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Underground > Comic Books >

Gen-13

Phex: Dorset Doom

15:49 / 26.11.06

There's a WildC.A.T.S thread, an Authority thread, there's even a Midnighter thread for some bloody reason, but no Gen-13 thread? This looks like a job for a gritty nineties hero with a totally hardcore single word name.
Enter Phex. Phex ist Tod! Phex is Strumm und Drang! Phex ist ein Berliner!
So, Gail Simone's Gen-13 anybody?
Now, Simone is possibly the best writer working in mainstream comics (whatever that means). Her Birds of Prey and Secret Six series are both excellent, despite some occasionally dodgy art, particularly on the latter.
Gen-13, being a Wildstorm series, has lovely art with all sorts of digital shininess. However, being a Wildstorm book, this digital shininess is often used to show teenage girls with unreasonably large breasts in very tight outfits. The cover to issue #2, for example, shows the team's leader, Kaitlin, with her uniform burnt down to her bra and panties. Later in that issue the evil corporation that's holding her and four other generic teenage stereotypes (the rebel, the white rasta, the skater, the native American lesbian) hostage subjects her to a novel form of deconditioning: dressing her up in various skimpy costumes and taking pictures.
If this was written by anybody else I'd have given up at issue one, if I'd bought it at all, dismissing it as a perfect example of why I don't buy Wildstorm comics. But it's Gail Simone, who's a genuinely talented writer who can write believable female characters (see BoP) in an industry that's still for the most part pretty adolescent (Gen13's co-creator also penned the dreadful and equally top-heavy Danger Girl). As in Morrison's WildC.A.Ts and Authority I get the perhaps misplaced feeling that any minute I'm going to have the rug pulled out from under me but then... It's Wildstorm, y'know?
What do others think?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:59 / 26.11.06

When I used to work in a comic shop, I was always put off Gen-13, largely by the people who were buying it and the T&A covers. From what friends who were reading it told me, it didn't sound like such a bad strategy.

Hmm. Seems a weird choice for a relaunch, but I've read some good things about this...

20:04 / 26.11.06

I've read the first 2 issues. They're VERY good. Between this and Gail's All-New Atom, I'd have to say she is definitely one of the best mainstream writers out there today.

15:38 / 05.12.06

I'm a big fan of Gail Simone's work, and I've been eagerly awaiting her Gen-13; the first two issues have not been a disappointment.

I think she's poised to do some genuinely subversive things with this title. After all, this is the woman who brought us "Killer Princesses."

17:50 / 07.12.06

Gail Simone has seemed pleasantly relaxed and aware in regards to sex, marketing, and sex-marketing.

'Gen-13' needs that awareness and an ability to check you panic at the door and dive right into the absurd end of the skin and wink pool.

Now, this is a series where an issue did not go by... that I saw/read... that was not penned by Adam Warren... that did not find at least one way to irritate and annoy me. Every time. Like it existed just for that. Mostly, this was Rainmaker. Because of the name. The flipfloppy sexuality. And the Indianicity Issue. (Adam Warren made this work, on the main title and in some exterior Gen-13 stories, by making it into a joke so pervasive, it seemed to have been intentionally built up from the get-go.)

Were the panty-shots and crotch-displays in 'BoP' scripted in, or were they totally the artist's decision?

I dunno, I think it'll work itself out, and there should be a broad absence of unnecessary torn-tights to keep a certain subsection of fanboys feeling better about themselves through seeing some stickfigure female skewered, teary-eyed, and stuffed in a major home appliance of some sort.

Probably be kinda funny, sometimes, too.

20:26 / 04.07.07

Having now bothered to read issue two of this (and beyond), I think this is the kind of bitter response I wanted to see, from the rape attempt that opens the series, the dress-up sequence with Caitlin, and so on. And, yet, it's not all bitter, which is nice, and does seem to have more in common with Warren's run than the other stuff. Loved that Roxy got to use 'trans-Neptunian' when you just know given her 'background' and character, there'd be a number of writers (and readers) who would insist it was entirely OOC. And the villains are enrepentant assholes who look read like one of the better thirds of the occupants at your local comics shop. Grunge's need to be The Guy, when he reads like the lovable sugar-rushing little sister of popular stereotype.

Are the most recent issues worth picking up? Or waiting for trade? Is anyone here, in fact, still reading this?

Shiny: Well Over Thirty

15:42 / 16.07.07

I'm still reading, although it's not quite doing it for me in the way that most of Gail Simone's stuff does, and I can't seem to figure out why. It might be that I've never picked up an issue of Gen-13 before this run for obvious reasons (although I understand that this may have been a mistake with regards to the Warren issues), but I think part of my problem ight come from it seeming a little light and lacking in meat compared to Gail's better stuff, so maybe it's one that is best read in the trades. On the other hand the next issue does look like it might be the best one yet, offering the prospect of a three way fight between Gen-13, and the 'Authoriteens' - a team the prospect of which might well fill me with horror in anyone else's hands, but who I'm convinced will be bloody wonderful under Gail Simone's pen.