Story: This collection of standalone stories illuminates different corners of the fictional universe of Astro City. Among the stories: The city’s leading superhero tries to be everywhere at once, and berates himself for every wasted second as he longs for just a moment of his own. A small-time hood learns a hero’s secret identity, and tries to figure out how to profit from the knowledge. A beat reporter gets some advice from his editor on his first day on the job. A young woman tries to balance the demands of her family with her own hopes and desires.
Review: There are many smart people in comics who argue that the superhero genre is totally spent, stuck recycling old stories and old archetypes and doomed to tell superficial power fantasies, no matter how much the hot new creators of the moment try to dress them up.
Kurt Busiek’s Astro City proves these critics wrong. In Astro City, Busiek, Anderson and Ross have created a wonderfully rich setting, a city with a history and character of its own that feels as real and as diverse as any American city. The only difference is that Astro City is full of superpowered individuals, and has been for at least 75 years. Some of these characters are allegories for established heroes published by DC and Marvel – analogues for Superman, Wonder Woman and the Fantastic Four (among others) appear in this volume. Others are wholly original creations, allowing Busiek to take various archetypes in new directions.
What sets Astro City apart is not so much its setting or any of the individual characters, although all of these are depicted with great skill and craft. The strength of this series is its determination to show the superhero genre’s unexplored potential. As Busiek says in his introduction:
I wanted to explore the rest of the genre, celebrating the power it has to make ideas come to life and seeing what it can do…This seemed to be the perfect chance to…wander off the main thoroughfares of a superhero world and see what stories have been waiting in the shadows to be told…what can happen if we stop heeding the siren song of What Happens Next and start wondering What Else Is There?
Astro City shows that what can happen is that serious, dramatic stories can be told that still maintain the sense of wonder and spectacle inherent in the superhero genre. Despite the fantastic settings, the characters in these slice-of-life stories feel like real people, and that gives the stories real power. The ways they interact reflect what goes on in Busiek’s mind, the way he sees the world. In one of the stories in “Life In The Big City,” a character has to make a choice between the supernatural-oriented neighborhood she grew up in, and the ‘modern,’ technologically-oriented downtown of Astro City. The character doesn’t make the choice I would have made, and so the story doesn’t have the payoff I wanted it to have. But Busiek made the story work, because I think he really believed in that character and the answers she found for herself, in a way that invites us to rethink our notions of ‘progress.’ That’s just one example of how Busiek makes use of the metaphorical nature of this project.
Anderson and Ross do a fine job with the visual design and storytelling here; Anderson’s style is steady, dramatic without being flashy. The character designs are well-thought; simple and elegant where necessary, flamboyant and even campy where that is a better fit. There are no wildly confusing panel layouts, but action flows nicely from page to page and the characters’ faces and body language convey their thoughts and feelings well, so Busiek doesn’t need to overscript. Fans of Ross’ painted work will enjoy the six covers included here; personally, I prefer his pencil sketches, which are included in the behind-the-scenes section in the back of the book.
Year: 1996
Writer: Kurt Busiek
Penciller: Brent Anderson
Colorist: Steve Buccellato and Electric Crayon
Cover Artist: Alex Ross
Astro City Design: Busiek, Anderson, and Ross
Publisher: DC Comics/Wildstorm
Pages: 192