Rising Stars
Apr. 16th, 2008 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficMan, this is hard to review. It takes a lot of familiar premises and tries to do something new with them, and in some ways even succeeds, but then there's... a lotta hippie crap. Really, that's the only way to say it. Every time things start to get interesting, it gets doused with some hippie crap. I think it could've used a nice editor, really.
After a bright flash in the sky in a small town, all the children who were in utero at the time are born with superpowers. 113 total. They grow up under government supervision -- although in an inappropriately hilarious way, when dealing with a group of superpowered children who are to be treated as WMDs waiting to happen, apparently the employee screening process doesn't get child molestors -- and some of them become superheroes, some supervillains, and the rest become your average mutant.
Then, much like Watchmen, one of the Specials starts killing the others. As I read this, I was disappointed that the villain didn't get much development, and even after a certain reveal I thought the whole thing could've been dwelled on a bit more. But that only makes up the first two arcs of the story.
The problem is that I never really tracked the characters from children to adults, so all the character development seems stilted. Perhaps this is because of the large cast of characters, with new ones getting called up whenever necessary, but I just didn't care much about everyone's issues and foibles and unresolved sexual tension. The plot moves along so fast, with so little build-up, that there's no time to really get to know anyone beyond a vague "Hi, my name is ____ and I _____." I feel like more leisurely storytelling in the "prologue" would've made everything resonate a lot more.
Another problem is the art. Never have I seen a worse fit for 90s/Image art. The fact is that on the comics page, those corny-looking superhero costumes really do help readers differenciate the characters. Here, only a few Specials wear costumes, so it gets hard to tell one dark-haired man in a trenchcoat from another. Beyond that, the art is often muddled and confusing. At one point, a religious zealot turns out to be a transsexual (I'll give them points for at least trying to avoid the closeted homophobe cliche, but it still amounts to the same thing) but the art just makes him look like he had a secret dream to open for Sigmund and Roy in Vegas.
Where the story really lost me is the hippie crap. By the third act, the plot embraces all those cryptofascist subtexts people keep seeing in superhero comics and... it works out great. It's like someone reimagined Watchmen as the feel-good hit of the year. One Special forces nuclear disarmament and it works out pretty good, all told. Another runs for President and forces bipartisan support by blackmail, which is okay because the ends justify the means. There never seem to be any consequences for this, except that the Republicans get angry.
Perhaps I'm cynical, but my version of that story ends/begins with the nigh-omnipotent superhero deciding that humanity, in its present form, is untenable and that the best thing for the world is for it to be reduced to an agrarian state. Cue the whole-sale destruction of every city on Earth... maybe in a couple hundred years, when the ozone layer has repaired itself, he'll let us work our way back up to steam power. Maybe.
Hey, man, what if that ended up with steampunk versus Superman? Sweet.
And oh, lordy lordy, the Republicans. Up to this point Rising Stars has had a typical liberal bias... but by the third act, it goes into overdrive. The Specials can do no wrong, and they get lots of author filibusters to prove it (in addition, all the supervillains that have survived have turned to the Light Side by now), and the Republicans can do no right. People stop talking and start speechifying. It annoyed me in Grant Morrison's Animal Man (although what annoyed me more was the smug, self-satisfied lampshade hanging) and it annoys me here.
It's like a review I read of the Left Behind series that mentioned how, since the Rapture had blipped out all unborn fetuses, abortionists were now despairing that no one would need abortions anymore. It's basically the exact inverse of that. I half-expected it to turn out that the Specials' Kryptonite was puppy tears, so an evil white old guy orders some soldiers outside to kick puppies.
My dirty little secret is that every time I watch the first X-Men movie, I can't help but think that Senator Kelly has a point and the movie cops-out by making him a racist. When he makes an entirely apt comparison between mutant powers and handguns, I think the X-Men's stated goal of having the mutants police themselves is... well, who watches the watchmen?
Here, once more, the Muggles' position gets softpedaled as fearmongering, completely ignoring the fact that there's actually something to be afraid of! I like the "mutants as minorities" metaphor as much as anyone, but it completely falls apart when you realize that people aren't afraid of gay people because John Barrowman can grow fifty feet tall and blow your house apart.
::adding a rantage tag because this has become less a review and more a reviewer filibuster::
It's depressingly true, but as much as we may wonder "hey, why haven't Reed Richards and Captain America and all the rest created utopia yet?", the reason is very simple... it's boring as hell, man. It's as deeply boring as listening to a stoned out college student tell you about how, man, if, like, the government would only, dude, only stop funding the military for one year, like you see?, and then put that money in legalizing hemp, dude, are you with me, and then stop the gas companies from keeping down that water that runs on cars, I mean...
Shit.
After a bright flash in the sky in a small town, all the children who were in utero at the time are born with superpowers. 113 total. They grow up under government supervision -- although in an inappropriately hilarious way, when dealing with a group of superpowered children who are to be treated as WMDs waiting to happen, apparently the employee screening process doesn't get child molestors -- and some of them become superheroes, some supervillains, and the rest become your average mutant.
Then, much like Watchmen, one of the Specials starts killing the others. As I read this, I was disappointed that the villain didn't get much development, and even after a certain reveal I thought the whole thing could've been dwelled on a bit more. But that only makes up the first two arcs of the story.
The problem is that I never really tracked the characters from children to adults, so all the character development seems stilted. Perhaps this is because of the large cast of characters, with new ones getting called up whenever necessary, but I just didn't care much about everyone's issues and foibles and unresolved sexual tension. The plot moves along so fast, with so little build-up, that there's no time to really get to know anyone beyond a vague "Hi, my name is ____ and I _____." I feel like more leisurely storytelling in the "prologue" would've made everything resonate a lot more.
Another problem is the art. Never have I seen a worse fit for 90s/Image art. The fact is that on the comics page, those corny-looking superhero costumes really do help readers differenciate the characters. Here, only a few Specials wear costumes, so it gets hard to tell one dark-haired man in a trenchcoat from another. Beyond that, the art is often muddled and confusing. At one point, a religious zealot turns out to be a transsexual (I'll give them points for at least trying to avoid the closeted homophobe cliche, but it still amounts to the same thing) but the art just makes him look like he had a secret dream to open for Sigmund and Roy in Vegas.
Where the story really lost me is the hippie crap. By the third act, the plot embraces all those cryptofascist subtexts people keep seeing in superhero comics and... it works out great. It's like someone reimagined Watchmen as the feel-good hit of the year. One Special forces nuclear disarmament and it works out pretty good, all told. Another runs for President and forces bipartisan support by blackmail, which is okay because the ends justify the means. There never seem to be any consequences for this, except that the Republicans get angry.
Perhaps I'm cynical, but my version of that story ends/begins with the nigh-omnipotent superhero deciding that humanity, in its present form, is untenable and that the best thing for the world is for it to be reduced to an agrarian state. Cue the whole-sale destruction of every city on Earth... maybe in a couple hundred years, when the ozone layer has repaired itself, he'll let us work our way back up to steam power. Maybe.
Hey, man, what if that ended up with steampunk versus Superman? Sweet.
And oh, lordy lordy, the Republicans. Up to this point Rising Stars has had a typical liberal bias... but by the third act, it goes into overdrive. The Specials can do no wrong, and they get lots of author filibusters to prove it (in addition, all the supervillains that have survived have turned to the Light Side by now), and the Republicans can do no right. People stop talking and start speechifying. It annoyed me in Grant Morrison's Animal Man (although what annoyed me more was the smug, self-satisfied lampshade hanging) and it annoys me here.
It's like a review I read of the Left Behind series that mentioned how, since the Rapture had blipped out all unborn fetuses, abortionists were now despairing that no one would need abortions anymore. It's basically the exact inverse of that. I half-expected it to turn out that the Specials' Kryptonite was puppy tears, so an evil white old guy orders some soldiers outside to kick puppies.
My dirty little secret is that every time I watch the first X-Men movie, I can't help but think that Senator Kelly has a point and the movie cops-out by making him a racist. When he makes an entirely apt comparison between mutant powers and handguns, I think the X-Men's stated goal of having the mutants police themselves is... well, who watches the watchmen?
Here, once more, the Muggles' position gets softpedaled as fearmongering, completely ignoring the fact that there's actually something to be afraid of! I like the "mutants as minorities" metaphor as much as anyone, but it completely falls apart when you realize that people aren't afraid of gay people because John Barrowman can grow fifty feet tall and blow your house apart.
::adding a rantage tag because this has become less a review and more a reviewer filibuster::
It's depressingly true, but as much as we may wonder "hey, why haven't Reed Richards and Captain America and all the rest created utopia yet?", the reason is very simple... it's boring as hell, man. It's as deeply boring as listening to a stoned out college student tell you about how, man, if, like, the government would only, dude, only stop funding the military for one year, like you see?, and then put that money in legalizing hemp, dude, are you with me, and then stop the gas companies from keeping down that water that runs on cars, I mean...
Shit.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-16 08:15 pm (UTC)And the difficulty in telling characters apart can be a real problem. It's one that can plague even very well drawn comics (Strangers in Paradise, for instance--occasionally even there I'm uncertain which character I'm looking at sometimes.) Those superhero union suits work like flags--they distinguish THIS guy from THAT guy the moment they appear on the horizon.
And "People are afraid of gays because John Barrowman can grow fifty feet tall and blow your house apart" is right on. Yeah, I'm sure that if Scott Summers' glasses slipped and he blew a hole through my house he'd be really sorry about it. But I'd still have a big honking hole in my house. Throw in the risks whenever superpowered types fight--which they do at the drop of a hat--or when someone's powers first appear and they have NO control whatsoever and, yeah, there's good reason to fear some mutants.
Teenage gangs and criminals are trouble enough when they don't have superhuman strength and can't fly or shoot lasers from their eyes and so forth.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-17 02:09 am (UTC)Later after he beats the rap, he's recruited by a bunch of people who have been scarred, crippled, and so on in the crossfire of superhuman battles, who decide to fund him in a war to wipe out all the supers, good and evil alike.
And these people are portrayed as an Evil Council. In fact, their ugliness is used to help convey that extra villainous flair, despite the fact that the ugliness was caused by superheroes. In fact, they're so evil that Frank decides to kill them all, too, to get them out of the way.
It was a great chance to explore the consequences of a world of superheroes where collateral damage is ignored unless it's a Very Important Issue without turning it into "Ruins", but it was skipped over in favor of "Frank Castle is a crazy murderer unreasonably obsessing over the death of his wife and small child". Again.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-17 04:53 am (UTC)