Third Genesis

“Third Genesis” / “Searching” / “Dead Silence” /
“Between the Cracks” / “Don’t Touch That Dial!”
/ “Notes From the Underground”
Generation X #1-6 (1995-1996)
Written by Scott Lobdell
Pencils by Chris Bachalo
Inks by Mark Pennington

Generation X, much like its namesake cohort, is a strange middle-child in the X-Men franchise that never quite got enough space to fully grow and thrive, and is largely overshadowed by school-centric X-books that came before and after it. The comic seems to move in fits and starts without building to any defining storyline, and the series loses direction and identity once its creators Scott Lobdell and Chris Bachalo depart. The characters created for the series – Husk, Monet, Chamber, Skin, and Synch – have rarely been used to their full potential since the book ended, and the latter two were killed off years ago and have never returned. (Which is fine, more characters ought to stay dead, but it wouldn’t ever hurt to have more black and Latino characters around.) The series’ greatest legacy is that it marks the first use of Emma Frost primarily as a heroic character. 

The biggest reason why the classic Generation X issues work is also the reason later issues and other interpretations of the characters have failed: This series is VERY MUCH about the synergy of  Bachalo’s highly distinctive art style and Lobdell’s sardonic wit and skill for writing low-key character development. Everything that is appealing about the characters and the stories comes down to these two guys being allowed to indulge in their quirks. It’s in the character and page design, it’s in the way Lobdell is clearly a lot more interested in writing scenes where characters get to know each other over a game of Scrabble or a field trip to Manhattan than typical superhero conflicts. Even those are unusual, and mostly focused on Monet’s creepy quasi-vampiric brother Emplate and her odd connection to the mute enigma called Penance. 

Much in the same way Warlock never looks quite right when illustrated by anyone but Bill Sienkiewicz, it’s hard to translate the burst of light that Chamber has where his chest and lower jaw ought to be outside of Bachalo’s style. It looks awful when rendered with a more photorealistic aesthetic, and the sad poetry of his form is lost if it’s drawn with a more standard superhero look. Bachalo and Lobdell nail something very potent with Chamber. Lobdell took Bachalo’s design of a boy with flaming hole in his chest and made the implicit metaphor the basis of the character – he’s a sad, lonely, self-pitying kid whose damage is on permanent display. 

He’s a literal flame, and Paige “Husk” Guthrie is the proverbial moth. Paige is the younger sister of Cannonball, one of the leads of the original X-Men spin-off school series New Mutants. At this point in time, Cannonball had “graduated” to become a full member of the X-Men. Husk is presented as a classic Type A person – an obsessively focused student, the type of kid who gets up at the crack of dawn and goes out for a five-mile run – and extremely eager to follow in the footsteps of her brother as an X-Man. She’s basically the Rory Gilmore of Generation X, and Chamber is her Jess Mariano. (Angela Chase wasn’t a great student, so a comparison to the roughly contemporaneous My So-Called Life doesn’t quite work, sorry.) 

Paige’s power is a metaphor for her personality too. She can induce metamorphoses by literally tearing off her skin. She never knows what her next form will take, but she always reverts back to her primary form as what Lobdell describes as “a doe-eyed blonde fresh from her native Kentucky home.” Unlike Chamber, who has to wrap himself up in layers of scarves to venture out into the world, she can choose to pass as normal, but is often a grotesque freak. The body-shedding thing understandably grosses people out. She starts off as the seemingly normal girl who’s quite odd and interesting below the surface, but grows into the girl who’s always finding something in herself that she didn’t realize was there. 

Husk spends the first few issues of Generation X fascinated by Chamber, and surprised as she learns that he’s not always a brooding dick, but actually a very sweet and generous person when left to his own devices. They bond in the fifth issue, shortly after Husk learns about the Legacy virus, a thinly veiled mutant analog to HIV and AIDS. He finds her drunk off of one beer, utterly despondent because she can’t help but think that all her hard work and promise as a mutant might not mean much if she catches this disease and dies before she’s even out of her teens. Lobdell and Bachalo manage a delicate balance in this scene – it’s funny, it’s cute, it’s depressing, it’s romantic. The scene conveys a moment of intimacy and connection, but Lobdell shows that these two aren’t quite on the same page. As she informs him that life is unfair – “with a capital UN” – he gazes off into a mirror at what remains of his face. “Tell me about it, Paige.”