Review by Frank Plowright
Whether they knew it or not, the five super powered teenagers forming Gen 13 were descended from parents who willingly or otherwise were experimented on by a shady organisation known as International Operations or IO. Years after those experiments they were co-opted by IO for a training programme, but with the help of former operative Jack Lynch escaped their intended indoctrination. Read all about it in Who They Are and How They Came to Be.
As the title suggests, this is a new start, with the team hidden away by Lynch honing their skills and with the intention of keeping away from the public eye. It doesn’t quite happen. Brandon Choi is now co-writing with artist J. Scott Campbell, with Jim Lee rejoining the writing team after a couple of chapters.
If you want a superhero graphic novel that screams 1990s, Starting Over is it. Extremely popular in its day, it’s not aged well. The reasons are varied. Firstly, instead of treating Gen 13 as a separate entity the writers are determined to integrate them into wider universe events, and while that might have made sense to someone picking up all WildStorm titles back in the day, it doesn’t any longer and results in confusion.
Secondly, Campbell’s involvement in the plotting means greater influence on what he gets to draw, and what he likes best is posing teenage girls with impossibly long legs, preferably in swimming costumes or less. The nadir of objectification and pandering is a scene by the pool as the girls admire each other, accompanied by the revelation of Rainmaker being attracted to women. It’s arbitrary and insensitive at best.
The dialogue always reads as scripted, and what people do serves the plot, rather than being true to how they’d respond in reality. Why are secrets kept when that causes resentment? Because that serves the plot, too much of which is the result of people keeping secrets. The light tone doesn’t work either, as it switches in and out, with the innuendo taken too far when half the team arrive on an island of Amazons. It’s what Campbell wants to draw.
Lee draws the final two chapters in his overly fussy style, the plot first following up on Ivana Baiul and her associates and then introducing another super team, this time protecting the Vatican’s interests. For a while they speak Italian with no translation. Isn’t that clever?
People who loved the series when it was originally serialised may still have the love within them, but anyone else is going to have to search long and hard for anything of worth.
Only the first five chapters make Starting Over: The Deluxe Edition, but it does include plenty of extras and the entirety of the previous volume. Rather strangely, though, considering how popular Campbell was at the time, his subsequent Gen 13 work has only ever been collected in black and white as part of Gen 13 Archives, and even then not all of it.
