Astro City #14 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair & Wendy Broome (colors)

The Story: Reform school for robots.

The Review: Much as I love the superhero genre, I recognize its limitations as much as anyone else does, and Astro City frequently helps me in this regard. By constantly abridging the superhero material to their essence—hero versus villain; punches, blasts, explosions; rubble and property damage; inevitable triumph of good over evil—Busiek reveals that the most interesting parts of a superhero story are the things that take place outside of it.

Busiek applies this approach so often in Astro City that it’d almost be formulaic if it didn’t yield such wildly different results each time. This issue, he explores the aftermath of a common feature of superhero battles we often take for granted: the wanton destruction of robots, giant or otherwise. In doing so, he takes something we would never give a second thought to and finds the emotional layers hidden underneath.

Astro City #13 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: It’s just like the townspeople in Footloose thought—dancing does lead to sex.

The Review: I admit that I tend to get a little nervous around non-linear stories. I can handle the back-and-forth jumps between two time periods that you get on Arrow or Rocket Girl, but keeping track of what’s happening at a string of different timelines feels like more work than I really want to put in. I like my fiction like reality: once something is in the past, I like to keep it there, looking back only when necessary.

So I was prepared to dislike this issue, it being not only chronologically out of order, but also broken into half a dozen storylines all featuring characters I’d never met before, some of whom go nameless the whole time. But it just goes to show you: if you have a writer who knows what he’s doing on a really compelling idea, then anything can work. It also helps that this jumbled narrative, which, true to the issue’s title, waltzes from hour to hour with no apparent pattern, is contained to this issue alone. I don’t know whether I could’ve handled an ongoing series done like this.

Astro City #12 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Graham Nolan (art), Wendy Broome (colors)

The Story: Clothes make the villain.

The Review: Every time I read an issue of Astro City, I always think to myself, with no small degree of wonder, this is a superhero series. It gives hope to the entire genre that Busiek can deliver, month after month, a series featuring characters in the same ridiculous costumes as their peers over at the Big Two, engaged in the same endless battles, yet still possessing dignity, originality, and depth that outstrips practically everyone else in the genre. Lavish praise, I know, but mostly deserved, I think.

It’s true most Astro City issues lack the primal thrill of its mainstream peers, but what it does have is longer-lasting. For one thing, you can always count on Busiek to give his characters real motivation, by which I mean they have needs and desires that heroism and villainy only partly fulfills. It’s amazing how often this basic principle of fiction is either neglected or completely ignored by Big Two writers, leaving their characters forgettable from the moment you stop reading. Busiek characters stay with you, even after one issue, memorable as the stranger you spend a bus ride talking to, never to meet again.

Astro City #11 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair & Wendy Broome (colors)

The Story: Unfortunately, there’s no spell for good organization.

The Review: There’s a kind of segregation that happens in the superhero world, namely between the heroes and the civilians. In one sphere, the heroes fling punches and energy blasts, crashing off and through buildings, flying overhead and grappling with their foes. In another sphere, the civilians dutifully run about, panicking or trying to stave the damage, according to their natures. The two groups interact infrequently and usually in the most cursory manner.

Astro City isn’t so different in this regard, but it does the rare exceptions. Raitha McCann, personal assistant to the Silver Adept, functions much like a Pepper Potts or Alfred Pennyworth, and if she existed in any other comic book universe, we’d most likely only see her a couple times an issue max, delivering exposition, wit, or emotional support as needed. But since this is Astro City, it’s Raitha who takes central focus. We’re only invested in Adept’s life insofar as it impacts Raitha’s.

Astro City #9 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Winged Victory learns what the wise already know—a good tea solves everything.

The Review: The flipside of trying to support the historically disadvantaged is that you might end up showing your own gentler brand of racism or sexism.  I think we can all agree there’s a fine line between providing opportunities to the disadvantaged and patronizing them.  This kind of dilemma is what I like to call liberal anxiety-plus.  Not only are you self-conscious about coming across as prejudiced, you’re self-conscious about your self-consciousness.

Speaking as a member of a minority group, I don’t experience this extreme level of political correctness that often, but I can recognize it, and I definitely see it in Samaritan’s uncertainty after he flies in to give her a last-minute assist in fighting off the Iron Legion.  “Should I have held back?” he asks.  “Let you handle them?”  But even the very question has a vaguely paternalistic air, as if he’s the one in control and he need only “[l]et” Victory “handle” things.

Astro City #8 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: The Trinity of Astro City come together and just barely avoid a trademark violation.

The Review: The brilliance behind Astro City is despite its cornucopia of heroes and villains, the focus is rarely on the supers or their endless battles.  There is, however, one distinct benefit to being a superhero in Astro City: civilians come and go, entering the spotlight for an issue or so before moving on, but the capes are constant.  No matter how powerful each Astro citizen’s story, it’s the ones in costume that remain recognizable over the course of the series.

This is especially true for Samaritan, Winged Victory, and Confessor, who are as much icons for the Astro City universe as their forbears, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, are for the DCU.  While mostly useful as stand-ins for more famous, but copyright-protected figures, this particular trinity of heroes does occasionally bear intriguing stories of their own, as character-driven and relatable as any tale from the Astro citizenry.

Astro City #7 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Winged Victory realizes that boys have feelings, too.

The Review: While I’m very much all for supporting the progress of women in society, I’ve never much appreciated the ladies who labored under the impression that they could only advance themselves by treating men as the enemy.  After all, men can be victimized and unfairly stereotyped, too, though more rarely and with less serious consequences.  Statistically, women are more vulnerable, but that doesn’t make guys somehow invulnerable.

Joey Lacroix, a young man escaping abuse and seeking sanctuary with Winged Victory, is a good example (and, I might add from personal experience, entirely credible).  This is someone who’s suffered no less from callousness and domination as the people Victory usually takes in, yet the immediate response from one her workers to his plea for help is, “Whoa.  We don’t do that, kid.  We teach women self-defense here.  Just women.  No men allowed.”

Astro City #6 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Special delivery, for one Telseth of the star-spanning Kvurri!  Sign here, please.

The Review: For all the efforts made to produce diversity in comic books, it’s amazing how little we actually get.  That’s probably because publishers’ conceptions of diversity tend to miss the point.  Stories don’t prosper just by ticking off a checklist of superficial qualities: a black man here, an Asian woman there, a few gay folks thrown in for good measure.  Without strong characters to fall back on, you can discredit the very demographics you wanted to promote.

On this point especially, Astro City stands out.  Busiek has brought back diversity—real diversity—to comics, not by picking and choosing from underrepresented classes of people, but by delving into the things that truly make people different and interesting: their backgrounds, families, attitudes, and experiences.  This is how Busiek can get away with writing stories featuring seemingly ordinary characters; he knows the powerful effect of details.

Astro City #5 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Never mess with a man’s data wall, especially a Broken Man’s.

The Review: In the short time that it’s returned to the living, Astro City has quickly gotten us back into its rhythm of done-in-one’s and two’s, so much so that you’ve nearly forgotten that there’s an overarching plot lurking around somewhere.  It’s been four months since we last saw the Broken Man and his ranting and raving about Oubor and nothing we’ve read so far has given us even a hint about what’s happening on that front.

Here, Busiek makes up a bit for lost time, even against Broken Man’s will.  True to the purple-skinned man’s name, however, the information receive is fractured into vignettes, each of which sheds a little light, a mere candle-flicker, onto this thing he’s striving against.  The pieces aren’t such that you can fit them together into a coherent picture, but you can at least get some sense of what we’ll ultimately be dealing with here.

Astro City #4 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Wendy Broome (colors)

The Story: Why chase supervillains when you can eat English muffins with jam?

The Review: I’ve spent a lot of time—some would say too much time—pondering on what I’d do if I had superpowers of my very own.  I’m sadly unimaginative in these daydreams; most involve me cheating my way out of school in one respect or another.*  It rarely occurred to me to use my powers for the greater good, in some kind of costumed capacity.  I don’t know; I never saw myself in spandex.  Indeed, the very idea is too disturbing to contemplate for very long.

I imagine that for a lot of us, our instinct would be to approach our superpowers as we would with any special talent: more for our self-interest than for the public interest.  I mean, as many many star athletes and brainiacs that do end up in non-profits or government work, there are leagues more who decide to apply their gifts towards making a living, the typically profit-driven way.  Martha Sullivan, this issue’s featured Astro citizen, does just that, revealing that there’s a trade-off between glory and peace of mind when you decide to use your powers for something between heroism and villainy.

Astro City #3 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: If you’re gonna get fired, you might as well put your employee benefits to good use.

The Review: I won’t go into the cringing specifics, but I’ve made some doozies of mistakes in my time.  Some affected only me, but a few had rippling ramifications for lots of other people and those were by far the most humiliating moments of my life.  It’s impossible, at these times, to not take your mistakes personally.  No matter how much others might insist that you did your best and there’s nothing to feel ashamed about, the weight of your screw-up lingers on.

I’m sure most of us have felt this anguish before, which makes it that much easier to sympathize with Marella’s deep, crippling self-loathing in this issue.  It’s a very human sort of experience she’s going through; no other species so readily punishes itself even when the mistake is made with the most innocent intentions.  No matter how details about the disaster in Equador come to light, you can’t see how Marella can blame herself for what happened, yet she is deeply convinced otherwise and won’t stop at finding any detail to tack onto her guilt.

Astro City #2 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Technical support—do you have super-crime to report?  Please hold.

The Review: The idea of technical support for superheroes is nothing new.  As characters like Snapper Carr or Oracle prove, plenty of other writers have arrived at the conclusion that any modern vision of superheroism requires some attention to administration.  It’s asking too much of readers to accept anymore that the only time a hero will leap into action is if he happens to be in the right place and right time.

It’s particularly interesting to compare Busiek’s idea of the Honor Guard call center to Kieron Gillen’s depiction of the emergency call line Prodigy operated in Young Avengers #6.  Gillen uses the concept to poke fun at the clichés of the superhero genre, coming up with ridiculously elaborate emergencies and allowing Prodigy to respond with advice equally as ridiculous and elaborate.  In contrast, there’s not a trace of irony in the way Marella or any of her fellow H.G. responders conduct their business.  Unlike Prodigy, they are driven in their work, despite how much more banal their own phone calls are.

Astro City #1 – Review

By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: There are worse retirement gigs than being an extradimensional diplomat.

The Review: The last time I read an issue of Astro City was so long ago that I don’t even recall what it was about.  All I remember is something about the issue really resonated with me and left me contentedly thoughtful long afterward, and this was one of the few times that had ever happened to me outside of reading a proper book.  A lot of comic book writers try to be introspective and deep, but few succeed so easily and naturally as that issue did so long ago.

Since then, I’ve always held Busiek’s name in high regard, one that only grew after reading the quietly powerful Superman: Secret Identity.  So you might guess that the idea of reading Astro City on an ongoing basis again fills me with a lot of excitement.  Still, it’s been a long time since Busiek wrote the series or anything noteworthy; a part of you can’t help wondering if he can revive the magic without working through some painful rust first.