Astro City
by Busiek/Anderson/Ross
Image Comics
Astro City is a fantastic fucking comic book. Go read it.
That's the review, really; the rest is
just filler so James doesn't send this back. Well, ok, I have to
elaborate a little. I mean, I love Astro City (it's the first comic
book I've actually looked forward to since early-mid Sandman), but I
can imagine why some wouldn't. Last time I was in Pic-A-Book, buying
one of the Astro City trade paperbacks, I overheard a conversation
between the clerk and his friend.
"That's a great comic," the clerk said.
"I just don't care about the characters,"
his friend said.
"That's not the point." the clerk said.
Well, then, what is the point? Like
Sandman, Astro City wanders from one story to the next, from one set
of characters to the next, not quite giving us the chance to grow too
attached. But just as Morpheus watched all of the Sandman's tales,
there is something that binds together Astro City's narratives: Astro
City itself -- a superhero universe so astonishingly conjured out of
thin air that it manages to simultaneously deconstruct and glorify the
genre.
You know those old Twilight Zone/Outer
Limits episodes where some square jawed stiff goes up in space/on a
date/out for a walk, but when he comes back the world is
somehow... different? Like his house was still there, but the white
picket fence was gone, and his dog responded to the name Patches
instead of Rocky, and his wife was from California instead of
Nebraska, but things were pretty much the same unless you looked real
close? That's what the Astro City universe is like; it all feels so
familiar, yet it's all new. Astro City itself is New York, filtered
through the Gernsback Continuum (the city's symbol is an old school
sci-fi rocket within the electron paths of a model atom -- iconography
just doesn't get more 50's sci-fi than that). Most of the superheroes
are built on the archetypes of the Marvel & DC universes: There's the
Samaritan, who's sort of like Superman but from the future instead of
Krypton; Winged Victory, sort of like Wonder Woman but with a better
haircut and taste in clothes; the First Family, like the Fantastic
Four with an extra member or two; The Confessor, a shadowy, caped
crusader for justice who sort of looks like, all together now, Batman,
but has his own secrets. And I bet you crayons to kryptonite that the
oft-mentioned but never seen "Experimentals" will bear a striking
resemblance to certain uncanny students of one Professor Charles
Xavier.
In the wrong hands, of course, this could
be a disaster; but Busiek pulls it off. Props here must go to the
artists -- Alex Ross handles the covers, and Brent Anderson the
interiors. The art doesn't jump off the page at you like, say, Todd
McFarlane, but Anderson has created a distinctive look and feel for
dozens of heroes that keeps one foot firmly in homage and the other
kicking in originality. He also recreates Golden Age scenes (of
course, Busiek fleshes out Astro City with a coherent history --
anyone who can create a plausible hero called 'The Bouncing Beatnik"
deserves respect) convincingly enough that I expected the pages to be
yellow. Ross brings the same stunning virtuosity he brought to
Kingdome Come and Marvels (also penned by Busiek), _painting_ each of
the covers.
The result of this is that you feel like
you know the characters, like you used to have a box full of their
comics under your bed until your mom found it freshman year at college
and threw it out. Our seeming familiarity with the characters means
that Busiek is spared the effort of getting us to know the characters
-- we feel that we already know them -- but he has the freedom to
surprise us, to take the characters in unexpected directions. When, in
"Dinner at Eight", Winged Victory and Samaritan get set up by mutual
friends to go out on a date, we expect Samaritan's secret identity to
be mild-mannered (he even works for a newspaper!) and Winged Victory
to be proud and confident; we don't expect them to almost get into a
violent fight over the ideologies that motivate them (Fear not,
romance fans; things head up from there).
This brings me to the other cool thing
about Astro City: the stories. They're so... mundane, in the best
sense of the world. They involve superheroes, and sometimes even
superheroic fights. But they're not about that; they're about people,
in a way that traditional superhero comics never are. "Dinner at
Eight" is a story about a date. With very few modifications, it could
be about a lawyer and an accountant. But it's not. It's about arguably
the two most powerful superheroes around. It's about how pathetically,
brilliantly, amazingly human they are. And that's part of why it's so
cool. But there's another part of it too, the part that makes it
essential that it's about superheroes.
Samaritan's sense of duty is intense;
literally superheroic. But while transcending that of any mortal, in
Busiek's hands it also represents it, standing as an example -- a
bright, shining, noonday sun on bare retina example -- of the desire
we all have to do right and make the world a better place. As Neil
Gaiman himself says in the introduction to "Confession", the second AC
trade paperback, "There is room for things to mean more than they
literally mean." Busiek takes superhero conceits, relieves them of
their traditional duties as adolescent wish-fulfillment, and presses
them into duty as powerful champions of universal human concerns. In
"In Dreams", the first ever Astro City comic, we follow Samaritan,
both in dreams and in reality, as he battles evil and soars through
the sky. He is a man devoted to duty, so devoted he has little left
for any sort of private life. Every man who has stared at a beeping
alarm clock at 5 AM, who has dreamed of finally being able to sleep in
but who stil gets up anyways, because someone, somewhere is depending
on him will see his story writ large in Samaritan's battles and
hurried rescues. Similarly, in "Dinner at Eight" Samaritan's
nervousness and awkwardness -- despite being the most powerful being
on earth -- mirrors the feelings of every man who's felt his life's
work melt into irrelevance in the face and strong will of a beautiful
woman.
If I'm making Astro City sound dull and
lifeless, more like an essay than a good comic book, I apologize--
Astro City's genre bending brings out the closet literary critic in
me. Stephen King once split fiction into two classes: that which
transforms genre conventions, and that which works within said
conventions to just plain tell a good story. Critics always seem to
like the former better, maybe because it's easier to write about --
which explains part of Astro City's phenomenal critical response. But
not all of it. Astro City works on the level of good story as well --
on top of the novelty, on top of unusual perspective, on top of the
critical acclaim, it's fun to read, and Busiek tells good stories. And
that's the highest praise of all.
