Deadly Class, the creator-owned Image Comics series by writer Rick Remender, artist Wes Craig and colorist Jordan Boyd, is a tale about teens attending a clandestine school that trains them in the art of assassination. Based in the mid-'80s, the comic spins a story full of intense action, high drama, nuanced characters, and the type of long-form storytelling payouts comic books excel at. That combination has made the series a fan favorite, but difficult to adapt as a film.

Of course, one medium that's ripe for a Deadly Class adaptation is television, where it's easier to tell a long-form story like those found in comics. And soon fans of the series will get a chance to see what a Deadly Class television show looks like when Syfy's long-anticipated series debuts. With Comic-Con International bearing down on us, and the series' premiere getting closer and closer, CBR spoke with Remender about his experiences working on the show. Below, he opens up about what fans can expect from the series, why Syfy is the perfect home for i, and what it was like to meet his hero, punk rock icon Henry Rollins, who has a role on the series as one of the students' teachers.

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CBR: Let's talk about the big news, the Deadly Class television adaptation has been ordered to series by Syfy. After watching the network's adaptation of Grant Morrison and Darrick Robertson's Happy, it's pretty clear it can do Deadly Class justice.

Rick Remender: Yes, the network is a wonderful group of people who love the book and are committed to translating it to the screen. They don't want to change the book or its voice. I'm co-showrunning and serving as lead writer, wrote the pilot with fellow EP Miles Feldsott, and have a lot of say when we break stories in the room. As it stands, the direction of the series is entirely true to the books.

They want to translate this book into a TV show, and you can tell that they want to feature heightened and prestige genres. Deadly Class is perfect for Syfy, as they're also doing amazing things with Superman, George R.R. Martin and Grant Morrison. They've got a lot of other very interesting things on the docket. So it's a really cool time to be with Syfy, as they're digging into the comic book space and trying to find really cool and noisy projects.

We wanted to make sure the show and its voice remained true to the book, and true to the characters that Wes and I created. So it was a hell of a lot of work. We've been working on this TV show now for three and a half years. I lived in Vancouver for two and a half months while we were filming the pilot and was fully involved in the translation with this amazing group of people. We were very fortunate to have some of the best people in the industry working with us. It’s been amazing, between the studio, cast, crew, the network, and the Russo's heavy involvement it's been great. Joe and Anthony have been such champions of this project. We've been very, very fortunate and the result is an amazing, cinematic pilot.

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One cast member I wanted to ask you about specifically is the man whose music was a big part of the '80s punk-rock aesthetic that fuels Deadly Class, Henry Rollins. What was it like meeting him? And what can you tell us about his character, Jurgen Denke?

Henry is playing the poisons teacher, who we only see briefly in a few issues of the comic. In the comic books I have to choose the most essential storytelling elements. So I don't really get to linger in the school all that much. I don't deal with the classes, the training or the ins and outs of things like PTA meetings. Because as readers of the comics know I can barely fit the story of my main cast into the 35 issues we've done of the series so far. [Laughs]

So the joy of this is it allows us to expand and unpack the universe. We can look around and see what corners of it were unexplored. And the poisons teacher was somebody who always excited me. I had a lot of ideas for him that I ultimately could never do anything with because I didn't have the space. So he, and Ms. de Luca, and Benedict Wong's character, Master Lin, will all have big stories coming up in the season that were things I could never quite fit into the comic books, while staying true to the spine of the overall story in the books.

As far as meeting Henry? I obviously love Black Flag in all its iterations, but in 1989 I started hearing Henry Rollins' spoken-word stuff and buying his books. Those things had a huge impact on me because here was this guy delivering this authentic disclosure without any need for veneer or trying to sell a cult of personality. It was somebody who was philosophical like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut, and just as smart, but came from a scene that's near and dear to me. It's a scene that inspired me to do things myself and get out there and to try. So he's a huge influence.

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It was him recounting his tales of growing up with Ian MacKaye from Minor Threat and Fugazi that were one of the biggest influences on Deadly Class, because that stuff is so heartfelt and interesting. I realized I also have childhood stories I’d love to tell. So I thought, “I'll wrap them up in a high school for assassins. I'll use the danger as a metaphor for the high emotions and trauma of the teen years.”

Henry Rollins in Deadly Class (Photo from Rick Remender's Twitter feed)

So the day he was on set I knew what I wanted to talk to him about. I wanted to talk to him about a homeless gentlemen named Paul that he used to mention in his stories. One day he was walking past Paul on the street and Paul said to him, “I always wanted to be a dancer but I never could get the shit off my shoes.” Henry turned that into something that was very inspiring to me. It made me quit my job in animation and pursue my dreams to make my own comic books. He turned it into this parable of we all want to be dancers if we could just get the shit off our shoes. That's beautiful. So I went up to him and talked to him about Paul for a little bit. He told me that Paul ended up being killed at a shelter. He was kicked to death by a bunch of other homeless people who mistook him for somebody.

I said, “That's a super bummer ending for Paul.” Then I took my exit and went back to video village to watch the scene be shot. That's where I spent my day. At one point I snuck up behind Henry, put my arm around him, and had a buddy of mine take a picture. Then I disappeared again because he's such a hero of mine I just wanted the experience to be clean and easy. I didn't want to be a drooling fan boy. [Laughs] I didn't want to taint my memory or my overall experience of it. So I clocked in at five minutes, and I Constanzed out.

It was really great and a little surreal. Especially to watch him acting in a scene with Marcus, Billy, Viktor and Petra. Plus, we had such an amazing set design and an amazing cinematographer, Tim Ives, from Stranger Things. And we had Lee Krieger direct what looks like a David Fincher movie.

That day goes down as one of the top five days in my life. A few weeks later I interviewed Henry for a new and upcoming podcast; that was surreal. He’s amazing. You always fear meeting your heroes, but in this case I only ended loving him more.

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Just like in the comics, Marcus is the central character of Deadly Class. But the show will also expand from his point of view and follow other characters and other stories.

Yeah, I definitely try to do that in the book. There's such a large cast that in order to do them all justice in the comic I have to be very mercenary about who gets what page time.

The pilot is equivalent to the plot of three issues of the comic, and as we unpack the comic book into episodes you can fit a considerable amount more story into a TV show. So we'll be able to do the A story as well as adding B, C and D stories for the other characters. We'll unpack them and give them all their own arcs that are not necessarily entirely Marcus-centric. Marcus though is still our main P.O.V.

You already talked a little bit about the pilot's director and cinematographer, but can you talk a little more about the look and visual feel of the show? Will it include some homages to Wes' art and the color palette of the book?

I mentioned David Fincher earlier because I think it has that quality to it. It features a slightly inverted green/sepia hue, very atmospheric. We also shot it in anamorphic widescreen. It's like the extreme, old-school, Sergio Leone-style widescreen. So it's not just a TV show.

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One of the things our colorists, Lee Loughridge and Jordan Boyd, establish in the book is using color to establish emotion, tone, and feel. That's something that's carried through to the TV show as well. There were a lot of people who were very reverential in talking about those aspects of the book and the designs.

We were in a large studio office space in Vancouver and the whole art department was just covered in Wes' art. There were a bunch of concept artists working on how to turn that into reality. They wanted to make the book. Their job was to take both the wonderful designs that Wes had spit out and the emotional feel of what Wes and Jordan do in the colors, and then try to translate that into a TV show.

We're very lucky in that the book inspired the whole team to try to do something that was a movie version of it. And it looks like a nice movie.

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We talked about Henry Rollins, but what was it like meeting some of the younger actors who play your main cast?

It was totally surreal because they're all such spirited and wonderful people. We got so lucky with the cast and they all responded to the material in the book. They took it so seriously. They're all going to be superstars. This is going to launch many careers.

So many of these stories and characters are based on heightened, metaphorical versions of things I went through. And there are a number of scenes like that in the pilot that also come out of the book. So I had a very emotional experience because I don't think that I was completely aware of the fact of how many bits of my actual life ended up in the book. I would be on set seeing things and I'd be, “Oh my god!” This scene happened in my life and here we are shooting it! [Laughs] How many people get to experience this? And with a wonderful cast and crew? Shit. Crazy.

RELATED: Remender & Craig Continue to Drop Student Bodies in Deadly Class

You hear all the clichés of somebody experiencing this, like, “We became a family on set.” But you do. We did. We've got the father figure at the top of it all, Benedict Wong who plays Master Lin. You could watch that guy read the phone book! The gravity he brings to the part is just incredible! Man, I can't wait for people to see this.

Again, spending all those weeks living together and putting this pilot together ranks in the top five experiences of my life because of the people, the enthusiasm, the excitement, and the passion. Seeing everybody bring it all to life and how hard they worked to find the living, breathing voice of the characters was great. People would ask me things like, “Would Willie do this? Is Billy like that?” We'd have long conversations about all these characters. It helped me dig into them and helped me make sure that I can help them translate that to this medium. They all found their own vision, and yet the spirit of this thing is everything I dreamed it would be

Do you think you experiences working on the show will inform your work on the Deadly Class comic moving forward? Has it already impacted your approach to or work on the book?

I haven't really thought about that yet because I'm still at a point in time where the current outline of the book is still probably about eight months old. I break story and I plant basic beats 10-15 issues out, sometimes even 20. Then I go through and I chisel out 10 issues of bullet points. So a lot of what I'm doing now is stuff that was written well before the show was even approved to pilot.

In making this show, working with the brilliant team of writer’s in the room, we do deep dives on every single character. We drill down into every single thing. And in doing this I answer questions about them and get new optics on the characters. I definitely have a deeper immersion and a better understanding of all of these characters from the exercise of doing this, and from working with all these brilliant people and their insights and their questions.