Astro City Part 1

Before reading "Astro City" I wasn't too excited, because I thought the idea of "superheroes in the real world" had already been played out time and time again, and wasn't sure what Busiek could offer that was fresh and unique. Some examples in the past that Busiek also mentions in his introduction are Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and others I've seen since then such as The Tick, Venture Bros., and more recently Mark Millar's new miniseries for Marvel Kick-Ass. But after reading it, I was very pleasantly surprised and thought Busiek did a great job of maintaining both the reality and mundane of the real world with the fantastical life of superheroes.

We discussed the design of art deco playing a role and a basic sense of nostaglia for superhero comics in the past. For instance, one group of heroes, "The First Family" is obviously a giant homage to Marvel's Fantastic Four, it being comics 'First Superhero Family.' One thing I noticed and really liked was how all the stories ended with a caption designed as a road signing saying "You are now leaving Astro City" I think this helped in connecting the individual stories and really each one together and made it come to full completion. I'm not sure how effective it was for every story, but it was certaintly effective for the stories "In Dreams" "A Little Knowledge" and "Safeguards" all of which end with the main character leaving Astro City either physically and/or mentally.

Of all the stories, I think my favorite was "A Little Knowledge" because it was really Eisner-esque and film noir-ish, where the superhero isn't the main character at all, but someone who finds out his secret ID and contemplates what to do with it. The fantasy sequences are great and often hilarious, and I noticed that unlike the panels set in reality, those are drawn without borders, in order to differentiate the reality and fantasy of what this character is going through.

Unlike the previous work we read, "Buddha" Astro City varies its speech bubbles very often issue-to-issue and page-to-page and examples include the Shark God on p.49 which is colored like Shark skin and written menacingly to the Demolition character on p.104 that uses BIG BOLD and brick looking like font. Overall though, it's a great series that I regret not reading when it first came out and I'm amazed that Busiek can bring such an incredible amount of sophistication to what is dubbed a "kids' genre." Look for what else I have to say in Part 2 of my blog on this.