As I've pointed out several times over the last few months, one of the oddities of M-Day is Marvel's treatment of the fallout.  Rather than actually doing the obvious big stories in the major titles, they've been shunted into miniseries like Generation M - presumably because the major titles don't really want to tell those stories.

It turns out that Generation M doesn't really want to tell those stories either.  Nominally, this is the book following up on mutants who lost their powers on M-Day, but in reality they've largely been shunted to the sidelines so Paul Jenkins can tell us more about his new character, journalist Sally Floyd, who will shortly be regaling us once again in the Civil War: Frontline miniseries.  Loosely speaking, the idea seems to be that Sally has sunk into depression and alcoholism after the death of her young daughter, but that writing about former mutants somehow or other gives her the strength to turn her life around. 

Quite how the one leads to the other isn't readily apparent.  It turns out that Sally's daughter was a mutant who aged in reverse, and therefore might have survived if she'd lived to M-Day and lost her "powers."  This perhaps explains Sally's interest in the subject, but doesn't really tell us why she suddenly decides to write a big article about her tragedy in the final issue.  Worse, the issue then turns into one of those awful stories where all the other characters stand around agreeing that they've just witnessed something terribly, desperately moving - effectively, the writer patting himself on the back for page after page.  When the Angel is wheeled out to tell Sally that she's displayed unparalleled courage simply by writing an article about her dying child, one starts to wonder whether everyone involved has lost their minds.

So, no, I don't buy it.  The idea that Sally's kid might have survived if M-Day had come a little sooner is quite a good one; the idea that she's some sort of hero simply for writing about a glorified form of cot death is just plain baffling.  I simply don't understand why everyone's so impressed by her.  Not to the level of character after character bowing down to admire her saintly heroism, in any event.  It doesn't work.

The creators then remember that there's a serial killer storyline, so they resolve it and go home.

This seemed like an interesting premise for a series, but somewhere along the line the book has gone charging down a blind alley, and not a particularly interesting one at that.

Rating: C

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