Wednesday Wes Rant! (all new!)

My name is Wes, and Patrick has been nice enough to loan me space on his soapbox of geekdom to blog once a week. I have a reputation for being a crotchety old man when it comes to what I think is geeky and not geeky, although I myself feel I'm more a purist in the face of the ever growing trend of making everything and everyone "geeky". Which brings me to the subject of this and future articles I'd like to write for geek-tastic; What you are watching and enjoying and what you should be READING. For me it's all about the comic books. As awesome as these Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows that have been recently blowing us all away are, making us all "geeks", it all comes back to the books.

 

For my maiden voyage I chose Heroes.

 



 

I'm going to assume everyone here is already watching Heroes so we can take that "as read". Have you read "Rising Stars" by J. Michael Straczynski?

 



 

If you haven't I think you should, I mean, if you like Heroes. I LOVE Heroes, but the one thing that plagued me through the entire first season was how much it just FELT like I was reading Rising Stars again.

 

I was lucky enough to read Rising Stars when it was discovered amongst the collection of comic books owned by my previous landlord. Will, my aforementioned landlord and fellow geek, turned me onto many many more comics than he will ever know. If I'm correct my Hetero Life Mate Matthew pulled it from his collection and thrust it into chest demanding that I read it. He's always correct about these things, and the odds double if it's something that is thrust into your chest.

 

Boy howdy was he right.

 

All the characters from Heroes are in this book. All the awkward attempts by the characters to meld into society with their unique abilities are in this book. The book has the same feel of flash-backing and going to the light and dark side of the issues being faced. Even some of the characters are similar, eerily similar.

 

Check out the Wikipedia article about Rising Stars and see if that grabs you (the part at the bottom that says Sam Raimi has expressed interest in making Rising Stars into a series grabbed me). You can get the compendium for less than 40$ on Amazon.com and I'm sure individual trades for much less than that. The Amazon.com synopsis made me laugh though, if only for this line:

 

"Launched in 1999, Rising Stars is about a group of people who are born with special abilities after a mysterious light appears in the sky. Parallels have been drawn between this series and The 4400 TV series on USA Network and Heroes on NBC."