| abstract
| - Gen 13. So many genres and incarnations, so little time. This is a Wildstorm universe based comic series that used to be owned by Image until DC Comics decided to engorge themselves on the Wildstorm label, and while still being printed today, is damn hard to locate in some comic shops. The book was created by Brandon Choi, Jim Lee and artist J. Scott Campbell, and any familiarity with those three should already give an idea of what the book was going to entail. The characters were introduced in "Deathmate Black" (September, 1993). In 1994, they got a 5-issue mini-series. It sold well enough for the introduction of an ongoing series in 1995. It focused on the exploits of five teens who were invited to participate in a government research project, but who all later discovered it was nothing more than a prison used to locate children with "Gen-Active" genes that the government would later attempt to experiment on and use as weapons, of course. The roster consisted of:
* Caitlin Fairchild, redhead resident Shrinking Violet geek girl turned Amazonian team leader.
* Roxanne "Freefall" Spaulding, the smart-mouthed smart ass spunky chick, with gravity manipulation powers.
* Percival "Grunge" Chang, a diminutive perverted slacker, and resident ditz, with the power to absorb the properties of any material he touches.
* Robert "Burnout" Lane, the angst-ridden musician who can Play With Fire.
* Sarah Rainmaker, a weather-controlling Native American who had bisexual "will she or won't she" tendencies. Their mentor was John Lynch, a gruff and grizzled former soldier and ex-agent for the conspiracy that gathered them, who was basically, for lack of a better term, the hybrid love child of Clint Eastwood and Wolverine. Lynch freed them and acted as Team Dad for this Secret Project Refugee Family. While the book was derivative of the millions of other books focusing on ridiculously attractive teens or teams with superpowers, it occasionally took it upon itself to hang a lampshade on the very conventions of the genre, including the constant Clothing Damage, the rambling villains, and more, which allowed it to not only cater to its audience, yet give them a wink as well. Gen 13 and its spinoffs have also tended to gather a wide variety of talent. To start with, this is the book that made J. Scott Campbell famous before Danger Girl. Warren Ellis wrote the first eight issues of DV8, a book starring the titular Psycho Rangers and series Arch Nemesis Ivana Baiul. Adam "Empowered" Warren did two well-received parody miniseries ("Grunge: The Movie" and "Magical Drama Queen Roxy") and was the writer for what turned out to be the final issues of the original series. Chris Claremont was brought in to write an all-new, all-different Gen 13, but the new version wasn't accepted by readers. Finally, Gail Simone launched a Continuity Reboot of the original team in 2006, which was also critically well-received but Too Good to Last. The series had been Retooled yet again, along with the rest of the Wildstorm universe, as part of the World's End Crisis Crossover. After that, it seems to have been folded into the DC Universe along with the rest of Wildstorm as a result of Flashpoint; there are no plans to revive the book, but some Gen 13 characters have shown up in the "DCnU". There is a little known direct-to-video animated film that was released overseas., titled Gen 13 The Movie
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