I am not ashamed to admit that by the time I reached the last page, I was weaping, a little.
There are authors who use darkness, depravity, and horror to inspire readers to something better, and there are those who use wonder and amazement to do the exact same thing. Warren Ellis can do both, though he's heavier on the horror. Joe does them both, too, but his stories are never short of wonder.
Rising Stars began six years ago, all but out of the blue. Joe had written a few successful Babylon 5 comics, and they were good. They had his creativity, his humour, and they genuinely added something to the enjoyment of B5, his great "novel for television." When he started writing under his own label, "Joe's Comics," I was first in line. I still remember reading the first few pages near the stairs on the second floor of the Comicshop in Vancouver, marveling at it. I could tell, immediately, that this was a kind of comicbook I hadn't read in a long time.
I had read good books by then. My friend Jay practically forced a copy of Watchmen into my hands, for which I will always be grateful. Peter David's Supergirl was a shockingly good read, and was still going at the time. Kingdom Come, Golden Age, Mark Waid's Flash, good books, all. Only Watchmen was in the same category of storytelling as Rising Stars, and though Joe took some time to get used to the unique writing demands of comics while Alan Moore is truly the Grand Master of the medium, at least in English, I knew that this book was something to remember, an experience that I would treasure. A story that would take me from awesome to the awful, and would leave me unsure of which was which.
Joe joined the ranks of writers like Moore, Gaiman, Ellis, Ennis, David, and others who, instead of feeling trapped by superheroes, use them for all that they're worth, take the tools of propaganda and power and turn them back at those in power. Unlike a lot of people, I like my heroes to be nice and political, to actually say something from inside the cacophonous emptiness of the mainstream. Instead of striving to say nothing, and ironically acting as the perfect mouth pieces for the status quo, Joe's comics, like Moore's and Ellis' and Gaiman's, speak their messages in clear voices, and become all at once more useful to the mass of readers and more personal to their creators.
Tonight, I have had, reading the end of Rising Stars, a moment of joy so pure that the critic in me is laughing while tears run down his face. He doesn't care about analysing for now. Neither do I.
Thank you, Joe.
Posted by orion at March 3, 2005 9:27 PM