In case you missed the announcement, I'm undertaking a project of re-reading every issue of Gen 13 for the purpose of blogging about it now that we're celebrating the 25th almost 30th 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 upped the dose of activator drugs in her food, and the results . . . well, let's just say Fairchild's needs to shop at the big 'n' tall stores. 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. This issue promises to up the clobbering quotient, and introduce a new character according to the cover. Also, don't neglect 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. This is page one, right . . . ?
Yup, I checked. This is absolutely page one. So suddenly Caitlin has clothes, there's a new dudebro we've never seen before, and they're in the middle of the Nevada desert. What gives?
Something important to know while reading the Gen 13 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 "Gen 13", 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 series 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 the moment, 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 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 says he likes the cut of Tom's jib and unleashes his own powers. 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. His classmates in high school called him a burnout, and he decides that's as appropriate a callsign as any. Thus inspired, he roasts another group of Ivana's soldiers with some heat vision.
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 with a Native American instead of an African 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?
Turns out it's Roxy who's manifested powers, 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, all the attackers have been neutralized, and they have a prisoner they can pump for info. 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 it was hardly her fault she grew nine inches and packed on sixty pounds of ultra-dense muscle in a matter of minutes. 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're the type of weirdo who picks up issue 2 without having read issue 1.
After Caitlin beat up the initial guard, she, Roxy, 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 she's 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 size to pick out? She's taller and shapelier than she was 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 bury them in legal fees, so the Gen 13 kids (any every other metahuman in the Image-verse) are "Super-Powered Beings", and not "superheroes", "mutants", or other legal landmines.
Back to the story.
Caitlin remarks she never saw Tom among any of the other test subjects, and Tom explains he was one of the Keepers, not the students. When he manifested his powers, he 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.
Fade to black.
The night passes, and Fairchild wakes under the harsh desert sun to discover a psychic link between herself and Freefall:
"Errrr...what's that? 'The Empire Strikes Back'? Never heard of it." -- Jim Lee (probably)
Marching back to the remains of last night's battle, Caitlin grabs 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 Gen 13 letter column -- winner receives a Gen 13 #1 ashcan signed by J. Scott Campbell and Alex Garner. Sorry pal, you're twenty-nine years too late to win the prize. Try to keep up on current events, will ya?
And that's Gen 13 #2. It's refreshing to see Lee and Choi 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 Gen 13 #2 a rating of...
out of
Thanks, as always, to @blewitt for providing the dopiest face imaginable 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 @blewitt sell you all the 90s comics you need out of his actual, real-life store front? Could you be an SPB and not even know it?
Spoiler alert: Yes, yes, hell yeah baby, and probably not.
So until next time, crank some Soundgarden, keep blasting that Pearl Jam, and I'll see you in the back-issue bins!
I really miss the look and story telling of 90s books.
!DHEDGE
I know, right? There's just something quite comforting about the fact the books didn't take themselves quite so seriously. At least not most of Image's output around this time. Thank you so much for the comment at the vote from @dhedge! :D
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