Astro City: Life in the Big City
Busiek * Anderson * Rossreview by Livia
I found a nice review of "Astro City: Life in the Big City" here. The author pointed out that Busiek bases a lot of his characters on already established comics legends. This is pretty obvious even to the non-fan: "Samaritan" is a red-white-and-blue Superman clone, while "Winged Victory" is similar what I think Wonder Woman should be like, and so on. (You almost know what to expect from the name of the publishers of the second series: Homage Comics.) Seriously though. The beauty of Astro City is that Kurt Busiek isn't just creating a run-of-the-mill Superman-like character to tell your run-of-the-mill Superman story. He's taking a Superman-like character, one we all know and love, putting a realistic spin on the character, and telling a story so incredibly original, so far beyond "me good, me punch the bad guy," it just stunned me to death.
The first story in "Life in the Big City" is called "In Dreams," (see the cover here) and it focuses on a day in the life of a hero called the Samaritan. What would it really be like if you had superpowers? What if you knew every bad thing that was happening, everywhere, and only you could do anything about it? You wouldn't sleep in, would you? Samaritan gets up and spends four hours saving the world every day before work. The Samaritan can't take a second for himself-- literally. Not a second, let alone lunch with co-workers or a dinner date. People might die. People he could have saved.
This story hits like a hammer, and by the end of it, you can set aside the surface similarities and see that there's no way this could ever have been a Superman story. Because no matter how much they soup him up for the nineties, Superman's a happy hero, "the big red cheese." He dates Lois and he kids around with Jimmy and he has a life. Because Superman is an adolescent power fantasy, and the adolescent idea of being a superhero is that it's fun-- the rewards, the babes, the getting-to-hit-stuff.
And as Busiek says in his intro to "Astro City: Life in the Big City," superheroes have generally been very good metaphors for just that: adolescent male fantasies, adolescent male hang-ups and struggles. But as he also points out, just because superheroes are such an excellent metaphor for teenage boy issues, doesn't mean they can't be symbolic of other segments of human experience, and "Astro City: Life in the Big City" proves his point. The people in this book, male or female, superheroes or not, are people. Okay, so they live in a pretty fantastic world, but "it's not about what it would be like," Busiek says, "but what it would feel like." And he lets us know exactly what it feels like; by the end of each story, you're feeling it too. Busiek's characters have a kind of reality-- humorous, tragic, scary or touching-- that I find to be rare in any kind of writing, not just comics.
Busiek's stories also-- and I really mean this as a compliment-- seem, to me, to have some of the best qualities of fanfiction. In that by using famous characters for inspiration, his stories achieve a kind of instant mythic quality. Okay, so his armored superheroine Winged Victory may look at first like Wonder Woman with the serial numbers filed off. She's also Wonder Woman the way I always wanted her to be-- unabashedly and actively feminist, strong but layered, with hidden depths and her own issues. In the last story of the book, "Dinner at Eight," Winged Victory is revealed to be just another wounded workaholic who hasn't seen her family in almost two years-- but she'd rather be Winged Victory twenty-four seven, for the rest of her life, before she'd go back to being "the broken, pathetic, scared little thing I once was!" Pow. It's a hell of a moment. When she yells that at the Samaritan, you care. You care because in ten or fifteen pages Busiek has made her a real, rounded character, but the fact that she's also kind of a weird alternate Wonder Woman, someone you thought you knew so well, also helps with the impact. Mythic resonance. It's fun stuff.
As for the art: the covers by Alex Ross are fabulous, just like everything he does. Brent Anderson's interior art is sometimes a little... grittier, more "realistic" and less "pretty" than I like, but it fits the stories. He can be infinitely expressive with the faces of his characters, which is almost as rare as Busiek-quality writing. There's a single panel on the fourth page of "In Dreams," just a close-up of the Samaritan's face, half-turned away, half-in shadow, as he gets ready to start the day. No words. Infinitely expressive. In an age of splash pages and alternative anatomy, I appreciate a panel like that.
Like I said: wow.
05/08/01
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