Murder School by Paul B. Rainey. Drawn & Quarterly, 2026. 9781770468603. 216pp.
Yesterday was a perfect day. I was looking for a reason to avoid work on a project, and I arrived home to find a review copy of Murder School in the mail. I felt entirely justified in clearing my schedule and reading it in one sitting, even though today I’m putting in a few extra hours of work. The one-sheet that came with it describes it as “part memoir and part surreal fiction.”
The book opens with reproductions of a few issues of Crud, a comic-format school newspaper by “ex-All-Saints pupil Nick Goddad!” In the first, after another student wet himself, Nick approaches the headmaster to try to get him to allow students to go to the toilet without permission. In another, he takes revenge on a nonchalant bully. In a third, Nick is sexually assaulted by an older boy, and no one seems to care. The fourth is Murder School, and it’s about something that he witnesses while wandering the school hallways during class.
Who is Nick Goddard? How does his experience relate to what Paul Rainey experienced at his secondary school, All-Saints? (This is the subject of most of the rest of the graphic novel.) What Rainey and others go through is dark. It includes not just beatings by other students but repeated violence at the hands of teachers. But Rainey has friends, and he has comics. Sometimes he even has a friend who likes comics. He’s caught stealing. He gets the strap.
One of his teachers always sends him out of class, and he’s unsure why. Another beats all the students in class, usually with a slipper, for speaking while he’s lecturing. (He does this even when no one is actually speaking). This teacher is one of my favorite characters. I can’t justify this; something is clearly wrong with me. I really loved the music teacher, too, who invites students to bring in music to play during class but doesn’t seem to understand the filthy lyrics. (I laughed aloud several times while reading the book, probably loudest when an idiotic teacher was trying to shame a young Paul Rainey for reading 2000 AD.)
The end of the main narrative about Rainey leads into another issue of Crud, which is back after a forty-year break. And then this turns into the final act, also titled “Murder School,” that starts with Rainey giving an amazing presentation about his first graphic novel and leads to a strange reunion or two.
Murder School is another volume of deadpan brilliance from Rainey, and it made me happy that I never had to navigate school life in the UK.
