The anthology is a staple of the small press, and Don and I have covered quite a few of them in our reviewing careers. To be honest, a lot of them blur together, a similar melange of super-hero pastiche, Twilight Zone-ish twist endings and creators who are almost but not quite ready for prime time. My only comics work has been in the anthology short story format, so I know how hard it is to work in this format and do something interesting. Unfortunately, while I sympathize with the difficult task in front of the Shooting Star creators, that doesn't mean I can just set my critical faculties aside, and my honest reaction to Shooting Star is that it is well-intentioned but not all that engaging, falling into the trap of being just another small press anthology.
The editors of Shooting Star are smart, though, in opening and closing the book with their strongest stories. "38 Days" by Sean Taylor and J.P. Dupras is a story that reads not unlike an Astro City tale, about a super-criminal who breaks out 38 days before his release to chase down some mysterious goal. It's not a completely unpredictable ending, nor a story structure I've never seen before, but Taylor makes Strongarm, his lead, sympathetic, and Dupras's artwork is very effective, with a sort of sketchy stylized background style that I quite liked. Of all the creators in this book, these are the two guys who look like they could become polished mainstream creators.
The story that closes the volume actually enjoys the work of a mainstream creator, Tim Truman, and though his work here isn't as strong as the work I've seen from him on prior projects, certainly his strong storytelling and attention to detail is a welcome addition to the anthology. J. Morgan Neal crafts an intriguing protagonist with a good backstory in this tale, almost pushing too much information into the short story but ultimately serving up what is a pretty good foundation for future western tales of his character. Scott McCullar also provides an interesting story of legacies and pulp-age heroes that would probably resonate with fans of JSA and which scores well on both writing and art, but which commits the sin that I can't abide in anthologies or one-shots of presenting an incomplete story, a glimpse into a longer tale rather than a done-in-one story. He dodges the difficulties of the format, but doesn't provide a satisfying read because of that format, making it hard to judge the whole story until it's completed, despite the strength of the installment here.
One of the problems that I detected with some of these stories is that the creators have created worlds and don't really take any time to explain them to the reader. I should mention in fairness that I haven't read the first issue of this anthology, and it's possible that more foundation work was done there, but at any rate, there's a definite accessibility problem to some of these stories. In particular, "The Veil" seems to be an interesting mixture of Men in Black, the X-Files and psychological horror, but Lance Stahlberg and Danika Kenn make too many assumptions about what the reader knows or will guess and end up losing the punch of their ending by not explaining the job of their characters more clearly. Some of the blame for this one can be laid at the feet of Mariano de la Torre, whose storytelling, especially in the action, tends to be disjointed and hard to read, using close-ups where long shots would be more appropriate and generally failing to provide context in the form of backgrounds.
"Nick Landime" is also a major offender in the assuming too much area, as it features such oddities as a girlfriend assuming people will think she's a vampire (in what seems a major leap of logic for the benefit of a not terribly funny joke) and a psychologist monkey, with no explanation forthcoming as to why these characters are here. Without a little more context, it's hard to care at all about what the lead character is going through, especially when Burnham's dialogue is somewhat forced and his protagonist's "quip" problems suffer from not just bad timing but a lack of humor. That's actually the problem at the heart of "Bedbug," which is a story focusing on a Spider-Man like quipping hero facing down a super-villain robbing a convenience store. The concept is pretty standard, so the execution has to make up for it, and Scott Rogers just doesn't deliver. Bedbug's quips fall flat, and given that his mockery of the villain is really the whole point of the exercise, the story fails as a result.
Then there are the stories that just don't make a lot of sense. "Rainmaker" starts with an interesting premise and has some stylish artwork, but the introduction of Islamic terrorists with no motivation, and really no part in the story except to add some action, pretty much killed the story for me despite some interesting art by Todd Fox that reminded me a little of a rougher version of cover artist Jeff Parker. "Interrogation of Specimen One," meanwhile, is an attempt at that anthology staple, the Twilight Zone story, but Scott Hileman's story doesn't make any sense, and the resulting twist ending lacks punch because he doesn't play fair with his audience up until the end, even going so far as to have artists Chris Franklin and Ethan Colchamiro change all the appearances throughout so nobody guesses what's really going on.
