If creator Chris Claremont gets his way, GeNext - Marvel's new series about the children of today's X-Men, which launched on Wednesday - is just the start of a new line of comics where we find out about the children of today's stars of four-color-page and screen. But after numerous previous attempts, is the world ready for another set of adamantium-diaper-filled comics?

Talking about the new series, Claremont explained the lure of writing a comic outside of usual continuity:

The advantage of a book like GeNext or Exiles is that I can pretty much define the realities we are playing in... my approach is not a solo-title it is a potential foundation for new line and perhaps if we are successful we can bring back GeNext for a second arc or try it out on a one-year basis or even as a potential ongoing—or even create a spin-off. It's almost like having the potential for a second line of "Ultimate-style" books.

The problem being that no-one seems to have told Chris that Marvel already has a line like that, called MC2. That decade-old line started with Spider-Girl (the daughter of Spider-Man), before expanding to include such characters as Stinger (Ant-Man's daughter), next-generation Captain America American Dream and Wild Thing, the off-spring of Wolverine and Elektra. Marvel also has Young Avengers, the teenaged non-sidekick versions of their flagship team, as well as the soon-playing-on-a-DVD-near-you Next Avengers, about the children of the original Avengers fighting robots in the future or something. And who can forget the X-Babies who were, I shit you not, pre-pubescent versions of the X-Men from the 1980s. You have to wonder exactly what's going on over at Marvel Comics to create such a variety of fruits of their characters' loins...

Chris Claremont on GeNext [Newsarama]

Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.