Review by Frank Plowright
Starting Over: The Deluxe Edition features the earliest adventures of Gen 13, WildStorm’s teenage super team. At the time of original publication (1994-1996) the big draw was the art of J. Scott Campbell, as hot as they came during the era, which is now extraordinary puzzling. A raw talent is on view, with imaginative layouts always a strongpoint, but basic anatomy is woeful to begin with, and subsequently morphs into a consistent style of objectifying women with impossibly long legs. It’s dynamism without substance.
Gen 13 is a team of five teenagers offered the opportunity to study at an exclusive facility. They rapidly discover the object is to have them become a superhero attack team for a covert organisation. The first half of this collection, in print individually as Who They Are and How They Came to Be, details their escape aided by former IO operative Jack Lynch. It’s combined with most of the 1999 Starting Over collection in which Gen 13 look for answers as to the past and find themselves on what’s in effect an island of scantily clad Amazons. By this time Campbell is plotting alongside Brandon Choi and Jim Lee, and that’s what he likes to draw.
Included in the 1999 paperback but missing here are two chapters drawn by Lee. However, he does draw one of the short stories not included in earlier collections. They bridge the introductory sequence and the beginning of the ongoing series that follows, first a visitor from the future proving troublesome. The following five spotlights are the collection’s highlight. Drawn by different artists, they have the quiet moments the remainder of the content lacks as Choi takes the time to both provide an insight into the individuals, and to deliver a connecting plot. As it’s an early story the characters haven’t yet been fully defined, so Sarah in particular stands out as cheerful rather than the brooding personality she’d become. The art is largely in the messy style that Image Comics and their assorted imprints popularised in the 1990s, but there’s the revelation of Campbell being able to draw an attractive character-based story without exploitation (sample art).
This Gen 13 is very much era-defining material. Action art is prioritised above all else, plot is slim, and the dialogue is often jarring, with innuendo an irritation. The basic idea, though, is good, and strongly defined and very different characters see the series through to the point where more accomplished creators can make something of it.
