Update: Almost 2 months for me to get through Wild Cards #1. Not because it's that big or difficult, but it just seemed too... hell I can't really sum it up in one.
So the basic premise I dropped last post was accurate to a point. The alien virus is dropped on New York in the early 1940s, and you got Aces, Jokers, and dead people (they hadn't started classifying by power at the time, so there was no distinction between an Ace and a Deuce). My problem with the first book was... I guess you could say it lacked personality.
It was more of a history lesson of the major players starting from 1944 to the early 80s. The political and social changes society underwent with the discovery of super powers and super freaks. Each chapter was written by a different writer friend of GRRM's, so there was a lack of symmetry there as well. My best example to use would be a chapter wherein they explain the creation of a team of 4 Aces who were used by the US government to end wars damn quickly. In roughly 60 pages, they give entire background stories on 5 characters, give them superpowers on 'the day', recruit them by the government, send them to war for 20+ years, bring them back and not have a use for them, and allow Nixon to throw them to the wolves in a humans versus superpowers committee created because of public fear over Jokers. 60-ish pages and you get a complete start to finish on 5 characters! Now if you can imagine, that chapter was pretty fucking bleak on anything exciting... just like a newspaper article flying through basic facts.
Unfortunately the whole book reads more like a government response to superpowers manual than a comic book novelization UNTIL the last couple chapters. During the book I did some wiki-ing and review reading and discovered the first book was given iffy reviews way back when because of this staggering, back and forth approach, but that it was also necessary to set the stage for the rest of the series. One review (from Rolling Stone I think) stated that the entire series sucks you in with the most believable superheroes and villains, but if you really want to know how it all started you have to get through the first book.
For me, that was a chore. I would grab my tablet for some reading, open my ebook app, read a few sentences, sigh, and open a comic book instead. I could NOT drag myself to keep reading Wild Cards #1...
BUT I will say the backstory, the characters, the sudden comic style format presented in the last few chapters (which reviewers say continues through the rest of the series) make for a seriously interesting world that I will TRY to dig deeper into in the future.