Apocalypse Then: The Gen 13 annual script

Hey everyone, I have something special for you today. I've read Alan Moore's unfinished script for the Gen 13 annual a couple of times and wanted to talk about it in depth.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here are the background details. In the beginning of 1998, Alan Moore was writing Supreme, Youngblood and Glory for Awesome (and had written proposals for a couple other series). One of Rob Liefeld's investors in Awesome suddenly pulled out of the company and it was quickly out of funding. Liefeld laid everyone off and Alan Moore was suddenly looking for work.

The conventional wisdom had been that he was hired to do ABC for Jim Lee's Wildstorm and Moore jumped right into it. But Scott Dunbier, the editor at Wildstorm at the time, recently posted on his social media account that Moore was hired first to do an annual for the teenage-superhero comic, Gen 13. 

 

This is everyone's idea of an Alan Moore comic, right?

Moore wrote it for several artists, including Jim Lee and Travis Charest. For some reason, he only got through 28 of the 48 pages of the script and it was never finished.

Fast forward to present time and Scott auctioned off what was likely the only copy of the script for charity. 

 

Brian K. Vaughan bought the script and gave a scan of the script to anyone who donated to the charity.

The details for donating are here. I'd ask you to donate before reading on.

I can wait.

La de dah

What?

You donated already?

Okay then.

If you haven't read the script, its a pastiche of teenage superheroes from comics history. The Gen 13 kids are sitting around when a package shows up that is pretty obviously an alien comic book. When The teens touch it, they get sucked into the comic.

 

The first part, intended for Jim Lee to illustrate, was a take on the classic Lee/Kirby X-Men. The Gen 13 teens take the place of the classic members of the X-Men and become the "Gen Men." They complain about being persecuted by normal people who don't understand them. They're plagued by a villain with the power of "animal magnetism." A group of giant robots called the "Juvenihillators" come to exterminate them. It's funny and cheeky in the best way.

But then the teens get sucked into a second situation. This one was a send-up of the "late eighties-early nineties superhero armageddon." I'll talk more about this one in a minute.

For the third and final pastiche, the teens take over the place of a Marv Wolfman/George Perez Teen Titans type of team called "Thirteen Titans." The teens fight off a group of alien women while coming to terms with their teenage emotions. It's very funny stuff. But then it ends with no conclusion.

Eventually an alien called The Collector was supposed to come along and I assume the Gen 13 teens were supposed to break free of this cosmic comic and everything would be fine. In a silly way, I hope Moore was planning on doing a pastiche of Rob Liefeld's Youngblood.

The srcipt feels very similar to what Moore was doing with Youngblood at the time. If you consider the many different alternate timeline versions of the Youngblood characters in issue 6, where they represent the 1960s, a post-apocalyptic 1980s and a utopian future, you can see that the style and tone are similar. This annual feels more tongue-in-cheek, though, perhaps because Moore wasn't trying to build the series along, as he was with Youngblood.

And that would be that. A trifle that Moore did before moving on to ABC and doing much better work. But there's more to this script, at least from my perspective. So, let's dig into that second part.

He titled this section, "Another Doomsday, Another Dollar" for reasons that will become obvious.

Moore wrote that the section was recreating well-know dark futures, "whether we're talking about Watchmen, Dark Knight, recent Marvel series like 'Ruins' or recent D.C. series like 'Kingdom Come.'" But the twist was that the apocalypse was one that had destroyed the comic industry, or as Moore puts it in the script, "the rubble of comic book culture."

 

In the first splash page, the characters Burnout and Freefall find themselves in a destroyed city with the remnants of the Daily Planet building, the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building and other notable landmarks. In the rubble are Captain America's shield, Superman's cape, Grifter's mask and a smashed Bat-Signal.

In the dialogue on that page, Moore had Burnout say, "Our UNIVERSE and whatever unimaginable industry SUSTAINS it seem to be COLLAPSING into a state of continual APOCALYPSE. It's like ARMAGEDDON is all we have LEFT!"

The two characters find it ironic that they're the ones who survived. As Burnout says, "I guess we were the YOUNGEST, last of our generation before the days of the GREAT CANCELLATION descended upon us."

They set off on a quest to try to reverse this plight. There's a legend of a secret society called "The Plot" with a machine that can handle any eventuality. But to get there, they need to get through the "Bankrupt Zone" and the "Mountains of Sale."

The Bankrupt Zone finds them climbing over "the logos and mastheads of vanished comic book companies," such as Valiant Comics. And then Moore suggests including the Eclipse logo in there, too.

"It's a wasteland where the survivors snipe at each other," Burnout says.

Grunge turns up, but his name is now Grudge and he appears to be made of junk. He says that in order to protect "the whole business" he absorbed the criticism and the losses. But it was too much and now he's going to absorb Burnout and Freefall into the junkyard, too.

They manage to escape, but find themselves in the "Valley of abandoned ploys." It's a desert filled with "strange and twinkling green spectres" as it is filled with prismatic chrome foil and holograms of "generic super-hero type figures" and other early 1990s cover enhancements.

"I hope we don't meet any marauding multiple variants..." Freefall says. 

And then they run into Fairchild, who is completely nude. "I became Barechild during the nudity fad...mostly it's quiet, although you still get the occasional smut-glutton sniffing around..." she says.

Then two "mutated fanboys, grown to enormous size" with a checklist and an Overstreet Guide look Barechild over. "They're a couple of the last remaining rogue SPECULATORS!" she yells.

Freefall and Burnout escape to a mountain of avant garde collage of newspapers, advertisements and other pop-culture ephemera. It's the Mountains of Sale. As they climb, they complain about how modern and bizarre it is. "Bizarre to the point of PSYCHOSIS, I'm afraid," Burnout says. "The DIZZY HEIGHTS are now an ASYLUM for deconstructed VINTAGE characters and the occassional disturbed LONER." He remarks that one of their friends got "revised as a psychedelic native American SHAMAN called 'BRAINSHAKER'... The last time I saw her she was talking gibberish about how her SEXUALITY was related to SUPER-STRING THEORY."

They reach the top of the mountains, "the SALE'S PEAK" and two "Retro-Racketeers" with pink-colored goggles and rays are revising Burnout into something "more like something from an issue of some early silver age comic book. ... into a character that looks like its drawn by Jack Kirby."

They make their way to the Plot's secret hideout where they find a machine called "the Plot Device" that can save the universe. They just need to switch it to "ALL A DREAM" or "IMAGINARY STORY" or "MAKE IT DIDN'T HAPPEN."

Freefall remarks, "I suppose that's part of the FUN with these 'Alternate Future'-type situations: seeing everyone DESTROYED or grotesquely ALTERED..."

They activate the machine to escape the "ongoing INFINITE CRISIS!"

And that's the end of the section, but there's no escape from what Moore was trying to say in a cheeky way. In the real world, this wasn't an alternate future that we could just make it didn't happen. In 1998, Moore had seen companies that he had worked for fall away into bankruptcy. Awesome had just collapsed, but so had Eclipse, where he had worked on Miracleman. Marvel and DC had seen dwindling sales and pretty soon Jim Lee was going to sell his company to DC, rumor claims so that he didn't have to see his staff lose their jobs.

And Moore lays the blame for this squarely on the 1990s trends. The cover enhancements, variant covers and nudie covers created a generation of kids who thought they were going to get rich collecting comics. And of course, then it all collapsed.

As Moore had Burnout say, "I'm afraid our universe lost THE PLOT some time ago."

But Moore tears apart the trends that had been successful up until 1998, those on "Sale's peak" of psychopaths and deconstructed vintage characters. It's hard not to see him criticizing the effects of Watchmen and Batman: The Killing Joke here, as he had been doing for several years and prominently in Judgment Day for Awesome. 

But even his Awesome work is not spared. His revision of Supreme into a silver-age pastiche of Superman gets called retro-racketeering. 

It's tough to say if there is a positive future in all of this, or if it's just a criticism...Moore as the anarchist, tearing down with no organized path forward. But if there is, maybe it's Moore taking stock of what he had been through and to put what he had done with Awesome behind him. He moved away from the retro-racketeering, as he called it, that he had done so effectively with Supreme.

We know that Moore created an ABC universe, drawing on vintage ideas and characters, but finding new and fun ways to use them. He avoided most of the approaches he described as being part of comics' ruin. As he has said elsewhere, he created ABC to do fun stories. I think that was the long-lost plot he was attempting to have these last, youngest superheroes attempt to find.

Anyway, let me know if you think I'm way off base or if there's really something here? And what did you think of the rest of the script?