Rising Stars Volume 1: Born in Fire [Paperback]

And now, we have "Rising Stars" which raises the bar for social interaction and commentary on the nature of man.

While "Rising Stars" is indeed a superhero series, the most important aspect is not the heroes - it's the conflict of ideals between the Specials and the human race. Given the amount of racial tension present in human history, "Rising Stars" poses an excellent question: "How would humanity react to the sudden emergence of 113 superpowered beings?"

i'm not a JMS fan. Never saw Babylon 5. i only picked this up because of the recommendations here. i'm really happy i did. Others have described the story so i'll just mention the tone. It's another adult-type comic where the good guys have insecurities and the world at large doesn't worship them. Many of these people with superpowers can't get decent jobs and die as lonley, TV-dinner eating janitors. Some have bad tempers, some are wimps, many are child bullies, a few are primo donnas, all pretty standard human stuff. Think Watchmen. It's the kind of environment (real world) that i know others claim is overdone in comics but i don't think it's done nearly enough.

So it breaks with the cliches of most comics in that there aren't clear good guys and bad guys, where human motivation plays a big role and where the public is more scared than thankful. Others here have said the book is cliche, derivative and poorly paced. Maybe i'm just not smart enough to notice, but i thought it was done wonderfully and uniquely. The only really, really horrible reversion to standard comic book style is at the very end of the second volume (Power). And that volume is pretty good. But this volume is, in my opinion, the strongest of the three

* It's sometimes hard to tell which characters are which at first. (And why does Flagg/Patriot have black hair in the first issue and blond hair later? That doesn't help matters.)

* It's hard to get a read on what the various characters are all about. Give us more characterization, more motivation, more reason to give a darn about them. That's especially true of the lead protagonist, who's very bland and unsympathetic. It's hard to care about a conflict unless you first care about the people involved in it--that's Writing 101 stuff, very surprisingly neglected here, given the way JMS handled the Narn-Centauri conflict in Babylon 5.

* SPOILER! The scenes where the killer reveals himself to Joshua and his father and where they create a conspiracy through the government are just horribly paced, seemingly thrown together in a heartbeat with no decent setup or sense of drama. You're left to guess at any deeper motivations, and not in the good sense of being left wondering in anticipation, but rather just wondering why the author painted everything in such broad, clumsy strokes.

* As others have noted, the second half of the book devolves into very juvenile, cliched superheroics. The author is capable of way more than that, and so are comics (see Watchmen again, for a classic example). Please, no kids' stuff, JMS!

Hopefully the storytelling will gain refinement, depth, and better pacing in the later issues, but I'm not even sure if I'll give them a try now.

As for the art, it's all over the map technically and stylistically, thanks to an army of different pencillers, inkers, and colorists. It starts fine and mostly keeps going downhill, with the last few issues pretty pedestrian, if not weak.

The real problem is that no matter how nice some individual images look, the visual storytelling falls flat almost everywhere--just one jumbled, cluttered, hyper-dense page after another. Check out David Lloyd's work on V for Vendetta to see a master of pacing, grace, and restraint at work.

This series has some potential, but it really doesn't capitalize on it in this volume.