted to change any of the depictions when translating them to screen given our current reevaluation of what was deemed acceptable in that era, he demurred. “What's changed is we're all very frightened to talk about it, we're all worried we’re going to get [an] article written about us and somebody is going to take a giant s*** down our throats if we say it wrong.”

He believes his responsibility lies in showing it as he believed it was — not turning the series into, as he puts it, “a Saturday afternoon special where you have like a clean little moral and everybody learns a lesson.”

Remender went on to add that, “I think that the danger is to look at the fact that we're finally in a culture that's desperately trying to rewind a lot of bad, bad mistakes [and instead] try and whitewash or water down our entertainment so that we don't take a look at what it actually is ... I think that the responsibility is to show the reality as the reality exists. I don't want to clean up who they are. I don't want to clean up what they are. I want to embody that. While also trying not to make it two dimensional or too easy on myself.”

Check out our spoiler-free series premiere review of Deadly Class.