An extra couple cents from me:
Gen13 Bootleg is mostly a rotating cast of creators phoning it in and collecting a check, with one legendary exception. Adam Warren wrote and drew a three-parter called "Grunge: The Movie," which is a world-caliber pisstake of kung fu movies, John Woo shootout movies, movie nerd shit in general, and Gen13 itself. Hard to find these days outside of quarter bins. Side-splitting funny if you were around at the time and you can get all the jokes.
Magical Drama Queen Roxy is Warren's other big Gen13 story as a writer/artist, and it flopped so hard it never even got a short-run trade collection. Again, you kind of had to be there so you can pick up the references and meta-humor (lot of gags here for the creaky old anime nerds), but if you can it's fuckin hilarious.
The original DV8 series is a great concept hamstrung by the fact that however much you liked Warren Ellis in the 00s, he really wasn't that good a writer yet in the 90s. It's a 90s teen book filtered through the Larry Clarke movie Kids: what if a bunch of kidnapped orphan fuckups with superpowers were being operated by an ex-spook psychopath who let them run wild in New York City doing all the drugs, sex, and murder they wanted to in between black ops.
Ellis only wrote the first six issues (plotted the next two). After that it got handed to Wildstorm's usual gang of idiots and it went on for a couple years of being crap, but not crap enough to be interesting. Issues 1 and 2 are worth looking up scans, the antagonists in 2 are this great ultra-disgusting superpowered version of the Manson family. It also has one of my favorite Humberto Ramos pieces ever on the cover (looks best at full size):
Gen13 Bootleg is mostly a rotating cast of creators phoning it in and collecting a check, with one legendary exception. Adam Warren wrote and drew a three-parter called "Grunge: The Movie," which is a world-caliber pisstake of kung fu movies, John Woo shootout movies, movie nerd shit in general, and Gen13 itself. Hard to find these days outside of quarter bins. Side-splitting funny if you were around at the time and you can get all the jokes.
Magical Drama Queen Roxy is Warren's other big Gen13 story as a writer/artist, and it flopped so hard it never even got a short-run trade collection. Again, you kind of had to be there so you can pick up the references and meta-humor (lot of gags here for the creaky old anime nerds), but if you can it's fuckin hilarious.
The original DV8 series is a great concept hamstrung by the fact that however much you liked Warren Ellis in the 00s, he really wasn't that good a writer yet in the 90s. It's a 90s teen book filtered through the Larry Clarke movie Kids: what if a bunch of kidnapped orphan fuckups with superpowers were being operated by an ex-spook psychopath who let them run wild in New York City doing all the drugs, sex, and murder they wanted to in between black ops.
Ellis only wrote the first six issues (plotted the next two). After that it got handed to Wildstorm's usual gang of idiots and it went on for a couple years of being crap, but not crap enough to be interesting. Issues 1 and 2 are worth looking up scans, the antagonists in 2 are this great ultra-disgusting superpowered version of the Manson family. It also has one of my favorite Humberto Ramos pieces ever on the cover (looks best at full size):
