I guess an alternate name for this entry could be “Five Short Stories Featuring Gen13.” As both issues are shorts that are chronicling what the Gen13 members were up to between the first volume and the second. They’re mostly small and fun stories, and they’re done by a variety of artists. I imagine one of the many reasons they were done was to give more lead time for J. Scott Campbell for the series proper and keep the “Gen13” name alive and out in front of the comic buying and reading audience.

The first story, as detailed in “Gen13” 1/2 has the kids pretty fresh out of the mini-series going on a bit of a road trip. Rainmaker has already left to be with her family in Arizona and the kids are now just driving around, supposedly they’re just killing some time before meeting up with Lynch down in San Diego, but they could just be being silly ass teens with no real direction. They have been told by Lynch to stick to the backroads to avoid altercations with local authorities or Ivana’s Keepers. They’re having some real problems with reading the map to said backroads, but that’s only the start of their troubles. When they pull over to ask directions and get some gas they also encounter Loran, a Traveler, or rather The Traveler, who shifted through time. She’s on the hunt for Langston, better known as Timespan who we’ve seen in a few issues of “StormWatch.” Loran has no time to deal with the primitives of this time, and in her little freak out bully time against some innocent bystanders, she catches the attention of Bobby, which in turn gets the rest of the kids to go after her. It’s a tough battle, but in the end, Loran gets tied up with a stop sign and left of the cops, as the kids continue their road trip to San Diego.

The next story is the first of four from issue 0, it stars Caitlin as she’s meeting up with her cousin and her family in Portland. Caitlin isn’t quite sure at this point if she really wants to go down to San Diego, and she might just stay in Portland with family. No sooner than she starts talking to her cousin (and her jerk husband) do some suited men start walking their way. Caitlin fears the worst, that they were sent by Ivana or by I/O and she does what she can to get away. This involves being hit by a train, then picking up said train and tossing it. That puts some distance between her and the rude boys, but she knows it’ll only slow them down for so long. Lucky for her a friend of Lynch’s pulls up and whisks her to the airport to catch a flight to San Diego. Did I say one of Lynch’s friends? Oh, turns out all these guys were pals of Lynch and it was all a set up to make sure Caitlin didn’t find a reason to stay in Portland and to make sure she joined the team. Oh, Lynch, it’s stuff like this that made so many Team 7 members dislike you.

Continue reading Weathering WildStorm : Gen13 issues 1/2 and 0 →

In the ’90s it seemed like most big comic properties really wanted to keep the backstories of their newest characters as vague as possible. Examples: Wolverine and Cable. Oddly, WildStorm always seemed to be champing at the bit to give background info on their creations. We were getting comics like “Team 7” and soon “Team One” books filling in the gaps for us on a bevy of WSU characters. We’d seen a bit of Jacob’s previous adventures in “WildC.A.T.s” so now it’s time to shed a little bit of light on Zealot, AKA Lady Zannah in her own three issue limited series, titled, predictably, “Zealot.” Ok, Imma gonna present this story chronologically. I’m not gonna go all shifty shift, all over, back and forth in time. The narrative does this in the book, and it works to read it like that, talking about it, not so much.

The earliest bit of history we have in this book is the Kherubim ship crashing on Earth. And of course that can’t be the true start of the history, as there are many past events that are mentioned as well. First, we have Promethos AKA Prometheus on board the Kherubim in some sort of cell. Turns out he tried to arrange for a mutiny on the ship. Into the brig with you, ya jerkface. As the ship is going down he appeals to the past romance that he had with Zealot. In a moment of weakness, she frees him, only for him to take hostage of Savant to make sure that he gets an escape module to get safely to Earth. He lands with Savant still his hostage and telling Zealot “We can rule this world, you and I! Let’s do it! Never mind me holding Savant’s life in the balance as I make these proclamations of hypothetical greatness!” Zealot is having none of this, breaks his thumb, and Savant elbows him in his douche bag stomach. They walk away down the beach while he clutches his tummy in the sand and surf.

Time passes, a lot of time. Time enough for Zealot to set up her branch of the Coda, fight in the Trojan war, and then defect from the Coda. That last event causes the Coda to be after her. She almost gets taken down, but in a surprise twist, Prometheus saves her. Turns out since being left on the beach, he’s set himself up quite nicely on Mount Olympus, and even has a buncha servant girls. He once again tries to talk Zealot into staying with him and ruling the rubes. This time she nails his hand to a statue with her Kherubim Honor Blade and walks away. Prometheus vows revenge!

Revenge is taken, a fair bit later when Zealot is in Japan. She’s shaking up with her latest boyfriend, and learning, as well as sharpening her fighting skills in a dojo. The good times can’t last and she gets a message that Savant has been kidnapped by the Masked Warlord. You guessed it, the Masked Warlord is Prometheus and he wants to get Zealots attention. Face it, man, she’s just not that into you. After Savant is saved, and Prometheus kills Zealot’s boyfriend, the ladies jump off a cliff and swim away. Oh yeah, Zealot was stabbed in the shoulder with her Honor Blade and just swims away with it stuck there! Seriously Prometheus, stop trying so hard. Chicks don’t dig that, bro.

Finally, we get to a story set in Nazi Germany. Prometheus is a Nazi officer and he’s trying to live up to his name, and give the Nazi’s the technology to develop atomic weapons. It’s still all part of his grand plan to rule the world. His logic works thusly, have the Nazis do all the work, rise through the ranks on the inside, then take out that weak little man Hitler. Easy, peasy! Zealot objects to, well pretty much the entire plan. Giving atomic weapons to Nazis, taking over the world… she didn’t say, but I’m sure she was fine with taking out Hitler, though. From now on that’s head cannon, Zealot was fine with Hitler being killed. At any rate, she and Prometheus start to fight again, but this time it is different, Zealot means to end Prometheus, and she does so with her Honor Blade. She lops off a hand, then a stab to the abdomen and then she pops his head off. Having done all this, she goes true badass and nukes the whole damn military installation.

So yeah, that’s the story. She told it to Pris when she came out to check on her. Eventually, Void comes calling because Jacob needs everyone back at the compound. Zealot gifts her Honor Blade to Pris, as she never quite felt honorable about killing Prometheus, despite it needing to be done. I really enjoyed this short series. Sheds a little more light onto Zealot’s life. I would’ve loved to see how she and Cole met, or more what they were up to before they joined up with the team, but with a story this well done, I’m gonna let it slide.

Continue reading Weathering WildStorm : Zealot →

It’s holiday time so let’s do a holiday book! But let’s face it, we know where Geek Nerdery came from, the only holiday here is Halloween! Ok, so what we have here is WildStorm’s attempt at their very own “Treehouse of Horror.” Remember when those started, there was a framing story of the Simpson kids telling scary stories to each other, and we have that here. The team, sitting around in the Smithsonian telling spooky stories. Some are stories from their past, a history of Tapestry that Zealot knows, or in Reno’s case, a horrible dream!

There’s not too much here. Reno keeps having a nightmare of visiting his parents’ graves, them rising as zombies, turning into Daemonites, trying to kill him and succeeding. We’ll find out more about Reno’s background later, but it’s that as a kid some Daemonites burned down his folks’ house and he carries the guilt of not being there to save them. Him telling this story to Savant gets the whole ball of wax going.

Continue reading Weathering WildStorm : WildStorm Chamber of Horrors →

In going through the history of WildStorm, I sometimes come across books like this. One shots that I had no idea existed, and I was probably better for it! So there’s this book, “Voodoo / Zealot : Skin Trade.” This sad little book, this effing book. Ok, let’s be serious for a minute, this book is basically a bunch of pin-ups arranged as a story. But trashier than that sounds. For all the cheesecake glory that is “Gen13” when compared to this book “Gen13” ends up looking rather tame. And, if I was a better reviewer, and thought this was the place to get into it, I’d comment on how WildStorm went from putting out a book like this, where the women are all posed as sexual objects first and to serve the story second, to eventually putting out books that dealt with a more mature take on sex and sexuality in such a small span of time. Not to mention how much ahead of the curve on that kind of thing they were in regards to DC and Marvel. But this isn’t the blog for that and I’d never do that argument justice anyway!

We catch up with Zealot training Priss in the ways of the Coda. Along for the “It’s Not the Danger Room!” session is Cole and Jeremy who both admonish Zealot for being too harsh with Priss. Little Big Jake tells Zealot that she needs to lay off of Priss a bit and she needs a break. Zealot storms off and is then confronted by Providence. Providence tells Zealot she has information about her Zealot’s previously unknown child and proceeds to give some long convoluted story of how it’s been cryogenically frozen and will still be a young kid. Also, it’s in Yurgovia and she should go save it. Most of this is a lie, but Providence needs to get Zealot to Yurgovia and Zealot will meet her kid, so she embellished a lot.

So why does Providence need to get Zealot to Yurgovia? Well, ok, remember Yurgovia from the “WildC.A.T.s Special”? Remember how there was this Coda gal named Destine that was running it? Remember how she died getting shot in the back by Cole? Welp, I guess it didn’t take because she’s back and she’s pissed. She’s out to take Yurgovia back from the people that’d been running it since she’d been assumed dead, and also to grow her own little branch of the Coda as well. She has a few recruits already and she’s looking for more to train, which means kidnapping the children of Yurgovia. In the end, it seems that Providence didn’t like all this, because who would, and vowed to put and end to Destine’s schemes. Oh, and Destine has a bit of “the Orb” that created her and Void and she means to have it back. Not that Providence went about it attaining her goals in any logical manner, she handed out half truths to Zealot and double crossed Destine.

Continue reading Weathering WildStorm : Voodoo / Zealot : Skin Trade →