If you need to get back up to speed with how things were progressing prior to Ordinary Heroes, you can click over to issue 2's synopsis/review and catch up. Otherwise, all you really need to know is: this issue is entitled, "The Magical Mystery Tour", there are no Beatles, and by the end of this three-issue story arc, Grunge will have logged so many Amazons that every tree in South America now suffers from crippling depression.
Screw you, that was funny and I'm not apologizing.
We open on Caitlin Fairchild: involuntary Princeton dropout, genetic anomaly, and super-hax0r using her 1337 skillz to snoop around Lynch's hard drive. Why? Because Lynch hasn't told her absolutely everything there is to know about everything he knows, and she's a teenager who hates feeling like she's out of the loop. Why else?
Well, he also promised to help them track down their real parents six months ago and hasn't exactly delivered yet. Yeah, maybe we'll go with that one instead. Good choice.
Her computer science background lets her crack Lynch's password easily enough, and the first file she opens relates to exactly what she was looking for. Caitlin's either the luckiest woman on the face of the planet, or Lynch needs to seriously update his account credentials. A guy who functioned as a major section boss for International Operations should have the sort of password it would take years for a supercomputer to brute force, not one used by @blewitt to access his hentai NFT investment portfolio.
In any case, she's found a file which relates to her father, with a lead on an expedition that disappeared two weeks ago ago off the coast of Madagascar. It contains a photo of a partial dog tag, with the name 'Fairchild' etched on the front, found fifteen years ago by a team of marine biologists doing research in the same area. Jackpot . . . ?
Or it would be if Lynch didn't pick that minute to drop by his office. Cue the shouting match. Caitlin's understandably angry with him for not telling the group about his research. Lynch claims the lead was a dead end. She argues that wasn't his call to make, and he should be more forthcoming in the future. Lynch's defense is that it's safer for him to work solo on this, given how many different people are looking for Caitlin and her peers, and right now it's his job to keep them alive until they learn to function like a team and get their abilities better sorted.
That goes about as well as you'd expect:
While Caitlin storms out of the house, Freefall is busy daydreaming while housekeeper Anna lectures her about the dirty dishes.
There's probably some reason why Freefall was everybody's favorite character in the early days of this comic, but I'll be darned if I can put my finger on why.
In any case, Anna's upset because Roxy's left the dishes sitting in the sink for almost a week, and she's sick and tired of cleaning up after the kids. Anna, I'm not sure how to break this to you, but you're a housekeeper, and these are teenagers. When it comes to household chores, they have the attention spans of goldfish, while leaving their environment just as messy.
In any case, Roxy's trying to ask Anna, the only adult woman in the house, a little bit about love. Right now, though, Anna's having none of it until Roxy drags herself back down to Earth and makes with the clean-up. Caitlin bellows from the other room that she's going in to town and invites anyone else who wants to come to tag along, so Roxy ghosts on Anna, leaving the housekeeper fuming.
Two hours later, with Rainmaker, Burnout, and Grunge having joined them, we re-convene with Fairchild and Roxy to discover Fairchild didn't drive into town at all, but rather took a two hour scenic detour up into the 90210 zip code. Now they're parked outside an enormous mansion wherein dwells the CEO of a philanthropic organization so well-known that Roxy has never heard of them.
After charming their way past the butler, and waiting half an hour, the team is greeted by Mrs. McArthur herself. The years have not been kind to her . . .
. . . but she's intrigued that these kids know anything at all about the Madagascar expedition. And when Fairchild mentions Lynch's name, well, Mrs. McArthur and ol' cyber-eye have a bit of history:
But let's not let that distract us from the situation. Ms. McArthur explains that Alex Fairchild's dog tag was discovered in a wreck off an uncharted island known as "Isle du Mystere". McArthur's interest in the matter is two-fold. First, according to legend, the island is home to a Fountain of Youth, something of great interest to an older, infirm woman. Second, the man who led the most recent expedition to the island is her son, James McArthur. He hasn't contacted her in weeks, and she's naturally concerned so Caitlin does what any kind-hearted young woman with super powers would do and promises that if Mrs. McArthur can get her team there, they'll find her son.
Back at the mansion, the kids pack up the van for a nighttime departure, sans Lynch's approval. Despite Grunge making more noise than a howler monkey, they manage to leave undetected.
The next morning, an apologetic Lynch walks into Caitlin's room to apologize for how he handled their interaction yesterday, only to discover he's talking to the wall. Caitlin's left a printout of a news story about Isle du Mystere on her desk, and as soon as he sees it, Lynch knows Caitlin's made good on her threat to chase down leads herself. Knowing the one person who could give them the supplies to make the journey due to her personal interest in the matter, Lynch high-tails it to McArthur's mansion, only to discover he's too late and his wards have several hours' head-start on him.
In the meantime, the crew has traveled halfway around the world already, arriving finally in Africa, where they've chartered a local guide named Biko who will take them to the coast, but no further. Rumors and legends abound about what can be found on Isle du Mystere, but all he knows is that no one who set foot on the island has ever returned, or been seen again. Still, McArthur was able to supply them with a small air boat with which to cross the ocean. But because this is the 90s, the only thing to be found on this ocean is TRAGEDY!
Fairchild wakes up on the shore alone and unsure where she is, but after taking care of a wardrobe malfunction caused by wearing a white shirt and being soaking wet, she sets off to find her the rest of the team. There's no sign of Burnout or Freefall. And she isn't the first to find Rainmaker and Grunge, who wake up to find a pack of armor-clad warrior women glowering down at them, weapons at the ready.
Man, I hate when that happens.
"To Be Continued", anybody?
Final Score:
out of
After the serious downer of Ordinary Heroes, which is a phenomenal story no two ways about it, it's kind of nice to get back to the ordinary world of the Gen 13 crew, and issue 3 eases us back there with . . . well, not class, exactly. Maybe verve? Panache?
Just kidding, the word I'm looking for is totally 'hormones'.
Basically, this is Choi and Campbell letting their teenagers be teenagers, while riffing on the Indiana Jones movies. Everything from the font on the cover to the world map with the red line stretching from city to city as the kids voyage around the world, to Grunge's cover fedora, to the exploration of a lost island in search of the Fountain of Youth screams 'Indy!' at top volume.
Sending the kids around the globe also serves as a nice excuse for Alex Garner to ink locations that aren't California, something for which I'm sure he was thankful. Campbell continues to be the perfect choice to pencil the book, given his penchant for hilariously capturing exactly what it was that made 90s teens so . . . 90s. That panel up there depicting the rest of the group's disgust with Caitlin for volunteering them is a riot.
There's also a little bonus this issue, an 8-page backup absurdist mini-series drawn by Tom McWeeney called "Robot Ruckus", which riffs on a bunch of the Image properties including Gen 13, Spawn, and Team 7. McWeeney's Saturday morning cartoon style approach to the story really sells the slapstick gags, and there are some howler one-liners in there as well. At one point, Lynch freaks out when he thinks he hears the alarm going off and dives behind the sofa, only to come up with twin guns blazing away at the door, barking orders to his old Team 7 mates: "Dane! Keep your head down! Cole, cover my back! Cray, take off that dress!"
The 'Cray' he's referring to is Michael Cray, aka Deathblow, star of his own Image book and probably the single toughest member of Team 7 despite being the only guy in the outfit who didn't wind up with Gen-Factor abilities (at least, not immediately). The idea of him prancing around in a dress still makes me roll on the floor. McWeeney's definitely a 'teenage male' level humor writer, but sometimes that's OK. This is a 90s book. It's all OK.
Finally we hit the letters section and holy good gravy, did the blowback from issue 2 come in hot and heavy. So much so that they devoted the first half of the column to an editorial explaining how much mail they got based on the revelation that Rainmaker wasn't straight as opposed to anything else. Pretty impressive considering they defeated a super-villain using Burnout's ability to thrash with an electric guitar. Apparently that was just fine, but a queer woman was a big no-no, a bridge too far, an abomination, etc, etc, etc . . . .
The first letter printed is complimentary of the Wildstorm gang for daring to broach the topic in a comic book, but the other two are rant-filled condemnations of the writers, both of whom threats to stop buying the comic if they don't fix her the way they fixed Grunge's chest tattoo.
Is it telling that the praise letter came from Ontario, while the two anti-gay-Rainmaker ones came from Tennessee and Minnesota? I don't know--probably not. They got deluged this month, and trust me, we ain't heard the end of this bitch-fest.
For all the flak Lee, Choi, and Campbell took over Rainmaker, it didn't seem to affect sales of the book in the slightest. Either the people who threatened to boycott the book didn't follow through, or Gen 13 attained a sort of LGBT-friendly status among that group, which might have brought questioning kids out into the shops to pick it up. Maybe a bit of both. But if you think Rainmaker's revelation in issue 2 caused a ruckus, just wait until a few issues from now when the team heads to Italy.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We have two more issues of this story arc to tackle, so join me next time when Grunge gets so lucky you'd think he had a four-leaf clover tattooed on his ass. Until then, krunk-heads!