What’s so Special?

So previously I posted my first foray into graphic novel review. This is my second trip. I purchased a series started by J. Michael Straczinsky, the “Rising Stars (spoilers so don’t go there unless you have read it already.)” series. The series is sold in five collections now: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The first three were written by JMS. The second two were by other authors and artists that were filling in story parts JMS skipped over in the original series. That’s not particularly unusual for JMS. He somewhat regularly bypasses talking about something big that may have happened, even though he mapped out what it was that happened. Sometimes others go back and cover that event in detail later. So the fourth and fifth books occur before or during the first three books. Anyway, on with the show. There will have to be some small spoilers to whet your appetite.

This series of course takes place in an alternate universe that diverged from ours at one point in the late 1960s when some sort of meteor or object fell from the sky onto the town of Peterson in the Midwest US and exploded. No one was killed, but all the children who were in utero, all 113 of them, eventually begin to show abilities. Slowly, as situations test them, they find each has some unique abilities. Some can fly, are very strong, very smart, can control light, move small objects with their minds, or many other things. They eventually become called “The Specials.” This of course scares authorities who want to study and control them. JMS talks about the legal battles that ensued.

But that’s where the story began. The tale begins in Volume 1 when a man is found dead in his home. He’s a portly man, and someone murdered him. The thing is, he was a Special. His ability wasn’t being strong, fast, able to fly, or any of that. He was simply invulnerable. So how does one go about murdering an invulnerable man? Well it requires intimate knowledge of the person you are trying to kill. Then the question becomes, Who with that knowledge would want to kill him? And here is a spoiler if you want to skip to the next paragraph. Honestly invulnerable was not my word and not the word I would have chosen. I would say he was impenetrable. You could shoot him with a howitzer and he wouldn’t feel it. He could swim in a blast furnace or liquid nitrogen and not feel hot or cold. In fact he couldn’t feel anything. Not even the caress of someone’s hand or the touch of their lips. How does being invulnerable sound now? One of the Specials begins an investigation of what happened. That leads to flashbacks and the unfolding of the plot of the story.

One of the things I really like about the story and the specials is that they are all just regular kids and people. They all have problems and issues. That includes some bad ones like child abuse and molestation. Real people are complicated and sometimes damaged things. Giving a random group of them superpowers can be interesting. This one will be shared with friends as well.