Generation Zero #8 Review and **Spoilers**

A Battle of the Minds!

Writer: Fred Van Lente
Artist: Diego Bernard
Publisher: Valiant Comics
Release Date: March 29, 2078
Cover Price: $3.99

After a little bit of a break we return to the group just escaping the Heroscape as they come under attack from the newly powered Adele Poole.  So we’re getting a super powered spoiled brat who is also the daughter of Rook CEO, this can only go well…

We start off where we left off with Adele ripping the roof, and accidentally the whole second floor, and confronting the team. We get some fighting and a little information on Adele, and her super hero name Black Sheep, before she throws Cloud through multiple walls. This fight seems to take up a lot of the book, but ultimately it feels like we don’t get much actually from it.

Eventually Keisha finally decides to do something and grabs the handcuff keys to release her father. After waking him up they eventually head off in their car. With Adele following, and eventually throwing cows at the car as the splatter on the road due to Adele’s untested strength, we learn Keisha is headed for Rasa. Rasa is seemingly the girl who is powering most of Rook and the secret tower of the Cornermen. We also get from this exchange that Keisha’s father, the sheriff, knows a good amount more than Keisha had actually thought.

You would think around this time would be a good chance for some exposition and set up of more background on everything, but we largely get nothing. We get some information on what the Cornermen are and we know that the Sherriff can’t see the tower himself, but not much is conveyed before Adele finally makes her mark and lands a hit with a cow.

Around this time we also get a short aside as Kwame and one of the Zygos twins using the Heroscape portal to confront the CEO of ROOK with some futuristic guns as they both discuss their distaste for guns. I like this little aside as I really like the interactions we get with the Zygos twins with other people. Here it seems Kwame acts a lot like one of the twins and I have to wonder if it’s intentional. The only issue it’s hard to tell what it’s exactly trying to convey. That Kwame is more like the twins, or the twins are more like Kwame. Either way I like what we get, but I just wish we could have had more of this from this issue than a lot of what we did get.

We end with some confusion. Keisha escapes the crash caused by Adele and makes her way to the tower to find Rasa. What’s weird is that it seems like Keisha just convinces herself that the tower isn’t there anymore. I can almost think that she is just going back to the previous state of mind of not seeing the Tower, but in my mind this would cause the pond or lake to return, but it goes away as well. I’m just kind of confused at what was the intention of this, is it Keisha having a power, is it just meant to be looked past? It just seemed odd.

Overall I feel this book may be losing some steam with me. It still has aspects I like, but with little of the twins and none of mind controlling fetus, this book focuses on characters with a lot less charm and interest for me. On top of that most of the issue being a fight and a chase scene with very little new information to take up that time. So far I’m just feeling like this arc is taking just a little too much time and could have probably been slimmed down a bit between this issue and issue 6 largely giving us not much at all.

 Bits and Pieces:

This largely felt like a filler issue, not much really progressed and not much was really gained. There were a couple comedic moments that held up the issue a bit and there are still the lingering creepy factors in play, but largely they were missing from this issue. That, plus some confusion in a few scenes makes this issue hard to really recommend.

6/10