Rating: 
Summary: Icould relate
Review: If you're a reclusive, brooding, self-absorbed, anti-social individual like myself, you'll be able to relate to this book and the main character. Even if your normal, the action and other aspects should at least keep your attention.
Rating: 
Summary: Incredible 1st Half, Weak Payoff in 2nd Half.
Review: J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame turns his epic storytelling to the comics page. In Rising Stars, he's laid the groundwork for an enormous story, one with a definite beginning, middle, and end, that will take years to tell (like Babylon 5). And he gets off to an amazing start.The first four issues in this 8-issue collection tell the story of a strange force which strikes the town of Pederson, Illinois. The force affects only the 113 in utero babies at the time of impact; all 113 are born with superhuman powers. The story is told by Poet, one of the 113, and he tells it from 60 years or more after the force struck. The story is told in an elaborate and fascinating flashback structure; and through it we meet many members of the enormous cast, and also learn that one of them began murdering the others. Issues 5-8 are a letdown from this incredible setup. Instead of continuing as an inventive superhero murder mystery, it devolves into a generic superhero punch-'em-up. We learn who the killer is in book 5 (WAY too early to be giving out that information), battle lines are drawn, sides are chosen, and shots start getting fired. Even more cliched are the shadowy government conspiracy figures who keep dropping in and out of the narrative. And, worst of all, the Bible-thumping televangelist is cast as the slimy evil manipulating vermin. I have no love for televangelists, that's for sure, but to make the televangelist the villain? It's SO easy. It's SO obvious. Straczynski can do better. Now, it's probably too early to be doubting Straczynski's storytelling skills. Babylon 5 only got better year after year, after all. And 8 issues is VERY early into the proposed run of Rising Stars. Which is why I will be sure to pick up Vol. 2, whenever it comes out. If it weren't Straczynski, and if he hadn't created such a fascinating world in the first 4 issues, I wouldn't be saying that. But I trust Straczynski to climb out of the rut he dug himself into in books 5-8. A note about the artwork: generic Todd MacFarlane/Image comics school of art. Totally lacking in distinction, but it gets the job done. 5 stars for the 1st half. 2 1/2 stars for the second half.
Rating:
Summary: Cliche? i didn't think so
Review: Maybe i'm not as picky as some of the readers here, but i gave up reading comics a long time ago because they lacked both realism and depth. In the last decade, i've only picked up a few graphic novels, all of them the usual suspects (V for Vendetta, Dark Night Returns, Watchmen, Kingdom Come, Sandman, Ronin, etc.). So i think i'm picky. And i really like this. Enough to read it in one sitting and then rush out to buy the three other graphic novels i found by JMS. 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
Rating: 
Summary: Rising Stars
Review: Story is pretty amazing, JMS' reputation is upheld, very impressed by this variation on super-hero books.
What happens is 113 kids or born with special powers, they're feared and monitored by the US government, and the worst comes to happen when they are falsely believed to plot to overthrow the government.. this is a quick summary but there's a lot more that goes into it
The art is pretty even for a couple of different artists working on the series.. nothing stellar though, the main constant is JMS
I gotta voice a little complaint that the characters were not differentiated enough and there's a bunch of em to keep track of
Rating:
Summary: Weak for JMS
Review: Straczynski is obviously capable of very powerful, insightful storytelling--just watch seasons 2-4 of Babylon 5. He's really off his game here, though. He starts creating an interesting tale in the vein of Watchmen, but without anything near the density and depth of that series/graphic novel. Here in Rising Stars the narrative is poorly paced overall and suffers from a number of other flaws: * 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.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: Think of XMen, then add a writer who is GREAT! Each of the characters has depth and seems like a real person (unlike other comic book heros who are 'A' typical ect.) and their are a tons of different story lines running congruently that add a whole extra level of depth to the book.
I like XMen, and I apologize to Hardcore XMen fans, but I think XMen has met it's match, and that's J. Michael Straczynski. (Good thing he freelances for Marvel, LOL!)
Rating:
Summary: Embodies what comics are all about !
Review: This is, by far, one of the greatest comics I've ever read. A great story line, well developed characters, fantastic artwork, and JMS's engrossing writing makes Rising Stars a true classic. The story is written with such authenticity and emotional depth you are drawn into the world of "The Specials". It's a real thinking persons comic (but don't think it's all dialogue...there are great battles and superhero action sequences in every issue !). I think JMS did a great job in portraying what would happen if ordinary people were given great powers. Who would use it for Evil? Who would use it for Good? Would the world embrace these "Specials" or fear them? JMS lays out a world where all these ideas are explored. Rising Stars is a comic that exemplifies all the qualities of great comics. Highly recommended ! Also recommended: Anything by J. Michael Straczynski,
Kingdom Come by Alex Ross, Star Wars Tales TBP Vols 1 & 2, Sojourn by Crossgen comics
Rating: 
Summary: Stick with the graphic novel
Review: When I saw this book, I thought perhaps this was an original novel set in Straczynski's "Rising Stars" universe, not unlike the "Bright" miniseries Fiona Avery is writing. I was surprised when I realized it was, in fact, a novelization of the first "Rising Stars" story arc, but I decided to give it a try. Comic novelizations aren't that common, but they can be done well, as Greg Rucka's "Batman: No Man's Land" and Elliot S. Maggin's "Kingdom Come" can both attest. I wish I'd let those works stand alone as my examples of this art form, because both as a novel and as a novelization, this falls very flat. The book is, in many parts, a scene-for-scene retelling of the comic book, which is not what you want in a novelization to begin with. There's nothing new here, nothing to enhance the story, nothing to make you feel like you've read something you haven't read before. Furthermore, segments that worked in the comic don't always work in the novel -- the chapter with a one of the Specials describing her life to a mundane over dinner was fantastic in the comic book, but tedious and unnecessary in the novel. The way it is constructed is very poor as well -- the decision to write this book from John "Poet" Simon's first-person narration is a terrible one. The author keeps lapsing into interior thoughts of characters that the narrator couldn't possibly know, showing scenes that he wasn't present for and could never have assembled this much information on -- and it gets worse when he tries to pass it off. At one point he tells us (after the fact) that the narrator later viewed the scene on a surveillance tape, at another point we're reading another character's (immaculately detailed) diary. At one particularly frustrating point, the author just admits he's writing pure speculation -- "And Lee probably said something like..." It was really weak and really distracting. I can't quite figure out who the target audience for this book is. It can't be fans of the comic book, because the comic book is far too good and this book adds nothing to it. I can't be people who haven't read the comic, because it isn't written in a fashion that will entice any of them. All I know is, whoever the target audience is, it's not me.
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