I'm honestly at a bit of a loss as to why this title is being relaunched. It was very much a product of its time, as a character named Grunge would seem to indicate, and killing off the entire team to replace them with a bunch of new characters seems silly; why not create a new book, since the name is meaningless anyway and doesn't carry any market power anymore? That's all beside the point, really, though, because the central problem with the book isn't it's ties to an old name. Instead, the problem is that the characters aren't all that interesting, the plot is so obscure as to be missing entirely and the artwork is often confusing.
So what's this new Gen 13 all about? After reading #0 and #1, I honestly couldn't tell you. It's clear that it will involve two twin brothers, one of whom has been chosen to receive some kind of enigmatic powers for enigmatic purposes. Beyond that, I'm at a loss. Claremont has always been a fan of long term pacing, telling stories that take years to end and leaving dangling plotlines everywhere, but either I've become less forgiving of those tendencies or he's gotten worse at it, because there's nowhere near enough interesting stuff in this issue to make me want to come back for more.
The whole issue is spent setting up the origin of Ethan's powers, and the mystery behind them, but there's not even a hint of where the book might be going from here. We learn a fair bit about Ethan and his family, including a somewhat forced tie-in to September 11 with his father being a fireman who died, but we don't learn much about any of the other characters who might be filling out the Gen 13 team or why the term Gen 13 might be appropriate in any way. If Claremont intends to introduce each of the characters with this much detail, they'll all be very well-formed characters, but nothing will actually happen for the entire first arc.
In terms of characterization, the book isn't a home run, either. The characters don't always sound real, speaking in flowery catch-phrases or ominous tones that seem more befitting adults, which is another Claremont tradition. In fairness, some of his more noticeable phrases, and indeed the speech patterns in general, don't fall into the uncomfortable cliches that some of his X-Men work did, but the characters still don't sound entirely natural. We can tell when they're trying to provide the reader with a laugh, when they're trying to provide the reader with information, etc.
Then there's Ale Garza's artwork, which I've never been much of a fan of. It actually is some of the strongest work I've seen from him, with Sandra Hope's inks and Udon Studios giving it an anime look similar to Agent X or Taskmaster. And he manages the rather difficult task of separating out two identical twins with different clothing and attitude, even when the script isn't differentiating them all that much. But his action layouts are often cluttered and confusing, and some of the big climactic scenes, such as the one at the car near the end, don't have the power they should as a result.
