"6. Which project do you feel didn't live up to what you envisioned?
Rising Stars"
*Jaw drops to floor*
OK... what did you envision, then??????


Me as a better writer. I think the series starts off really well, but
right around the middle act I made a hideous error: I was afraid that
the book was getting kind of slow, that there wasn't enough happening,
so I diverged from what I'd set out as my outline to do a prolonged
action thread with Critial Maas...and I totally lost control of the
story, in my opinion. It just got away from me and, where the first
part had been very unconventional, the action aspect of it suddenly
made it far more ordinary, and there was no way to get out of that
story once I'd started it for maybe another four issues...so the book
starts where it was meant to start, ends where it was meant to end, but
the middle section isn't what it could have been.

Nobody to blame here but myself. I'd never written more than a couple
of stand-alone comics before jumping into the Rising Stars arc -- 24
issues covering 60 years and 113 people -- and it just got away from
me.

And while the story in the beginning was what I wanted, the art was
not, and I think that hurt the book going in.

But the largest part of my dissatisfaction with the book rests with
myself. It actually spooked me away from doing more Really Big Stories
in comics until...well, until just recently, when I started a huge
action arc in Spidey (which won't be showing up for a bit yet). I
didn't want to do it again until I was sure I could do it right.

There's a lot of positive reaction to the Rising Stars mini, and
there's parts of it I like quite a bit, but I also know what it was
supposed to be in the middle, what it *should* have been if I'd had
more experience and a broader skill-set and more tools in my tool
box...but I didn't, and there we are.

jms