One look at the cover tells you this is a 90s comic. Fairchild's ditched the bra and gone native. Must be cold on that, you know, tropical island. Or maybe Jeff Scott Campbell, like many teenage males of the species, is just a fan of nipples?
You're right, it's probably the latter.
In any case, if you recall from last issue, Burnout and Freefall were rescued by pirates led by a man named Lucius, who was banished from Coda Island after he had an affair with one of the Glamazons. The coital coupling produced a daughter, whom Lucius is convinced still lives on Coda Island. Using Burnout and Freefall, not to mention the rest of his "brutally ugly, high-maintenance butt-pirates" (Freefall's words), to storm the island, find his daughter, then GTFO is the idea. As plans go, I guess it's hard to beat the tried and true method of "kick in the front door and start swinging". Not the most creative way to go about it, but intelligence was clearly everyone's dump stat on this ship.
Fairchild was swept up onto Coda Island, where she fell into the lap of Bruce Campbell Jim McArthur, son of the wealthy widow financing the teens' expedition. McArthur's been stuck on the island for weeks, eluding Coda warrior patrols, but unable find a way off.
Grunge and Rainmaker, meanwhile, washed up on a different part of the beach, and are now "guests" of the Coda: while Rainmaker cools her heels in the dungeon and makes friends with Daphne, the one maiden in the Coda crew who has zero warrior spirit within, Grunge is shipped off to serve as a breeding stallion and probable sacrificial victim. Kind of like The Wicker Man, only with a bunch more sex and zero bees.
And with that, you're caught up! Let's get to the action.
We begin with a jailbreak:
That's the second time Rainmaker's shoved her foot in this poor woman's face, so Quentin Tarantino definitely owns multiple copies of this issue. It's unlikely Sister Mira will have a job guarding anything except the outhouses after this. After congratulating Daphne on distracting the guard, Rainmaker takes off her clothes . . .
. . . but we can't dwell on that for too long, because Caitlin and Jim have made their way to the outskirts of the Citadel for some reconnaissance work. The place is quiet, with just a handful of Coda serving as guards. All the action seems to be over at the Temple, so Fairchild decides that's the perfect time to attack. Despite being clad in a couple straps of leather and a slice of thong underwear, she easily renders the pair of guards unconscious in a double sleeper hold we, as youth, could only dream about:
Pushing their way towards the Temple, the pair stumble upon a ritual that involves virtually the entire Coda tribe. Fairchild can't understand a word the women are saying, but Jim translates for her. I guess when you have nothing else to do on a deserted island for a few weeks, you pick up the local language pretty quickly.
As they watch, the Majestrix, leader of the Coda, stands in the center of the temple, surrounded by four warrior initiates. The initiates all draw knives and advance on the Majestrix, who appears unconcerned as the knives flash, and . . .
Looks like those 'Fountain of Youth' rumors stem from Majestrix herself. By allowing the Coda to ingest her blood, she transfers a portion of her essence into them, rendering them effectively immortal. Caitlin, relieved she didn't just witness a human sacrifice, gets to breathe long enough for Jim to point out the dude in the diaper spread-eagled on the other side of the room:
While Caitlin works out how she's going to rescue her unsuspecting (and ticklish) teammate, Lucius and his crew arrive on the island to blitz the Citadel and commence with the stabbing:
Fairchild frees Grunge in the chaos, then tears out a full-sized column to use like a baseball bat, battering nearby Coda into unconsciousness. Lucius and his crew meet swords and spears with gunpowder and fireballs. Caught in a pincer attack, the Majestrix and her forces can't hold back the tide. Finally, after Rainmaker saves the Majestrix's life and Daphne realizes the pirates will leave as soon as they have what they came for, a truce is reached. In exchange for allowing Daphne to leave with Lucius, Rainmaker cancels the life debt owed to her by the Majestrix, and they all live happily ever after.
Rainmaker, riling up the letter column again.
Well, except for Grunge, who now has to explain to Roxy why he unsheathed the pork sword on a bunch of other women while she slaved away in the galley of a pirate ship. I think there's a life lesson in there for all of us, don't you?
Choi and Campbell leave us with an open-ended conclusion to the story with the epilogue however, as Lucius recounts to Daphne how he knew Caitlin's father, Alex Fairchild. Last he heard, Alex was headed to the island of Gamorra, a name which hasn't surfaced in Gen 13 until now, but would be familiar to readers of other Wildstorm books. Even though fifteen years have gone by, he thinks Caitlin has a good chance of tracking him down, meaning her father may not be dead after all.
Wut WUT?!
But that's not the end of the issue! Wrapping up this three-part plotline only takes the first twenty pages, which leaves enough space for Tom McWeeney to conclude his own three-part magnum opus, Robot Ruckus. In just eight pages, we get a swath of amusing jabs at the size difference between J. Scott Campbell and Jim Lee, super-team crossovers, Scooby-Doo, and virginal comic book nerds (like @blewitt -- ZING!).
The letter column is pretty laid-back this issue, only a page and a half worth of letters and replies. Mainly readers complain about Roxy adopting some of the slang used in Clueless (which made its theatrical debut in July of 1995), but we also have questions about what Grunge got up to with the Coda breeding team (he was bumping uglies, do we really need to spell this out?), why the dude Roxy met in the club back in issue 2 looked like Trent Reznor (because Closer played relentlessly on MTV when Campbell was penciling the issue--man, remember when MTV played music videos?), and if any of the kids Grunge fathered with the Coda tribe will be Gen-Active (give it 14-15 years, and I guess we'll find out).
There's also some postage-stamp-sized fan art of Burnout and Grunge from Armando Durruthy, of San Diego, California which looks pretty cool, but since they shrank it down to squeeze it into a half-column of space at the end of the letters page on the back cover, it's hard to make out any of the details.
Final Score:
out of
You might be wondering, as I did back in the day, why Grunge and Caitlin look as shocked as they do when Rainmaker gives Daphne that peck on the forehead, and why Rainmaker has to comment about being "just friends". Well, one year later in 1996, Wildstorm would publish Gen 13 'Zine #1. One of the reasons for doing this quirky 2/3rds-sized book was to give a share information, artwork, rough drafts, and Q&As pertaining to the book that fans had been asking for but that Wildstorm never really had a good spot to print outside of the monthly letter column, which was far too small to accommodate demand. In Rainmaker's section of the 'Zine, Campbell showed the original pencils for that panel, and:
One can only imagine the kind of postal apoplexy that panel would have induced in some readers back in the day, so I totally get the change. Unfortunately the alteration completely undercuts Fairchild and Grunge's reactions, making them seem overly prudish about what is a simple term of endearment in Western culture.
It's sad, but Robot Ruckus carries this issue, because without it, this is a faceplant. Twenty pages isn't nearly enough to close this three-parter, which goes flying by like an express train on the Yamanote Line. The story is wrapped up far too quickly, considering the abandon with which the pirates and the Coda slaughtered one another just two pages before. The ease with which a bunch of untrained kids and ordinary buccaneers rain hell on an island of trained-from-birth warriors makes a mockery of everything Jim Lee built the Coda up to be in other Wildstorm books.
By the time they catch a plane for home, the Gen 13 bunch have learned nothing new except that there's an island off Madagascar run by nearly-immortal alien warriors who suck at fighting. They're in basically the same place they were when they left on their cross-planet junket, minus a lot of clothing and the V-cards of at least one, and possibly two, team members depending on just how friendly Caitlin and Jim wound up getting off the page. Lynch got bushwhacked by a bunch of Black Hammers, but it's possible you already forgot about that for how little attention it received, and we won't see that addressed until a crossover with Deathblow several months later.
It'll all be OK. Eventually Campbell starts hitting deadlines and they don't have to call in the back-up team to bail him out, but issues 3-5 are kind of sad in terms of overall quality. It's not very memorable, rushed to a degree unseen in previous issues, and does little to advance the story beyond what was already established.
We know the book's got potential. But as with most first seasons of beloved television shows, everybody's still figuring their way around the characters. Gen 13 survived long enough to get over this hump, we just need to give it some more time. Fortunately for us, things are about to start heating up in the next two issues! Tune in next week, krunk-heads, when the world travels continue with a layover in Italy, and the return of a few evil faces.