It's kind of hard to believe that the same man responsible for that first trade of GI JOE: COBRA also wrote this issue, which I picked up just for the hell of it and found to be a little ... meh. I liked the basic premise behind the story, which is that when you have a group of powerful superhuman teenagers living in the middle of Manhattan, it's almost impossible to keep them secret. But once Christos Gage tries to break that premise down into an actual story, he lost me. The book centers on the fame-hungry Striker, who has a dark and creepy backstory much like the Chuckles did in GI JOE. But, in every way that Gage's Chuckles was ambiguous and subtle, his Striker is obvious and uninteresting. Gage tries to hang a light on that problem by having Finesse cite it as a reason to shoot down Striker's clumsy romantic advances, but that just made me wonder why I was bothering with this issue. What's worse, the end of the book completely lost me. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to believe that Striker's mother set up the attack on the Academy students, but it's written in such a way that I don't quite get it. Did she call Whirlwind directly, or did she just call the paparazzi and they passed it along? Was Striker in on the attack also? From the way it's written, any or all of these things could be true or false. I can't tell. The pencils from Jorge Molina are occasionally great, and occasionally ... not so much. Whirlwind is defeated by grabbing a metal pole, thus grounding himself so that Striker can zap him, but I had to look at those panels a few times to get it. The same could be said with most of the action panels in the book. I did like a lot of his face-work in the book, but comics are all about action and he doesn't quite measure up there. All in all, I think Gage is stuck with a tough job. After the first few pages I loved the way he wrote Steve Rogers, but this is a book where the characters think that Steve is a boring, dusty relic. That does not especially make me want to read about them. Maybe I'll pick up the next issue of this series, but I doubt it.