Hey, kids! Remember when Lynch got kidnapped in issue 4 a few months ago while his wards were getting busy on a Coda island and we haven't seen him since? Yeah, me too! Well, if you've been wondering what happened to the Man with A Thousand Plans, wonder no more!
Grab yourself a Wendy's Country French Chicken Sandwich and let's get this party started!
Let's not bury the lede: John Lynch a 'guest' of Miles Craven. Turns out Lynch took a plane ride on a jet owned by an I/O shell company, which flagged him as a passenger and allowed Craven and his goons to track him down. Now, strapped upside down to a table and fitted with a synaptic scrambler which turns any attempt to use a Gen-Factor power back on the user, he's being tortured by the psychopathic Raymond Le Gauche.
Craven only wants to know one thing: where the Gen 13 kids are. Lynch, obviously, tells Craven to perform an impossible biological act with himself, so Craven orders Lynch fitted with an extractor which will suck his Gen Factor abilities right out of his genetic code--something which you could totally do with mid-90s technology:
The scream Lynch lets out reverberates through the void and is picked up by Michael Cray, aka Deathblow, Lynch's friend and former teammate from their Team 7 days. Cray's still on the flight home after a Black Razor team, led by Frank Colby, extracted him from Kaizen Gamorra's island and all the nonsense that went down during the Fire From Heaven crossover event. While grateful for the rescue, he's surprised not to see Lynch leading the charge, and equally surprised when Colby tells him Lynch has left International Operations and gone rogue. Colby doesn't know where he's hanging out these days, but he knows someone else who might.
Enter Alicia Turner, whom last we saw (with Frank Colby) letting Lynch off the hook when he tried to sneak back into an I.O. building. She's in San Diego, spying on the La Jolla safehouse, and Jesus Christ, how safe can this house be if freaking everybody knows where it is?
Cue the 'good guys brawl with one another' sequence which is the inevitable result of every meeting like this in the books of the day. Course, it would probably help if Turner hadn't pulled a gun on them in their own house, but still.
Things aren't improved when Deathblow shows up to meet with Turner, only to find her locked in combat with five Gen-Active teenagers. But he's Deathblow, so this isn't even a remotely fair fight. Turner zaps Rainmaker with her stun gun, then uses her psi abilities to put Freefall to sleep as Deathblow barrels in through the front door and hurls both Fairchild and Burnout through a nearby window, sending them splashing into the swimming pool. Turner's wiped from using her powers, which leaves Deathblow to square off with Grunge in some martial arts fisticuffs:
There's something familiar about Grunge's style, but Deathblow isn't worried about that right this second. A quick headbutt has Grunge seeing stars, but Fairchild and Burnout are back from their quick dip: Burnout holds Turner at bay with some flames while Fairchild is about to put Deathblow's lights out for good when who should show up to stop the hostilities and explain the error but the one person we haven't seen in the house yet: everybody's favorite robotic butler, Anna!
Sanity restored and insult forgiven, Turner gets online and, using a one-time-only backdoor into Miles Craven's files, discovers that Craven's begun something called Operation Rebirth, and is tracking down the former members of Team 7, Deathblow included. Better news: Craven is currently holed up in an I/O facility in San Francisco. Time for another road trip.
Freshly re-costumed, the group uses Turner's private jet to zip to the action. While the building is guarded by some sophisticated hardware, beating it is a cinch thanks to the kids' powers and abilities. Grunge comes in especially handy for his ability to merge with a security door, and thus unlock it from the inside. Deathblow orders everyone to stay behind while he infiltrates, but it's a matter of minutes before he's discovered and attacked by a Black Razor security force. Fortunately none of the Gen 13 kids listened to him, and they swiftly take down the guards, one of whom Deathblow is forced to kill to save Freefall. Shaken at having just witnessed a murder, Roxy lights up a cigarette to calm her nerves, and sets off a smoke alarm, alerting the whole building to their presence.
Oh man, what are they going to do? Tune in next week, krunk-heads, for another exciting--
Nah, just kidding. I love you morons. Here's part two.
We start this book in much the same place we did the last one: Lynch, strapped to a table, and being tortured by Le Gauche. While Lynch machos his way through the extraction procedure, we learn Le Gauche was part of Gen 12 as well, he was just augmented differently from Team 7. The alarm sounds and Le Gauche leaves one of his guards in charge while he goes off to grab up all the pretty specimens that just turned up on his doorstep.
Despite being assisted by Deathblow, who is one of the deadliest combatants in the Wildstorm universe, one by one the group is gradually overcome by the never-ending Black Razor forces. Alicia tells Deathblow to bug out and find Lynch, so he grabs Grunge, the only member of Gen 13 left standing, and heads deeper into the facility.
Despite orders not to take his eyes off Lynch, the lone guard does just that, which gives Lynch enough time to use his cybernetic eye to laser off his restraints. One unconscious guard later, and Lynch has a gun with Le Gauche's name on it.
Speaking of Le Gauche, he's on the phone with Craven, letting him know about the attack and successful capture of most of the group. Craven's pleased, as with the Gen 13 kids in custody, he can work on tracking down Ivana and the other Gen-Actives she ran off with at the end of the original mini-series.
While Le Gauche interrogates his prisoners, Lynch prowls the corridors hunting for him. Unsure where to go exactly, he calls on what's left of his Gen Factor powers, only for nothing to go like he planned. First, a group of Black Razor guards catch him in a pincer attack. Second, his head feels like it's trying to contain a tidal wave, and he begs the guards to back off.
Still bitching about having done a tactical withdaw, Grunge and Deathblow are seemingly ambushed by a group of Black Razors charging at them out of nowhere. But to their surprise, the Razors aren't attacking--they're retreating. When they round the corner ahead, Deathblow and Grunge see exactly what they were escaping from:
Lynch lashes out with a powerful psionic blast, but something intercepts it before it atomizes Deathblow; Cray has no idea what saved his life, but he takes advantage of it and muscles his way into contact with Lynch, which seems to snap him out of the bizarre trance he'd been in. The trio come up with a plan to rescue Alicia and the kids, sending Grunge ahead to break into the room while Lynch and Deathblow create a diversion:
Fairchild knocks the two nearest guards into one another as Deathblow and Lynch burst into the room. While Deathblow liberates Freefall and Rainmaker with some well-placed shots to their shackles, Lynch finishes off the remaining guards and unties Turner. Burnout, Rainmaker, and Freefall keep the reinforcements busy as Lynch spars with Le Gauche, but drained of his Gen Factor as he is, Lynch is no longer a match for the madman. Le Gauche fries Lynch's arm with an energy burst and leaves, taunting that he'll be back for Lynch and the kids after he's taken down the remainder of Team 7.
Lynch considers frying Le Gauche with a psychic blast, but thinks better of it, remembering what happened in the corridor a few minutes ago. Turner senses the arrival of the military police and reminds them that nobody's going to like the questions they start asking if they're around to be asked, so the group adds another charge of Destruction of Government Property to the list and bugs out via a stolen watercraft.
Having reached safety, the group breaks up. Turner needs to head back to I/O HQ in Virginia before someone notices she's gone missing. Cray's headed to New York to warn fellow Team 7 member Dane that Le Gauche is on the hunt for him. Goodbyes are exchanged, and everyone goes their separate ways, with Deathblow reflecting that he and the rest of his old buddies need to start acting like Lynch and his kids if they're going to make it through the troubles brewing ahead.
Final Score:
out of
Disregarding Deathmate: Black (which happened before the Gen 13 limited series), and Union #5-6 (which involved a Fairchild from a parallel universe), and anything having to do with the "Wildstorm Rising" mega-crossover which scattered its character crossovers throughout the entire publishing line, this is the first time we've seen a full-blown intrusion of the Gen 13 gang into another Wildstorm title "just because". I generally don't like when books do this, because it feels like a plot to get more money, but the storyline here at least makes a semblance of sense. It helps that Choi is scripting both Gen 13 and Deathblow at this point, since that allows him to tie the titles together seamlessly, much like @blewitt's wrists when he's doing one of his Wednesday Night Freak-Fests.
Didn't think I knew about those, did ya, buddy?
The real-life timeline on this is a little wonky, since these two issues came out before Gen 13 #7 when the kids actually get back from Rome, so if you were collecting these back in the day, you'd have probably read them out of order but it's not hard to suss out where they fit in the grand scheme.
I'd seriously consider this a five-Blewitt pair of books if the art was better though. Trevor Scott seems to be dashing this work off as quickly as possible, with a lot of scenes (especially in the second book) lacking almost all detail, including basic things like pupils in characters' eyes. When he does take the time to detail out a scene, he often mucks up simple details (especially the size of Freefall's chest, who is suddenly rocking a pair of D-cups for no reason at all. This isn't helped by Robert Chong's coloring, which often leave character skin-tones as half-dead grays or bizarrely-reflective and android-like.
At the same time, I don't want to rag on Scott too hard--he'd been out of work for several months recovering from hand surgery, and Deathblow 20 was his first time back in the chair doing pencils and inks on the book, but still, I'd have loved to see what Tim Sale (the best artist for the series, IMO) would have made of this story.
There's also a continuity question here, as Le Gauche needs Craven to tell him who Deathblow is, despite having fought with him back in Deathblow issue 15. I suppose you could say it was a dark house and Le Gauche didn't get a good look at him during their battle, but if Craven ordered him to pick off a bunch of Navy SEALs, including Michael Cray, and gave him a file full of intel on him including a photographs, it's odd Le Gauche doesn't recognize the man storming the Presidio with the Gen 13 kids.
In the end, Lynch is back home minus most/all of his Gen Factor, but he's still got plenty of other skills he can rely on in a pinch. We'll see them come into play next time when we return to the standard Gen 13 series in the next installment of The Great Gen 13 Re-Read! See you there next time (for real), krunk-heads!