31 May, 2004
Astro City: Tarnished Angel, Kurt Busiek, with Brent Anderson, Will Blyberg, Alex Sinclair, and Alex Ross (224 pp, TPB, 2001)
This is the fourth Astro City collection. Like the second, this is a proper "graphic novel," a single complete story in one volume. (By contrast, the first and third books are collections of "graphic short stories.") It's Busiek's attempt at a hard-boiled detective story set in a superhero universe. Carl Donewicz, a.k.a. Steeljack, is a middle-aged, small-time superpowered thug, who's just been released from prison. Unable to find and hold a legitimate job, he agrees to investigate a series of killings which is plaguing the minor-supervillain community.
In the course of his search for justice, Donewicz gets beat up, back-stabbed, arrested, doubted, and depressed in his search for justice. It's pretty typical noir material, apart from the superhero stuff. And, there is a fair amount of that--not only does Donewicz mix it up with various luminaries of Astro City herodom, he undergoes something of a heroic transformation himself, pulling off feats of derring-do in order to confront the Big Bad and save lives.
The superhero trappings make it less effective as noir; after all, it's hard to wallow in the seedy side of the human condition when you've got Superman and the Flash making guest appearances. I'm sure this reaction arises from the fact that I'm more of a noir fan than I am a superhero fan, so I read the story as noir-in-a-superhero-setting, rather than superhero-story-with-noir-trappings. I'd be curious to hear the opinions of people who come to this story from the opposite perspective. Note, that's not to say it sucked. Busiek does a decent job of combining two genres which don't naturally complement each other.
One thing in this story that really bugged me is that, right in the middle, Busiek moves away from Donewicz and goes off on a tangent about a different minor-league villain, and how he was led into a life of crime by a deceitful woman. It ties back into the Steeljack story at the very end, but it totally throws off the pacing and atmosphere. And noir is all about pacing and atmosphere. This is probably something that worked fine for people who read the story in monthly (or whatever) installments when it first came out, but which does not work so well in a compiled graphic novel.