Michael's Long Box: The Great Gen13 Re-Read, Part 3: Gen13 #3 (April 1994, Image)
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, they had been betrayed by fellow gen-active Tom Hallanan, who talked them into walking back to Ivana's Death Valley compound for some revenge. The only one unwilling to follow Tom was Fairchild, who couldn't handle his callous disregard for life. Upon returning to the facility, Tom revealed himself to be (GASP!) Threshold--he disabled Freefall, Grunge, Burnout, and Rainmaker in seconds, then returned them to the dungeons for further study. Fairchild apparently has some sort of psychic link with Freefall though, as she feels the pain of her torture. This is enough to get Caitlin to grab up a gun and pledge to make Threshold and everyone else pay for hurting her friends.
Just one question: what the frip-zipping diggity-whangdoodles is that creature on the cover?!
We open on Fairchild, who's doing her best Solid Snake impersonation:
Some kind of convoy's making its way to the I.O. facility, and they're carrying something big. Whoever's in the driver's seat must have some primo credentials too--we don't see their face, but they've got top-level authorization to enter a locked down compound with their enormous cargo. After threatening the gate guard with a repost, they're allowed entry as the guard muses somebody better wake up Director Baiul, cuz she ain't gonna be happy about this.
Director Baiul, as it turns out, is Ivana, so we finally have a last name for the woman who's making our protagonists' lives a living hell for the last two issues. The milquetoast tasked with waking her up gets raked over the coals repeatedly as she stalks down the corridor, demanding answers as to who broke her order for no one to either enter or leave the compound. We know it's not Threshold or Bliss, since they're already inside. In fact, there's only one guy we've been introduced to so far who is anywhere near Ivana's level, and that's...
Turns out Lynch and his Black Razor units captured another SPB (super-powered being) skulking around Death Valley in the middle of the night. Regulations state any unidentified SPB captured during the night has to be taken to the closest I.O. facility to be secured until daylight transport can be arranged. Whatever Lynch and his team found (spoiler alert: it's the gray-skinned thing on the cover), it's designated Class A, which sounds pretty dangerous. Pissed through she is, Ivana knows she can't buck the rules on this one so Lynch and his group are staying, but she makes it clear if anything goes wrong, it's his head on the chopping block.
Meanwhile, Caitlin's managed to infiltrate the facility while the convoy had everyone's attention, and she recaps the story from the last two issues in case we're first-time readers. Princeton, Project Genesis, guns in the desert, she wants Payback, dammit...
...and immediately fails her Stealth roll.
Fortunately for Fairchild, her strength and reflexes are continually enhancing themselves, and she quickly disables both the Keeper and the Black Razor trooper. The Keeper's face-plate is smashed to fragments, but the Black Razor suit is still intact, which gives her an idea.
Cut to Lynch and Ivana watching Threshold work over the prisoners via closed circuit camera. All four have been stripped naked. Burnout's chilling in a one-person liquid-filled chamber to prevent him from flaring up. Freefall and Rainmaker are each attached to power-dampening shackles. Grunge is suspended from the ceiling, upside down, arms manacled and subjected to increasingly harsh jolts from Threshold, who doesn't understand why Grunge hasn't manifested any abilities yet.
Lynch thinks Ivana's being a bit harsh, all things considered, since they are only kids. Ivana thinks Lynch has gone soft, and could learn something from Threshold who, she remarks, reminds her of Lynch in his younger days. Lynch counters that, while both of them have seen and done terrible things, he never enjoyed it the way Threshold does.
Elsewhere elsewhere, we meet Timmy:
Captured by I.O. and taken to Project Genesis to analysis, it's believed that Timmy could be an SPB. He's also just a child, and despite Ivana making every effort to make him feel right at home (everything from Beavis & Butthead on the television to a poster of Barney on the wall, a Sega Genesis console, huge teddy bear, and big comfy bed), it's not working.
Don't worry though: Timmy won't be here very long, because Luke Skywalker Caitlin Fairchild is there to rescue him!
"Errrr...what's that? 'Star Wars'? No, never heard of it." -- J. Lee, B. Choi, & J.S. Campbell (probably)
Because taking a small, scared child along with you is what all the best stealth operatives do, Fairchild takes little Timmy from his room and continues her sneak-a-thon through I.O.'s basement, where she spies Bliss. The deranged nymphomaniac is toying with the giant creature brought in by Lynch and his Black Razors, using her psychic powers to dangle the key to his cage within grabbing distance, then yanking them away at the last second. Probably not the best idea to mess around with a creature that looks like it could give the Incredible Hulk pointers on bodybuilding technique, but nobody ever said Bliss was the smartest cookie in the jar.
Since it's pretty much impossible to sneak by a psychic (and also since she's no longer wearing the Black Razor helmet which makes her disguise at all useful), Bliss senses Caitlin and Timmy behind her, turns, and unleashes a hellacious blast of psionic energy at the pair. Fairchild shields Timmy from the brunt of the attack, which shreds the Black Razor armor to rags, but she can't protect him from all of it, and he's blown off his feet. As he crashes against the wall, he screams one word:
"PIIIITTT!"
Time to turn the comic sideways for a nice Liefeldian two-page spread, kids:
Pitt, for those unaware, is a Hulk analog created by Dale Keown, and is another part of the creator-owned Image-verse. I won't get into Pitt's back story, since it's not important for his appearance here. Just know that Pitt is Timmy's own guardian...uh...angel? demon? alien? with two separate consciousnesses inside his brain. He talks to himself a lot.
Needless to say, Pitt snaps his restraints and blasts through the wall the way you dropped all those eggs at the store last week and didn't tell anybody. Bliss freaks out, then calls an alarm and closes off the containment doors, trapping him on that level of the facility. Meanwhile, Fairchild sits up after Bliss's brain-scrambling and costume-ripping mental assault, sees an enormous gray brute hunched over Timmy, and assumes the worst.
Cue the SPB smackdown of the century as the pair go at it full-throttle.
For a moment, it seems like Fairchild has what it takes to go toe-to-toe with 'Roid Rage Marshmallow Man...but only a moment. Pitt scoops her up with one meaty paw, holding her at arm's length, squeezing the breath out of her. It would have all ended there, except Pitt makes one tiny mistake:
Caitlin, moonlighting for Tractor Supply, sets Pitt up with his own couple of acres, and brawl-a-thon continues.
Meanwhile, back in Threshold land, Matt's getting sick and tired of Grunge being so utterly normal, and decides to give him one last chance to manifest his powers with a blast that will either activate him or reduce him to ashes. Freefall, enraged, screams at Threshold that she'll kill him, and Threshold releases Grunge and turns his attention on Freefall, levitating her with a thought and slapping an electrical noose around her neck.
Finally, finally, Grunge has had enough of these muthafuckin' snakes on his muthafukin' plane Threshold's nonsense, and the attack on Roxy is enough to uncork a can of 5'4" naked teenager whoopass. Grunge tears himself out of his manacles, drops to the floor, and lays out Threshold with one Kool-Aid Man-approved punch from a suddenly-metallic arm:
So much for all that 'training with the masters' shtick from issue #1, eh, Threshold?
Roxy and Grunge share a tender moment, where she gushes over his White Knight routine, there's some awkward naked hugging, Grunge explains he'd have done the same for any ol' homeslice, and thankfully everyone gets back into their clothing so Campbell doesn't have to keep coming up with new ways to draw naked people in positions designed to appeal to the Comics Code Authority.
Back in operations, Lynch and Ivana listen as an underling reports it's all-out war up there, with someone smashing its way down into successively lower and lower levels of the complex. Ivana and her crew are all hanging out down in sub-basement ten, when the ceiling above them gives way. In drop Fairchild and Pitt, determined to make that time the Undertaker threw Mick Foley through the roof of the Hell in a Cell cage look like a backyard wrestling outtake.
The pair pause their battle long enough to take stock of the dozens of weapons trained on them, Pitt realizes he and Fairchild are on the same side, Ivana orders Lynch to clean up the mess, Lynch orders his men to lock and load, and we all remember the cliffhanger ending of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Three, right?
Whew! See you next issue!
I absolutely hated this issue the first time I read it. Image was known for playing crossover games with their properties that made Everette Hartsoe's Razor-verse look positively pedestrian by comparison. Finally we get this brand new series, with all new characters, that doesn't require any prior knowledge of other Image titles, and by issue #3 they've already brought in a completely different character from a different creator for no reason.
The thing is, my annoyance at this issue's storyline was only due to my unfamiliarity with the material. Once I dug in further, did a bit of research, learned who Pitt was and his connection to Timmy (and once I realized Lynch had plenty of backstory baggage from previous Wildstorm titles), I grew to grudgingly admire what this issue actually did. In fact, issue 3 gets a lot better once you can read it in tandem with issue 4. But that doesn't change the fact that, if this is only your third experience with a Wildstorm book, it's kind of a mess.
Having Campbell join Lee and Choi on the writing side is a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. The story is filled to the brim with cliches and tropes that were old even by 1994 standards, and if there's one thing I hate more than anything else, it's the crossover characters misunderstanding one another and getting into a brawl, only to realize halfway through they were on the same side all along. It's the hackiest of hackneyed story ideas, and the bottom of the barrel in terms of writer creativity, right up there with the, "...and they woke up to discover it was all a dream!" ending or the "Superman races The Flash around the world!"-style filler issue. These things have their places, and they can be used well in the hands of good writers (Adam Warren, in fact, will use the "...it's just a dream" trope in a much later issue to humorous effect), but even with Choi, Lee, and Campbell all working together, this is more MegaMess than MegaZord. Jeff Mariotte's dialog from last issue is sorely missed.
That said, if you were waiting for some great fight scenes, this issue doesn't disappoint. There's been some battle action in the series so far, but this is its first real knock-down, drag-out fight, and it's something the series has really needed since virtually every other fight has been one side curb-stomping the other almost effortlessly. Whether it's Threshold taking out Rainmaker, Grunge, Freefall, and Burnout in a single panel last issue, or the Gen-Actives mopping the desert with Ivana's Keepers, there's been little sense of give-and-take. Pitt vs. Fairchild, on the other hand, is the sort of 'immovable object vs. unstoppable force' fights that we spandex-worshiping nerd-herders live for.
Outside of the story content, this issue also features a nice pinup of the Gen13 team in the centerfold area by Dan Norton and Chuck Gibson. The letter column also gets its name (Talkin' 'Bout My GEN-eration) courtesy of both The Who and Tyson Marshall of Springville, Utah who suggested it first.
Jeff Mariotte is back on the letters page this issue, explaining the original concept for a four-issue miniseries has been expanded to five issues, because there's just too much story they want to tell, so that's cool. The cut-out coupon in the back of this book also amends the rules slightly to allow a photocopy of the coupon from issue #1 (presumably because chopping it out meant losing the last page of story, instead of sacrificing an ad or page from the letters column), so...sorry if you already mutilated your book. Just buy another copy--it's only two bucks, ya know, and some day it'll be worth enough on its own to put your kid through college, right?
Oh well...maybe in another twenty-five years.
Also, take a look at the copyright page, and you'll see Dale Keown managed to trademark the name 'Timmy'. I shit you not.
I give Gen13 #3 a rating of...
out of
Sure, we finally get Grunge manifesting more than a raging stupidity, and Fairchild holding her own against a monster twice her size and three times her weight, but there's just not a lot of 'there' there. Without issue 4 backing it up, this would have merited only two @blewitt faces. I really should be rating them as stand-alone comics, but I'm finding it difficult to divorce my knowledge of what's coming from this review, and I don't want to turn off potential readers. While one can debate the merits of including a crossover character like Pitt so early in a series, there's no denying that at least in Gen13 we hadn't seen anything or anyone so far who could possibly match Fairchild for strength and stamina, and if it wasn't Pitt, it would have been Badrock or some other hulking mountain of muscle they pulled from the pages of Youngblood or whatever for the job. Despite lacking a nose, Keown's totally-not-the-Hulk imitation (for crying out loud, he even parrots Banner's "Don't make me angry...you wouldn't like me when I'm angry!" line from The Incredible Hulk TV show!) makes some measure of sense.
See you next time for issue #4, where we'll finally have all five super-powered youth present from page one...and hopefully some better dialog to go along with it. Yeesh...
Sup Dork! Enjoy the upvote!!!