Michael's Long Box: The Great Gen13 Re-Read, Part 2 - Gen13 #2 (March 1994, Image)

in #comics5 years ago (edited)

In case you missed the announcement, I'm undertaking a goal of re-reading every issue of Gen13 for the purpose of blogging about it now that we're celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication! Yes, I am crazy. No, I am not going to share--dig up your own insanity.

When last we saw our heroes, Caitlin Fairchild had gone from zero to sixty. Ivana had upped the dosage of activator drugs in her food, and the results...well, let's just say Fairchild's gonna need to shop at the big 'n' tall stores from now on. Now a statuesque amazon, with more curves than a NASCAR track and the strength and invulnerability of Wonder Woman, Caitlin's every adolescent geek's fantasy come true. Issue #2 promises to unleash the clobbering, and also introduce a new character as well according to the cover (not to mention that groovy image of a stoned-off-his-gourd Grunge up in the Image logo). So let's turn the page and find out what happens next before the anticipation utterly destroys us.

Hurry, hurry, hurry! Aaaaaaaaaaaand...voila!

I...wait, hang on a second...this is page one, right...?

Yup, I checked. This is absolutely page one. So suddenly Caitlin has clothes, there's a new dude we've never seen before, and they're in the middle of the Nevada desert. What the actual f-?

Something important to keep in mind while reading the Gen13 mini-series is that nearly everything in the present-day of 1994 is presented through Caitlin Fairchild's limited point of view. She's the narrator, through whom most of the events are filtered. While the book is called "Gen13", it's absolutely the Caitlin Fairchild show for these first five issues. With this in mind, Jim Lee and Brandon Choi utilize several techniques to feed information to the reader, and in this case they've taken the in media res option of dumping us into the action, then waiting for a pause to sort things out. It's not a literary device they keep once the main book kicks in, but for right now, for a new title, I commend them for keeping the limited perspective through most of the story.

So this is a 'flash forward' to what's happening now. We'll get the flashback that fills in the details later, but for right now, all you need to know is the roll-call:

Roxy, Grunge, and Bobby we've all met before, either in the previous issue, or in Deathmate Black if you were unfortunate enough to fall for that marketing hype. Sarah Rainmaker is an entirely new character, but we knew she was coming because the cover said she was.

Who the hell is this Tom Hallinan though? I certainly don't remember anybody with that name from last issue, but there's something undeniably familiar about him. Especially when he decides he's sick of running:

Hmmm...Tom's eyes glow with eerie energy, then a bunch of people on a flying weapons platform lose their heads. Now I know I've seen someone use a power similar to that in the past, but I just can't put my finger on it. I'm sure it will come to me. Maybe you've been paying closer attention.

In any case, once Tom lets loose, Caitlin looks on in horror at the carnage while Bobby Lane says he likes the cut of Tom's jib and starts his human torch routine. We learn Bobby's basically a Human Torch knock-off, as he can light himself on fire, throw balls of burning plasma, and manipulate the temperature around him to create a shield that harmlessly melts bullets. We learn his classmates in high school used to call him 'Burnout', so that's the moniker he adopts as he shoots flaming plasma from his eyes and incinerates another group of Ivana's soldiers.

With two attackers down and two more incoming, Caitlin grabs a nearby boulder, which is larger than she is, and hurls it at the third ship, causing another crash landing. That leaves one ship unaccounted for, but the retrieval team has landed and currently has Grunge, Rainmaker, and Roxy in their sights. Ivana's ordered them brought back alive, so they deploy a tangler device which incapacitates Roxy. Grunge runs to help her, but remarks it may take some time to get her out of the ropes. Rainmaker responds that she can give him all the time he needs, then whips up a ferocious sandstorm which buries their attackers. So, yeah, Rainmaker's basically Storm from the X-Men with a Native American background.

Unfortunately, one of the retrieval team has survived, and since Rainmaker disabled her commanding officer, the last soldier has decided to take matters into his own hands and put a bullet in Rainmaker's skull at point-blank range. Just as he goes to pull the trigger, his arm swivels upward and the bullet flies into the night sky. The soldier then starts to levitate, and demands Rainmaker put him down. Rainmaker's response?

It's not the 90's anymore, kids. Sigh...

In any case, turns out it's Roxy who has manifested powers of her own, and she's happy to oblige the soldier, sending him flying through the air with the greatest of ease. Rainmaker remarks it was like the guy was in freefall, and now we've got Roxy's new code-name as we discover she's got the power to manipulate gravity around herself and others. Now everybody except Grunge has powers, and he's feeling pretty lonely. Roxy tries to cheer him up by reminding him he's already super-dense, and I think he takes it as a compliment.

The important thing is that all the attackers have been neutralized, and now they have a prisoner they can pump for information. Caitlin reminds them they need to get going. She's not happy about leaving the wounded, but Tom's like, screw 'em, they messed with the bull and they got the horns. So, with the unconscious soldier slung over Burnout's back, they continue into the desert night.

Because these are teenagers, it isn't long before everyone is bitching about how cold, tired, and hungry they are, and a verbal altercation breaks out. Tom accuses Fairchild of getting them into this mess, Fairchild counters that it was hardly her fault she grew nine inches and packed on about two hundred pounds of ultra-dense muscle in a matter of minutes, and now we get the back-story to how the kids escaped from the facility along with a brief recap of last issue's events in case you missed them.

After Caitlin beat up the initial guard, she and Roxy and Grunge all had to run from a group of soldiers led by Bliss. They reach a dead-end and Fairchild rips a hole in the wall with her bare hands, but it turns out they're several hundred feet up with nowhere to go. Just in the nick of time, a gigantic portion of the ceiling melts away, revealing Bobby, Tom, and Rainmaker on the floor above. Bobby sets the hallway on fire to distract the soldiers, then grabs the whole group in a thermal updraft and floats them out the newly-created exit hole.

Caitlin remarks there are a number of things she finds strange though:

Well, that explains why Caitlin is dressed properly at this point, instead of sporting the tattered shreds of dress she had on at the conclusion of the last issue. How the hell did Tom know she'd need a uniform though? And more importantly, how the hell did he know what side it would be? She's quite a bit taller and shapelier than she was just yesterday, and Fairchild is sure she's never seen him before.

Tom poo-poos her suspicions, and reminds the group that without him and his leadership, both in finding Fairchild, Grunge, and Roxy, and then taking charge and bringing the fight to their pursuers, they'd still be trapped in a lab like guinea pigs. He figured out the whole Genesis Project thing was a scam: they're Gen-13, they're all the offspring of Gen-12, and there were eleven other Gen groups before that. It's nothing but a decades-long scam by the government to create their own race of SPBs (super-powered beings).


A side-note: Image always refers to their various enhanced teams as SPBs. Why not call them "superheroes"? Because they were trying to avoid lawsuits. Since 1979, Marvel and DC have jointly held the trademark for 'superhero'. There's a long, convoluted story about how and why this happened (as well as why Marvel and DC went in on this together instead of fighting for single-ownership supremacy), and Brian Cronin does a far better job breaking it down than I could in this post for CBR, so I'll leave it for you to read if you want. Basically, Image probably could have gotten away with calling their characters 'superheroes' in the context of the story, but given the animosity between their creator-owners and Marvel Comics at the time, my guess is they wanted to avoid any opportunity Marvel could have used to drag them into court and bury them in legal fees, so the Gen13 kids are "Super-Powered Beings", and not "superheroes".


Back in the pages of the book, Caitlin remarks she never saw Tom among any of the other test subjects, but Tom replies he was one of the Keepers who also found out he was Gen-positive, manifested his powers, and decided to help the rest of them escape. They argue over what their next move should be. Caitlin wants to keep going and tell the authorities what's going on.

Tom, on the other hand, feels like their best move is to take the fight straight to I.O., otherwise they'll spend their entire lives on the run from scum like the guy they've taken hostage. And that's something Tom just won't allow:

Fired up by Tom's rhetoric, the rest of the group decides to follow him back to I.O. for some "hardcore butt-kicking". Caitlin refuses to go, since she's morally conflicted by Tom's enthusiasm for killing. Tom replies that if he sees her again, he'll kill her himself, and leads Burnout, Rainmaker, Freefall, and Grunge off into the night.

Back at HQ, Ivana and Bliss reveal the ruse (assuming you haven't figured it out for yourself by now): there is no Tom Hallinan, there is only Matthew "Threshold" Callahan. He leads the four other kids into the fortress, then turns on them, using his powers to stun them all into submission. We get some more incest vibes from Bliss, who congratulates her brother on the success of his mission then wonders aloud if he performs as well in "other areas". Matt, once again, shoots her down as Roxy beats herself up for not listening to Fairchild instead.

Fade to black.


The night passes, and Fairchild awakes under the harsh desert sun to a rude surprise: some kind of psychic link between herself and Freefall:

"Errrr...what's that? 'The Empire Strikes Back'? No, never heard of it." -- Jim Lee (probably)

Marching back to the remains of last night's battle, Caitlin picks up one of the fallen soldier's heavy weapons, and does her best Ellen Ripley impression in preparation for the coming rescue mission which, the text box reminds us, will happen in 30 days.

"Errrr...what's that? 'Aliens'? No, never heard of it." -- Also Jim Lee (also probably).

The book closes with a nifty one-page pinup of Grunge sitting on a wrecked I.O. mecha and Freefall hovering above it, by Richard Johnson, then Bill Kaplan prints and responds to a few fan letters. They also announce a contest to name the Gen13 letter column--winner receives a Gen13 #1 ashcan signed by J. Scott Campbell and Alex Garner. Sorry, you're twenty-five years too late to win the prize. Try to keep up on current events, will ya?


And that's Gen13 #2. It's refreshing to see Lee and Choi keeping up the pacing and using some literary techniques to push the story along, and while Campbell's still honing his chops with the pencils (witness Fairchild's silly-looking feet on the first page as just one example), his compositions are good, and Garner's top-notch inks make Campbell's minor mistakes easy to overlook as he brings true depth to the scenes.

Also of note here is Jeff Mariotte who was brought on to handle the actual dialogue, with Lee and Choi sharing plot credits. While some of his lines are a little cringe-worthy now that we're well past the time when JNCO jeans, wallet chains, and flannel everything was hot fashion, I think Mariotte does a better job giving each character a unique voice. You can just hear that subtle twinge of menace in everything Tom/Threshold says, and the banter between characters, especially Grunge and everyone else, is more amusing. I can't remember if this is a one-off job for Jeff, or if they keep him on for future issues, but he did a bang-up job on this one.

I give Gen13 #2 a rating of...

out of

Thanks, as always, to @blewitt for providing the dopiest face imaginable against his will for my rating system. He will be subjected to further abuse as we continue, so tune in next time when we hit Issue #3 and another Image character gets dragged into the mix. Will the super-powered beings known as "Gen-13" escape from Threshold, Bliss, and Ivana? Will Grunge ever manifest an ability to do more than complain? Will @cryplectibles sell you all the 90's comics you need for just a fraction of your hard-earned cryptocurrencies? Could you be an SPB and not even know it?

Spoiler alert: Yes, yes, hell yeah baby, and not on your life.

So until next time, crank some Soundgarden, keep blasting that Pearl Jam, and I'll see you in the back-issue bins!

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Man, I am not a fan of 90s comic art, and definitely not a fan of the Image style. That leftmost panel in this image you included.... shudder...

Still, good review of the story. A tad formulaic, because I don't think anyone over 13 could have missed that betrayal at the end, but it ticks all the boxes in an introductory story.

A-are you saying...you weren't surprised by that shocking twist reveal?!

NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo...!

:D

Yeah, it's totally formulaic. Kind of hard to rip off The X-Men without devolving into formula territory though. I have to give Campbell something of a pass on the artwork, since he was 19 when Jim Lee hired him to work at Wildstorm. That's a damn sight better than I could draw when I was 19, at least.

Campbell actually gets to both write and draw the book later on in its cycle, which presents an interesting dynamic: it's one of the few comic books about college-age kids of the 90's to be written by a college-age kid from the 90's. He's not around on the book for too long (he leaves it completely around issue 20 of the ongoing series to focus on his own creator-owned project, Danger Girl), but his foundation is definitely the reason the book survived its "wilderness years" under John Arcudi, Gary Frank, and Scott Lobdell until Adam Warren got his hands on it for its final issues. :)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I'm prone to do. Like...all the time...

Thanks for reading!! :D

Yeah, and the subsequent panel of the "head chick grinning" is actually a superb expression caricature indicating a positive direction the art can (and doubtless will) go.

Oh my god, mid nineties was the geekiest time of my life (gen13, Spawn, the max, all Sandmand, and vertigo comics) , i remember these, I can recall there was a cartoon movie but never watched it.

Your wish is my command, @yidneth! Thanks for dropping by. :D

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🤣🤣 alt.X-men....

Man, that was a bit of a flashback.

Yeah, 90’s ... when everyone had massive breasts and no waists or 6-packs!!!

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And don't forget, great things were "totally fresh"! :D

Hi @modernzorker
really an exciting reading! and to think that centuries have passed since then eh? great story and a lot of imagination. How did you come to mind to propose it again? Nostalgia? Congratulations and thank you for sharing

Thanks, @road2horizon! It's all nostalgia for me, as I read this series when I was a teenager. I thought it would be fun to look at it again today and see how well it held up now that I'm twenty-five years older. I'm having a great time! I hope you'll come back for later installments too! :)

Damn. You are really going all out blogging this re-read! I actually wanted to do a bit of the same recently and decided to start off with the 1990 Guardians of the Galaxy series... but I’m figuring maybe 1-3 posts covering about 60 issues! 😂

Your writing and enthusiasm is entertaining as always though. The thoroughness is enjoyable!

Yeah do that!!!

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Will do! Glad there’s some interest! I’m a bit over halfway through the reading. Finished #34 a couple days ago and the original series ran 62 issues... I’ll write about it on one of my alt accounts, @exploreunlimited, so keep an eye out there!

Sup Dork! Enjoy the upvote!!!

Thanks, @supdork! You're a peach, no matter what @blewitt says about you behind your back. ;)

I ve heard this comic for the first time. I looks exciting. Thanks for sharing. Nice article👍👏

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