Rick Remender has become an important voice at Marvel in recent years, helming books like Uncanny X-Force, Venom, and now Uncanny Avengers. But for many years, Remender was a mainstay of the indie comics scene, dabbling in many genres and weaving epic saga like Fear Agent and Strange Girl.

And in the same year that many creators are flocking to publishers like Image and Monkeybrain to tell their creator-owned stories, it's good to see that Remender is renewing his focus on his independent work. He recently debuted his dark new sci-fi series Black Science with artist Matteo Scalera ( which scored pretty well here ). And now Remender is about to launch a second new series with artist Wes Craig called Deadly Class. Despite revolving around a group of teenagers at a school for killers and assassins, the series is also a personal reflection of Remender's own interests and experiences as a teenager.We had the chance to chat with Remender as the release date for Deadly Class #1 draws near. He talked about how his own life and interest in things like skateboarding and punk rock has influenced the book. He also provided us with an exclusive look at some of the interior art for the first issue.

Deadly Class #1 cover (Phil Noto variant)

Deadly Class #1 cover (Declan Shalvey variant)

Deadly Class #1 cover (Farel Dalrymple variant)

Deadly Class #1 cover (Nic Klein variant)

Deadly Class #2 cover

It's probably no coincidence that 1987 was the year I started high school. So given that this was the year that Marcus starts at Kings Dominion School for the Deadly Arts it seemed appropriate to write it in the same year that I started high school. Write what you know. But beyond that that was the year that solidified all of the components that cooked me into the human am I am today. When I had found all the things I love most in life.By 1987 I had been skating for a few years. Having never really found a sport I loved before skateboarding, I liked Soccer but didn’t love it, it was a full time obsession back in those days. Punk was “over” again at this point, I think the Circle Jerks’ Wonderful came out, Bad Religion put out Suffer, the Dead Milkmen put out Bucky Fellini, a few other albums I remember but the word was punk was over. But most of what I was doing was catching up on what happened the 10 years prior. There was so much great punk to explore and unearth. And that was the year I really began to hunt backwards, though I had started listening to punk around 1985 it wasn't until 1987 that I began to dig deeper into the history.I was also fully immersed in my comic book addiction then, and through the haze of memory, 1987 was a pretty great year for comic books.So I guess I wanted to examine the year where I found myself completely immersed in the things that I would continue to love for the rest of my life. I was 13 and I guess that's the year that everything seems the most important and leaves the greatest impact. Or at least it did on me.Most people are not aware of the sorts of books I was doing from 1998 up and through about 2006. Most of that stuff was Black Heart Billy, my wacky skate punk humor book, or various horror books that I had done around that time. In fact I had done more horror work than just about anything else, starting with Doll and Creature in 1999. If I can be tactless enough to drop in a plug, we will be collecting most of my horror work in an oversized hardcover at Image titled Crawlspace shipping this March. Plug over.As for being associated with pulp sci-fi, I think that's because Fear Agent was the thing that put me on the map in terms of fan perception. And I'm totally fine with that. I definitely tend to lean into nonsense science fiction so that I can tell whatever kind of bizarre visual story is the most fun to write. I can do what I feel like without having to do a whole lot of explaining. But this is a bit different. This is reality. In the 80s. No cell phones or email. No magic. No spaceships. Plain old reality. It’s got to have great characters and rock solid art or you’re sunk.I didn't look at anything. I reread some journal entries from back when I was in high school and I wrote a ton of notes about what it was like to be 14. What it was like to be moved around as much as I was. That sort of disconnected homeless feeling coupled with the insecurity and uncertainty of the age.It's collaboration so there's also a lot of my co-creator Wes Craig and editor Sebastian Girner in there as well. I spent countless hours on the phone with Wes and Sebastian beating this thing in the shape, cooking up new characters, devising interesting plot structures. The high panel count is something that I've always been a fan of, and a staple of Frank Miller from the era of the story, so Wes and I have tried to go for maximum panel count per page. The effect is basically giving people twice as much story or at least twice as much motion. Wes goes nuts with this stuff. He designs pages to look like frameable art that just happens to also have perfect story telling. The dude is a threat to all the living. He will spell doom for our people.Thank you for that. Means a lot to hear. When we are producing Fear Agent the book only sold about 5 to 6000 copies a month and was very difficult given that was barely enough money to pay for basic production costs. But we fought it out for 6 years and finally completed the story the way we wanted to. I’m very proud of it.As for getting back to creator-owned, it really was like riding a bike. It was like riding a bike that I missed terribly. I had taken a break from creator-owned comic books for about a year and a half before I started developing these two books and a part of me was withering up. The excitement I feel at collaborating with a great artist, cooking up a new world, a new story with brand-new characters that can reflect different aspects of yourself coupled with entirely foreign traits. I enjoy nothing more than creating new series and watching them grow in front of me month by month. It's a muscle I spent many years developing and it feels good to be using it again.I have a fair amount of say in the design of all my creator-owned books. On Deadly Class I work closely with everyone on the team to develop every aspect of the series. We all do, it’s a collaborative process. We all worked very closely with Russ Wooton for a few weeks to land on the logo. He killed it. Very clean, and very iconic.Wes and I spent months developing the characters, talking out who they were, what scene they were from, what aspect of the scene they would represent etc. Lee Loughridge and I spent an entire night drinking scotch at his house talking over how he was going to approach the colors. It's really the fun of it is sitting around your friend, developing and concocting and working together to collaborate to make something new.That was me. I actually had that arcade game in my apartment about 12 years ago. Right after the 9/11 attacks I was living near Oakland in California with a buddy who had also grown up in the skate/punk scene of the 80s. We were so shell-shocked from the attacks that we sort of regressed into this childlike mode of filling our apartment with '80s memorabilia. We got all of our favorite skateboard decks off of eBay, bought a bunch of old independent trucks and put together some old decks to go bombing hills with, we got a credit card so that we could buy 720 off of a videogame vendor, we sat around listening to T.S.O.L. and The Misfits playing 720 and pretending that we were still living in our childhood.Yeah, Wes and Rus worked closely together to come up with a very distinct and unique lettering style and balloon style as well. Somewhat based on the work of Alex Toth but not entirely. It really is a unique invention and I think it looks fantastic.Working with Rus is a treat, he such a big part of my creator-owned teams. He’s been with me for so long I can't imagine not having him on board. He adds an entire other layer to the artistic integrity of the comics he works on. The logos that he created for Deadly Class and Black Science are also fantastic.I love The Descendants for sure. One of the very first albums I ever listened to was a mix tape a friend made for me. It was really just a cassette with a couple of albums on it. It had a everything Minor Threat had done, Agent Orange’s Living in Darkness, and DRI’s Dealing With It. So those 3 albums hold a real special place in my heart given that they were the 1st 3 that I fell in love with. They were my gateway drug into punk rock.Scroll down for a look at interior art for issue #1:Deadly Class #1 will be released on January 22, 2014.

Benjamin is the co-writer of Captain Ultimate and a vicious lover of Godzilla. Follow Benjamin on Twitter @616Earth , or find him on IGN