I was never too fond of the original Gen13 series and characters, and Chris Claremont's recent writings haven't been my cup o' tea either. So going in, I had a hunch this wasn't going to be my kind of comic book. I was right. One word comes to mind when I think about this book: generic. Claremont is telling a story we've seen hundreds of times before, and there's little here to set it apart from any other teen-mutant super-hero comic book.
A quartet of teens are brought together by two common bonds: the emergence of super-powers and their desire to keep them a secret from their parents. Two of them -- Gwen Matsura and Ethan York -- meet up and investigate Gwen's strange living tattoo, seeking out the expertise of a local body-art shopkeeper. And the other pair -- Ja'Nelle Moorhead and Hamza Rashad -- searches the hospital where the latter is a patient, searching for a bizarre entity that threatens to consume one of the four Gen-active teens.
Garza's work fails to grab me as it did a few years back on E.V.E. Protomecha. His pencils here often lack definition. The backgrounds in the hospital scenes are sorely lacking. Garza's strongest work on this issue comes off as simply mimickry of the style of J. Scott (Danger Girl Campbell. Studio F's colors establish an appropriately foreboding mood, though. Unfortunately, the lettering isn't nearly as strong. Some odd placement of narrative captions makes for some confusing identification of characters.
All three of Claremont's current writing assignments hit the stands this week (this comic, along with Mekanix and X-Treme X-Men), and of the trio, this book is certainly not the strongest (check Mekanix for that effort). Though he introduces the characters and run-of-the-mill premise fairly clearly, the connection to the previous Gen13 team -- Caitlin Fairchild -- is glossed over. Readers who followed Claremont rather than the Gen13 brand name will be at a loss as to Caitlin's significance, and I'm at a loss to understand what kind of role she fulfills.
The most intriguing aspect of the book is how Claremont explores how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks affected two of the characters. The brief scenes in which that pivotal event plays a part here are quite strong, and I'm disappointed to see that it's really not a paramount element of the story.
