My diabolical friend Norm lent me a series of comics called "Rising Stars". It's created by the same guy who made Babylon 5. On the NGs, we always refer to him as JMS.

It's a fantastic series of comic books. In a nutshell, what happens is that in a small Illinois town, a flash of light occurs one evening. All the women in that town who were pregnant at the time (around 115) gave birth to children who would have super powers of various kinds.

The series goes through their lives as children and young adults and how the world deals with having super kids in their midst. In their early adulthood, some of them discover something -- the energy that gives them these power is finite and shared by all of them. When one of them dies, that energy is redistributed making the survivors more powerful. It doesn't take long for all hell to break loose then.

The series isn't done yet. Unfortunately JMS has stopped working on it for now due to some vague dispute over the script being written for a movie adaptation of the series. Which is a real shame because it is an incredibly compelling story. It would make a really good mini-series. The stories are very solid and compelling. It's not a matter of some of these guys are good guys and some are bad guys. The characters are much more complex than that, much more realistic. It reads more like a Stephen King novel than a comic book.

If JMS ever finishes the series, it's something I would highly recommend. Though for now you may want to stay back since it does suck you into it and it can get frustrating having the end of the series just out of reach.

Here are some good websites I found for it:

• http://www.jmscomics.com/rsrc/
• http://hometown.aol.com/Apocky/RISINGSTARS/index.htm
• http://risingstars.8m.com
• http://www.visi.com/~wildfoto/risingstars1.html