Crossgen had a smart USP - breaking out of the narrow superhero focus and drawing on popular book genres to try to bring in non-comics readers. In the end it was flawed because Alessi did it from a comics perspective. While all the material was new from a comics angle, from a genre books angle most of the material was tired, cliched and done to death, particularly the fantasy and SF stuff. Having said that, I found most of it readable and some of it - Way of the Rat, Ruse, El Cazador - really good.