Berlin, 1989. In the tunnels beneath the not-yet-united city, Christine Blaze is in a world of trouble. As a deep cover operative for I.O., Blaze's mission was to infiltrate a German Coda enclave and report back to her bosses. She succeeded. However, like most organizations, the Coda don't like it when one of their own turns out to be a spy:
Before Blaze's head can be forcibly detached, a four-man Black Ops squad explodes through the tunnel ceiling to save the day:
The guy heading up the extraction is none other than part-time Clint Eastwood impersonator and full-time badass John Lynch. He questions Blaze about what she was able to find out while she was undercover. She tells him the Berlin Wall's about to come down, which Lynch already knows. What he didn't know is I.O.'s newest director of their Sci-Tech division, Ivana Baiul, has everyone in her department working overtime tracking down Team 7's kids. Including:
Final Score:
out of
This one's an oddball. Story-wise, at only 8 pages, there's not a whole lot there (especially if you weren't following Divine Right, where Blaze made her debut a few months earlier). It sneaks into the continuity all the way back before issue 1 of Gen 13, Volume 1, but wasn't published until three years into the title's life, right about the same time as Volume 2, Issue 25. It's technically a Gen 13 story in the same way that Fazoli's technically serves Italian food, but this is more accurately a Divine Right/Team 7 interlude book since it's all about Christine Blaze and John Lynch. The revelation at the end that Ivana's looking for Team 7's kids, one of whom could be Lynch's son (oooooooh, more of that foreshadowing), is the only real connection to the title printed on the cover.
No, the real reason this is a Gen 13 preview is the seven-page interview with John Arcudi, who had just landed the gig to take over writing duties after Brandon Choi decided to step away. This marks something of a turning point for the series, as it's the first time none of the book's original creative team of Lee, Choi, and Campbell will be involved with the ongoing story.
Arcudi's 19-issue run on Gen 13 (18 monthly issues plus the 1999 Annual) is something we'll dive into more later, but spoiler alert, it's contentious and divisive among the book's fans. His desire to evolve the title results in some good stories, but one of Gen 13's biggest strengths was being written and drawn by people who were almost the same age as the main characters. With Choi's departure, that comes to an end as the madcap, unfiltered teenage craziness which previously defined the book fades into the background. As a result, readers start to trickle away.
In the interview, he says his main interest is exploring Rainmaker and Freefall as characters, since Grunge and Fairchild tend to steal the show. This means once again Burnout gets sidelined as most of the writers can't seem to get beyond "he's angry with the world and likes to play guitar, and oh yeah, he's kind of like that other character about whom we aren't permitted to comment" in their approach to his characterization.
Beyond giving us a peek at how Arcudi intends to handle his duties as scribe, Gen 13 Preview (much like @blewitt) doesn't do much. Like, it's a story that totally fits into continuity, but by the time Brandon Choi wrote this, we were well aware of Lynch's history with I.O., what a badass he is, and what conniving pieces of trash Miles Craven and Ivana Baiul are. If you weren't following Divine Right (which I, at the time, was not since it was neither manga nor Gen 13) then you're unlikely to care about Blaze.
Hell, even Wildstorm itself didn't seem to care too much about this being a part of their continuity. You couldn't buy this book straight off the rack. Instead, it came polybagged with your copy of Stormwatch Volume 2, issue 1 -- a book which you were totally going to pick up if you were a fan of Gen 13, right? See above paragraph.
This is a shame. With more pages to flesh out the story, this could have been something truly important. The Coda hunters seem both well aware and quite impressed by Christine Blaze's skill as a fighter -- this would have been a great opportunity for a page or two of flashbacks showing her talents while she was in training. You know, that whole "show, don't tell" thing comics (and @blewitt) should excel at? Instead, you'll probably forget this story as soon as you pick up the next issue, much like I did.
Wildstorm history enthusiasts, Gen 13 completionists, Divine Right nuts, and Lynch fanboys are the only ones to whom this book will matter. It's neither expensive nor hard to find, so there's little reason not to pick up a copy, but if you don't fall into any of those categories then you need not devote a spot in your long box to this one.