Gen 13 #1

History

Gen 13 grew out of a conversation between childhood friends Jim Lee and Brandon Choi, who noticed that no publisher had centered a superhero team book on actual teenagers since Marvel's New Mutants roughly a decade earlier; reading DC's Legionnaires gave Lee the tonal spark he wanted. The team was originally conceived as 'Gen X,' debuting under that name in the September 1993 crossover event Deathmate Black — but Marvel had trademarked 'Generation X' for an imminent X-Men spinoff, forcing a rebrand to Gen 13 (a play on Generation X being the thirteenth American generation since the Revolution) before the characters could headline their own five-issue miniseries in early 1994. That miniseries, written by Choi and Lee and drawn by the then-unknown Campbell — who had been discovered as a teenager through a talent search advertised in WildC.A.T.s #2 — sold well enough to warrant the ongoing series, which launched March 30, 1995 under editor-in-chief Bill Kaplan with Campbell graduating to co-writer alongside Choi.

Trivia · 8 facts

• The ongoing series' first issue was published on March 30, 1995 by WildStorm Productions under the Image Comics banner, written by Brandon Choi and J. Scott Campbell, with interior art by J. Scott Campbell inked by Alex Garner.
• Gen 13 was created by Brandon Choi, Jim Lee, and J. Scott Campbell; Jim Lee is credited inside the issue as 'fanboy consultant,' reflecting his role as the studio head and conceptual architect rather than active writer by this point.
• The issue ships with thirteen distinct variant covers — including homage covers, a parody cover ('Li'l Gen 13' by Arthur Adams, 'Barbari-Gen' by Simon Bisley), and a 'Do-It-Yourself' blank-sketch cover — an unusually large variant run that drew wide attention in the trade press.
• The five core team members making their ongoing-series debut as fully formed characters are: Caitlin Fairchild (superstrength and enhanced intellect), Sarah Rainmaker (weather manipulation), Bobby Lane / Burnout (pyrokinesis), Roxy Spaulding / Freefall (gravity manipulation), and Percival 'Grunge' Chang (matter absorption); their mentor John Lynch also appears.
• Although the ongoing series is often called their 'first appearance,' the team (originally named Gen X) actually debuted in Deathmate Black (September 1993), and a separate claim exists for WildC.A.T.S Trilogy #1 (June 1993) as an even earlier appearance — this remains a contested point among collectors.
• The issue's story is set primarily in La Jolla, California, where the team has settled after escaping the government program, and features a Mortal Kombat-style video game parody as a plot device, reflecting Campbell's pop-culture sensibility.
• The issue was reprinted multiple times: in European-market Gen 13 series (Juniorpress 1996, Semic S.A. 1996), in the Gen 13 Backlist anthology (Image, May 1997), in 3-D format as Gen 13 3D #1 (Image, February 1998), and as part of the DC collected editions Gen 13: Starting Over (1999) and the oversized Gen 13: Starting Over The Deluxe Edition (DC, 2022).
• The series spawned an animated film directed by Kevin Altieri (Batman: The Animated Series), produced by WildStorm with Buena Vista/Disney as distributor; it was publicly screened at Wizard World Chicago in 1998 but never received a U.S. home-video release after Jim Lee sold WildStorm to DC Comics, creating a corporate conflict with Disney. A limited release followed in Europe, Australia, and South America through Paramount.

Full credits

Key issues in Gen 13

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#33 1st appearance — The General

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#7 1st appearance — Powerhouse

Variants (14)