John Lynch, the International Operations agent who served as a mentor to Gen 13 during much of their comics run in the ’90s and who would later reappear in various iterations of Team 7, is featured prominently in a short written and drawn by J. Scott Campbell in tomorrow’s Wildstorm: A Celebration of 25 Years.
You can see the page below; in it, Caitlin Fairchild confronts Lynch over his repetition of alt-right talking points.
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The short story, titled “Generation Millennial,” sees Caitlin feeling guilty that she did not join Sarah Rainmaker at a women’s march dated July 2017. Lynch poo-poohs her enthusiasm, saying that protesters are being controlled by shadowy forces. In the course of the dialogue-heavy page, Caitlin and Lynch recite talking points at one another and ultimately the page ends with each deciding that the other is wrong.
Lynch does not just sound like he is getting his news from conservative outlets, though; he specifically sounds like someone spouting conspiracy theories far out of line with the mainstream and popularized by fringe news and commentary sites like Alex Jones’s InfoWars.
Conspiracy theories, popularized by The X-Files and other similar media in the ’90s, played a role in the original run on Gen 13, with Lynch often being at the center of such stories.
Gen 13 also always dabbled in politics. While the larger-than-life politics of the comic were rarely spoke directly to specific political candidates of the day in the way that Lynch’s use of “fake news” seems to, the book did make headlines shortly after it launched by outing Sarah Rainmaker as one of the first lead characters in comics to be openly gay.
Campbell both writes and draws the short, very much like Brett Booth did a short based on Backlash. While much of the content in the book is reprint material, it is arguably interesting that artists have so much creative pull over the new content, considering that when Jim Lee first founded WildStorm 25 years ago as part of Image Comics, almost every studio at Image skewed heavily toward artist-driven content.
You can get a copy of Wildstorm: A Celebration of 25 Years at your local comic shop tomorrow, in bookstores on October 31, or pre-order a digital copy here.
The volume reprints WildC.A.T.s #1, WILDCATS (v.4) #1, THE AUTHORITY #13 & #14, short stories from THE EYE OF THE STORM ANNUAL and the Coup D’Etat Afterword. Plus, it features brand-new stories and pin-ups.
