America’s Got Rising Stars: America’s Got Powers #1 Review

America’s Got Powers is a book that is based on a simple and brilliant idea. That idea is J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars.

Writer Jonathan Ross is a well-known BBC television host who has dabbled in writing comics (he wrote Turf for Image Comics last year), and who has gone on record for saying that he loves comics more than masturbation. Which is a bold statement; I personally buy about 30 comic books a week and spend more on them than I used to spend on my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, but compared to the Happy Slappy? A distant second, my friend… although I must admit I sometimes read my comics with my left hand so it feels like a stranger’s reading them. But I digress.

Ross is writing about American popular culture from the point of view of a European, which means that he sees us from the lowest possible common demominator view: a sporting event and television-obsessed unthinking angry mob, who would not only happily watch and / or attend an event where people are beaten to unholy and crippled pulps, but would bring their children and buy them cheap plastic souveniers of the savagery. Note that I am not saying that Ross is wrong about us. However, it is a little insulting to hear that kind of broad generalization from a lime-sucking buck-toothed rampant practitioner of pubic school buggery. But I’m getting off point again.

The concept behind America’s Got Powers is simple: some people in America have been given superpowers, and a reality TV show has been created to allow them to compete to become members of Power Generation, which is what the Justice League would be called if they were named by a soulless American marketing drone… or at least an Englishman’s idea of what a soulless American marketing drone is. A real soulless American marketing drone would call the team Opportunistic Synergy or Segment Paradigm or Branded Leadership – whichever they think they could shoehorn more “X-treme”‘s into. But I keep getting distracted here.

On one hand, this is a simple, yet brilliant, Small Idea comic that is easy to hook into and, frankly, pretty much exactly what we would do in this country if we had people wandering around with superpowers. Let’s face reality: George Zimmerman walked around thinking he was Batman and we (eventually) arrested his dumb ass… while The Situation? Yeah, we’re making that retard a superhero. Of course the first thing someone would do if there were superpowers would be to monetize it; we monetized Susan Boyle, for Christ’s sake. Wait: that was the British. But let’s stick with the point here.

The point is, if you’re going to have a story about a bunch of people who unexpectedly wind up with superpowers, you need to have an origin story. And this comic book has a great one. Which is to be expected when it is the origin story from JMS’s classic Rising Stars.

Seriously: the story behind how these people got their superpowers is taken almost whole cloth from Rising Stars. A charitable person would say that there were parallels between the stories. I, however, am not charitable; it is one thing to say that you are moving in the same direction as another man, but it is quite another when you are using that statement to mask that you are fucking that other man in the ass.

Both books start with an alien intervention in a city that causes all women pregnant at the time to give birth to children with superpowers. Both books specifically state that all the children have different superpowers, and both books include a single child who apparently has no powers, but winds up actually being the most powerful of all the (“Stoners” here, “Specials” in Rising Stars). The “Stoners” even identify themselves by wearing star logos, fer Chrissake. The parallels between the two books are beyond distracting; it almost utterly torpedoed me from the book. The “inspiration” was so out-front that it was obvious that “zero-powered” Tommy Watts would wind up being the most powerful Stoner, making the seven-page sequence revealing his power wind up having as much suspense as what’s gonna happen to the cable guy in a porno flick.

Bryan Hitch’s art is, as it always is, damn close to photorealistic, with incredibly detailed figures, backgrounds and depictions of violence. This is a comic book where the conceit is that superpowered people are fighting damn near to the death in an arena filled with giant fucking robots, and you don’t doubt a single panel of it. The only downsides – and they are only downsides considering Ross’s use of Rising Stars’s origin plot made me, amazingly, start looking for stuff to bitch about – are Hitch’s facial expressions. Which are, as they have always been, excellent… but we have two characters here who look like David Tennant and Sarah Palin. And make no mistake, they are extremely well-depicted and drawn, but seeing those kind of photo-referenced images, while obviously meant to be a visual shorthand for what their characters are supposed to be (The one man looking out for the Stoners and a corrupt, venial politician, respectively), the on-the-nose visual depictions are, while beautifully done, ultimately distracting.

The concept of using superheroes in a reality show is a simple concept that can be turned into a decent comic book, and to be fair, it is probably too early to say that America’s Got Powers isn’t going to wind up being a decent comic book. But when it comes to this first issue, what we have is what feels like a straight rip from one of the best miniseries of the past 20 years, which ultimately seriously diminishes the impact of a book designed to shine a light on the base nature of American popular culture. By parodying an American TV show. Adapted from a show called Britain’s Got Talent.