Is Heroes Ripping Off Rushdie?
I haven't read Midnight's Children, so I can't be sure. But this sure makes it sound that way. I've been enjoying Heroes, though it may as well be called Baby X-Men. Anybody that's read Rushdie and seen the show able to weigh in?
posted by Blogs t r e t c h @ Tuesday, October 03, 2006
2 Comments:
It's been ages since I read it, but the central premise of Midnight's Children is that all of the kids born in the hour after the creation of India's birth as an independent nation from Britain have special powers, with the protagonist being telepathic (if I am recalling the book correctly). Sure, there is something interconnecting the people on Heroes and they have superpowers, but it sounds like people are reaching a bit here to try and connect the show and the book. While there may be some similarities between Heroes and Midnight's Children, it's just because the creators of Heroes and Salman Rushdie both are drawing on comic book tropes.
Heroes is cribbing from a much more immediate source: Rising Stars, a hit comic written by J. Michael Straczyncki a few years back. JMS was most definitely ripping off Rushdie, since the plot of Rising Stars was not only partly lifted from Midnight's Children, he was at the same time writing another comic called . . . Midnight Nation.
In maybe two episodes or so we'll be able to tell definitively whether Heroes is ripping off Rising Stars. The crux of that comic (beyond the plains-clothesed superheroes): When one hero dies, all the rest become more powerful.
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