Heroes

So, like everyone, I've been hearing a lot about this new show "Heroes." Looks like it'd be right up my alley, but it's too late in the season for me to start; I figure I'll pick up the first season on DVD and start watching next season. Meanwhile, though, a lot of the things I've heard about it sound an awful lot like a comic that was published a few years back called "Rising Stars." So let me give a brief rundown of Rising Stars, and then any Heroes watchers can tell me if they're actually similar or not.

Rising Stars chronicled what happened when a strange mass of energy fell from the sky, striking down in Pederson, Illinois. All of the children who were in utero when the energy hit were affected, granting them all some level of superhuman abilities- some vast (Superman-level powers), some extremely minor (low-level telekinesis), some arcane (constantly appearing as the most beautiful person in the world to whoever sees her). After a brief prologue showing the children growing up together in a government facility, the series started with the 113 individuals ("Specials") in their late 20s or early 30s, when someone began murdering them. One of the Specials, Poet, investigated and eventually learned the truth: the energy that gave them their powers was finite, so whenever one Special died, their power was evenly distributed among the rest. Thus, the killer was murdering their old friends/classmates to increase their own power level. At one point, after enough of the Specials had died, the survivors went through a massive energy surge, all of them gaining high-level powers.

But that wasn't the end of it- further investigation revealed that while the killer was Jason Miller/Patriot (a corporate superhero), he was being controlled by another Special. Stephanie Maas was an incredibly shy, introverted girl who had been badly abused as a girl, and because of it now suffered multiple personality disorder. While Stephanie herself was low-powered, it turned out her "other" personality, which called itself Critical Maas, was not. Critical had taken over Jason's mind and made him kill their childhood friends, gaining immense power herself in the process; it took a covert team of other Specials to invade Chicago and eventually stop her.

There was more to the series, but I never got around to reading it. (It was told in 24 issues, I think I read the first 16 or so.) Nonetheless, there do seem to be some similarities between Rising Stars and what I've heard about Heroes. Am I misinformed, or is that the case?