REVIEW: Gen13 #3

Gen13 #3:  The Magical Mystery Tour
Story:  Brandon Choi & J. Scott Campbell
Pencils:  J. Scott Campbell
Inks:  Alex Garner
Colors:  Joe Chiodo

To be completely honest, back when I bought this comic I never read it. A friend recommended the series to me and a few back issues made it into my collection. I am truly not sure whether I like this comic or not as it has equal amounts of good traits and some pretty sucky ones. For the series as a whole, they have some really attractive covers, which is a great feature for a comic book.

Since I possess very little knowledge of this series, I will have to lean on other people’s information to help me with this. The premise of the story is very typical of the super-hero fad of the 1990s. According Gamespot.com, Gen13 was Image’s attempt “to create a younger team that was ‘less angry’ and ‘less bloodthirsty’ than other superhero teams that were popular at the time.” Jim Lee and Brandon Choi aligned with the artist J. Scott Campbell to do just this.

The main reason I decided to do some research on this series is due to the fact that this issue assumes you know exactly what has happened before page one. Reading the references to parents and the relationships shown made me feel like these teenagers were siblings. Then came the teenage flirtation between each of them. At that point I felt I needed to find out what was in the back story to get a better grasp of the situation.

These teenagers are all formerly part of Project: Genesis, which was a “government internship” for gifted youths run by an organization called International Operations (I.O.). It was in actuality a cover to secretly experiment on the teens Wikipedia. Yes, I know. This sounds very cliché to me as well.

Anyway, this issue was very dull to read. Teens belly aching and arguing and traveling around the world for clues about their parents (multiple sets of parents). Still no action or suspense or feeling or . . . drive to read this issue. Fortunately the storytellers are short-winded and only give us twenty pages of actual content. The rest of the issue is ads and a Gen13 short story that was dumber than the main twenty pages.

The artwork is really split down the middle. The artistry is very Manga-like, especially in the work on the characters. Each character in this comic is very good close up. On each of the scenes showing them at a distance the quality drops significantly. This is also true of the scenery. Details just seem to disappear as things get smaller on the page. J. Scott Campbell really likes to put a lot of detail into the females of this book, especially the main character, Caitlin. On page 16 after being thrown off of a boat, she loses half of her clothes (no nudity). The funniest part of it is that she states, “For some strange reason, I always seem to lose articles of clothing whenever we get into trouble.” Sorry, honey. That is a pervert with a pencil. Seriously, I wonder if the artist is living out some teenage wish-fulfillment drawing her this way.

After reading this issue and looking up some background information, my suggestion is to leave this one bagged and enjoy the covers, which are truly the best part of the comics. Back in the 90s I had a soft spot for Image, being a Spawn fan and liking those comic creators actually having creative rights (outside of the Big 2).