Fooled me twice ...

So one of the big hazards to being a comics fan is that eventually, a series will wind down and end, and it will probably do so in one of two ways:

1. Spectacularly, in such a way as to make you say, "Wow, this storyteller had it goin' on."
2. Craptacularly, in such a way as to make you say, "I cannot believe I spent months/years of my life thinking this story was going somewhere."

I just finished the final issue of J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars. Guess which number I'm going with?

(Warning: spoilers follow after the jump. If you don't want to know how the final issue ends, stop reading here.)

The 24-issues series had a nifty premise: 113 kids get cooked in the womb by an extraterrestrial flash of light, and all of them emerge with super-powers. The powers are specific; the amount of power the kids share is finite, so killing a "Special" will increase everyone else's powers a little bit. The series began with a Specials serial killer; this mystery was quickly solved so that we could move to Act II (Special V. Special! Specials V. Humanity!) and have an excuse to show women with enormous gazongas running around in low-slung pants; then we moved on to Act III -- the Specials realize they should have been working together to change the world for the better, and begin to do so. Naturally, some folks hate this idea, and obligingly provide plenty of dramatic conflict.

So the entire series is told in flashback, with foreshadowing aplenty, and you know from the get-go that only one Special survives. Coincidentally, he's the one who happens to be able to kill 'em all if he feels like it. Can you see what the central question of the series is shaping up to be? I had thought it was How did the Specials die, and what did The Poet's ability to manipulate the alien flash have to do with it? Because why else would you dwell on their deaths from issue one, if the ultimate mystery of how and why they die isn't the point?

Answer: the Specials died because they got nuked, and The Poet only happened to be hanging out with 'em at the time. And then, the Earth is cuddled in the alien energy's warm embrace and The Poet goes on to turn a bunch of green-skinned aliens into the Zorbax IV version of the Specials.

No, I'm not kidding. Twenty-four issues for this. And while the message is all well and good -- be a force for positive change, blah-blah-blah -- it's not well set-up in the series.

The thing that kills me? This is the second time in my reading history that I've felt like JMS threw a narrative swerve at me. I felt the same way when I read Midnight Nation. The man kills me: I love his set-ups, he's got a gift for foreshadowing, he's good with characterization ... but his Act III turns into vanilla pudding. Yeah, he puts the gun on the table in Act I, but he then spends Act II and Act III making you think it's a .38 ... when it turns out to be a water pistol. I don't like that.

So what would a sensible person do after noticing that they've been let down by a JMS denoument twice? Well, if you're me, you're all, "So, when is the latest issue of Supreme Power coming out? This won't happen again, will it?"

Comments

[Nicolas]

Huh. JMS did the same thing with Babylon 5, didn't he? (I'm using that example because I haven't read any of his comics). Mysteries, prophecies, Morden, Shadows, Vorlons, angels, Minbari politics, Earth politics, Centauri politics, Narn politics, Psi Corps, Walter Koenig rocking the black gloves, "There is a hole in your mind", Z'ha'dum...

...and then...

... a final showdown where the First Ones ships were nothing but cool-looking Big F***ing guns, some order vs. chaos philosophy that kind of came out of nowhere. And everybody leaves? Seriously? O... kay.

[cirocco]

Lisa, this is why I love the Rage Diaries. I'm never sure if I'm going to find pro-choice news, comic book analysis, or, most recently, awesome monkey photos.

The December 1994 issue of National Geographic has a great article called "Animals at Play"; the cover features a macaque holding a snowball. Apparently they roll snowballs all the time and enjoy carting them around, but have never been to throw one. I have a copy of the magazine but have yet to find a scan of the cover, even though with that wealth of search terms you'd really think google would turn up something; this is as close as I could come:

http://i13.ebayimg.com/02/i/03/88/91/8d_1_b.JPG

P. S. Dan from Seattlest wrote me back and I am ON BOARD! Thank you!

[Strega]

Heh. I had many problems with Rising Stars, particularly the final third. Oddly, I think the publishing delays kept me buying it, because by the time I saw a new issue I'd usually forget how much I didn't care about the last one. I don't know if it's a 3rd act problem so much as an inability to see the trees for the forest. I feel like he's racing to this preset climax and throwing away anything that might get in the way. The epic stories don't work if you don't believe the details, and in the last storyline it seemed like there was an awful lot of "Here's a villain. You've never heard of him before. Hooray, he's been defeated! Here's another villain."

I wasn't overwhelmed by Midnight Nation, but the cheese factor didn't bug me quite as much. I'm wondering if that's because it had a much smaller cast of characters. Or it could just be that I'm not that big on superhero hijinks.