Within recents months it has been established that the civilian code-named "Jen-Active" has had contact with numerous individuals at the LaJolla based Wildstorm Productions facility. It has also been established that both Wildstorm Productions and "Jen-Active" have covert agendas that undermine the sanctity and integrity of national security. As such, communications between the two entities is closely monitored. The following transmission between "JenActive" and "writer" Michael Heisler was intercepted and uploaded 08.23.99 at 012:42:01 EST.

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JA: With things wrapping up with DV8 do you have any little nuggets of knowledge you'd like to share with the rest of the class? You know, plot lines that never happened, who their parents are, stuff you weren't allowed to do...

MH: Wow! That's a pretty loaded question. Well, first of all, the very first plotline that never happened would have been back when I took over the book. Issue #9 took shape exactly as I planned, but what I had in mind for that story arc was the complete disappearance of Ivana. She wouldn't have been seen for several issues, and the team itself would have been split up (as they were at the end of #9), with each group thinking the other was lost or killed. In contrast to the first eight issues, which showed us the Deviants living in the penthouse and not wanting for anything, we would have seen them living in the streets and just getting by -- real hard-boiled stuff, eating out of dumpsters, robbing and looting, that kind of thing, not the "aren't we lucky to have landed face up in this convenient beach house" scenario that GEN13 had. BUT...when the "New Horizons" program at Wildstorm was conceived, there was a decision made that each book already ongoing needed a specific relaunching point. With DV8, we decided to bring Ivana back to I.O. so that she could be more involved in various other activities within the Wildstorm Universe. At that point, I had to decide whether or not to bring the kids with her. I didn't want to do yet another Hunted-By-I.O. title, so I decided to flip the original premise on its head again, and make them the spoiled, anti-social superbrats that ALSO happened to be untouchable government agents. So the original idea for #10 was thrown out the window almost immediately.

Having the kids as I.O. agents definitely wouldn't have been my first choice otherwise. But I've been a longtime James Bond fan, as well as a follower of the old MASTER OF KUNG FU series from Marvel, which, despite its ludicrous title, was concerned with a lot of the same character issues as DV8, while mixing in goofy superspy action. I thought it was worth a shot. The three-part Arthrax story was my sort of homage to a couple of my favorite MOKF story arcs, though it came nowhere near in terms of quality. Quality of WRITING, that is -- Al and Trevor knocked themselves out on it.

Let's see...my original structure for Slipstream was considerably different. I wanted to start off in GEN13 BOOTLEG, with a story that would have co-starred Fairchild and Sublime. They would both have been searching for the orb for different reasons, and they both would have stumbled over the same clues -- at which point the Gnome would have sensed their interference and changed their histories, much as he did in the story that saw print. But BOOTLEG was killed before I had a chance.

The very NEXT story arc would have featured Trance, and his seduction of Sublime. In fact, as originally written, the guy that Sublime meets in the department store in #29 was supposed to be Trance. After escaping from his clutches, the team (or what was left of it at that point) would have run head-on into Threshold. Around and during all of this, we would have seen the team separated from I.O., and finally forced into living in the streets, eating from dumpsters, etc. Apparently that is a story I am fated never to tell. :)

Oh, and Powerhaus was going to be brought back from the dead -- literally. A lot of people just assumed we'd see a new clone. But Ivana's take on the whole situation would have been that she had nothing to lose by experimenting with his corpse, since she could recreate him at any time anyway. We would have seen that his body -- which was always absorbing either (in the old days) kinetic energy or (in the Ellis days) emotional energy -- had become a sort of storage battery for life energy. He would have come back as a Zombie!

As for their parents, there was a bunch of stuff that I'd worked out. But bear in mind that since none of this will ever appear in the book (though some of it has been hinted at), it's all basically my opinion, not "fact". It's valid until something happens in the books to invalidate it -- as long as the info appears in a STORY, that is. I posted this on Crawlspace a few weeks ago, and one of the forum members there responded that I'd contradicted some information that appeared in a letter column. Not so. If it ain't in the stories, it ain't a fact, and that goes for "sourcebooks" as well as letter columns...as well as the following:

Frostbite is the son of James and Eunice Carver. James Carver was an unwitting pawn of an I.O. experiment designed to "seed" various members of the populace with Gen-Factor. Shortly after Frostbite's birth, James Carver was poisoned and killed by I.O. operatives so that the changes to his cellular structure would never be detected. When Frostbite came of age, he was harvested by Ivana. Even after learning what Ivana was all about, he allowed his mother to believe that he was part of a military reserve program.

>CLASSIFIED INFORMATION BEING DIVULGED<
>TRACE PROGRAM INITIATED<

Sublime is the daughter of Deathblow and an I.O. agent recuited specifically to seduce Deathblow and bear his child. Shortly after Sublime's birth, her mother was "eliminated" by I.O. and Sublime was turned over to an adoption agency. Her foster parents never told her that she was adopted, and Deathblow never learned of her existence. Sublime's last contact with her wealthy foster parents was to tell them that she didn't want any more contact.

Evo's parents were similar subjects of the same experiment as James Carver, but both were killed in an accident completely unrelated to I.O. Although constantly supervised from afar by I.O., Evo was bounced around between various foster homes and juvenile detention centers for his whole life, until being selected by Ivana.

Copycat, picked from a foster home, is part of an I.O. experiment with children. The Gen-Factor was introduced to her at around the age of 10, at which time she was also subjected to boosters in order to jump-start her abilities before she reached puberty. As a result of this, she developed unusually large breasts for a girl her age (okay, so I just threw that in at the last second). She didn't respond well, and required constant medical supervision. Like Threshold and Bliss, she was part of the Gen13 Project before the project was officially started.

Powerhaus was a "test-tube" baby, another Gen-Factor experiment, who was placed with two I.O. operatives in Argentina. He'd known that he was adopted, but was fed a cover story to lead him to believe that he had had real parents. The Powerhaus we know was the first and only Morales clone. So far.

>TRACE COMPLETED<
>TACTICAL UNITS DEPLOYED<

Freestyle was part of the same experiment as Copycat (this is the REAL reason why their powers cancel each other out), but being part of a large family rather than an orphan, she was left to develop at a more normal rate on her own. Her parents think she's joined an international gymnastics program.

Threshold and Bliss are the children of Stephen and Rachel Callahan. Stephen is a former Team 7 member. As shown in the third TEAM 7 miniseries, his first wife is the mother of Gen13's Rainmaker, making Rainmaker the oldest among the Gen13ers and the Deviants.

JA: Whoa! That's a whole lot of intel in one dose! Do you have any ideas what's next for you or other members of the DV8 creative team?

MH: I'm co-writing THE DISAVOWED with Brandon Choi, with art by Tommy Lee Edwards, who drew the recent WILD TIMES: DEATHBLOW one-shot. It will be unlike any Wildstorm book you've read, no lie. There are some vague and tenuous connections to the Wildstorm Universe, but it stands on its own. It's a horror title, closer in tone to Vertigo stuff than anything Wildstorm has done. Hey, if DC can do a Homage title out of New York, then we should be able to do a Vertigo title out of La Jolla. It's debuting in January; Tommy's already penciled the first issue and it's being lettered by the brilliant John Workman as I write this. Well, actually, it's almost 2 in the morning as I write this, so John is probably sleeping.

Al Rio is doing EXPOSURE through Image Comics.

Trevor Scott, former inker and current penciler of DV8, is busily wrapping up the last issue. He's doing great work, and I really wish we'd been able to work together for longer. I have a couple of other proposals in mind that I'm going to pitch to various publishers, with Trevor in mind as the artist. Hopefully these will land at Wildstorm, but you never know.

I'm also getting back into lettering, both by hand and by computer, which I haven't done on a regular basis for a long time and which I really miss doing. There is something to be said for work that you can do in your sleep.

JA: Well good luck to you all (except maybe Rio). Here's a question I've wondered about for a while: Why the @$&*%$ didn't Gen13 and DV8 actually ever fight each other - did the brass have some unspoken decree that it should never happen or what? It seems like a natural...

MH: John Arcudi and I didn't really want to do it -- we both felt like we were just re-establishing the status quo on the books after the New Horizons relaunch, and working out a crossover would have been a major headache at the time.

>ESTIMATED ARRIVAL TIME OF UNITS<
>...THREE MINUTES<

Also, personally, for me the whole "GEN13 vs. DV8" bit just didn't hold water. The Deviants aren't stupid, and it seemed there was a definite limit to the number of times they could run into the Gen kids and not realize that Ivana was lying about the whole thing. If I ever get to write a Sublime/Fairchild story, I have this scene in mind where Sublime spots and recognizes Fairchild, and immediately throws a superdense fist to knock her down. But rather than retaliating, Fairchild simply looks offended and says "what did you do THAT for?" Suddenly embarrassed, Sublime realizes that she's acted just like a character in a comic book...

JA: Um...but isn't she a character in a comic book? Anyways, it's too bad we'll never get to see it now. Here's another question I've wondered about for a while: What character(s) do you feel you most helped develop and, conversly, which characters weren't you able to develop as much as you would have liked?

MH: I think I did a good job with Frostbite and Sublime -- I think it's pretty obvious that they're my favorites. I thought the two-issue Powerhaus story went a good way toward making him a more realistic character, even if it did reveal that he had a decidedly science-fiction background. I THOUGHT I was doing a pretty good job with Evo, but just very recently it occurred to me that a cool thing to do with him would have been to turn him into a living vampire/werewolf, who needed to kill to live. Of course, that would have made him even more of an unredeemable psycho than he already is, and comics already have way too many psycho characters.

I liked Freestyle, although no one else did. :)

I shouldn't have left Copycat out of the action as long as I did. I didn't even realize it until I wrote a footnote caption in #31, which referred to her appearance in #16 -- fifteen issues ago. Note to all developing writers out there -- if it takes you fifteen issues to add to a subplot, be prepared for readers to fall asleep.

Something wild happens with Bliss in the last few issues that I think I set up pretty well, although I'm sure quite a few people will bitch about it.

Ivana I found quite boring. I couldn't see why she'd want to go back to I.O.; she seemed happier on her own. If it wasn't an editorial dictum, I wouldn't have brought her back, and if you look at the body of my work on the book, you'll see just how many times I tried to write her right out of the action.

Sideways Bob was a one-note joke that I never felt comfortable with. Warren told the joke in #7, and then it didn't seem like there was anywhere else to take him. I think he COULD have been a great supporting character for the original "life on the streets" idea, but he never seemed to fit in at I.O.

>TARGET TERMINATED<
>SECURITY THREAT ELIMINATED<

JA: Yeah, I could tell that you never liked Ivana, you pig! She's kewl. What exactally did you have against her?

MH: ...

JA: Uh - Hello? Are you still there?

MH: ...

JA: Uh - Is everything okay on your end Mike?

>CLEAN-UP COMPLETED<
>UNITS RETURNING TO BASE<

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