10 February, 2004
Astro City: Confession, Kurt Busiek with Brent Eric Anderson, Will Blyberg, Alex Sinclair, and Alex Ross (208 pp, TPB, 1997)
Recommended by Mike K. and lent by Hawk, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect from Astro City, since I'd never heard of this Busiek guy before. Now I've read it, and I'm wondering why I've never heard of this Busiek guy before.
Astro City is set in a world which is similar to ours, but more similar to those of DC and Marvel Comics. Superheroes and costumed adventurers are everywhere; they're a normal part of society.
Confession is the story of Brian Kinney, a teenager who leaves his small-town home to seek his fortune in the big city (Astro City, to be precise). His goal is to become a superhero, and he goes about it like a wannabe actor who's just arrived in LA. To wit: he gets a job as a waiter. He starts out at the superhero equivalent of a cop bar: a place where working-class heroes go for a tall cold one at the end of the day. This leads to a better gig as a busboy at a private club for top-tier heroes. He gets his break when the club is crashed by a costumed villain, and Brian reacts quickly to take the uninvited guest down. This leads him to an apprenticeship with the Confessor, a hero based on the "Dark Knight" mold; he's kind of like how Batman would be if Batman was a Catholic priest, rather than a millionaire businessman.
As Altar Boy, Brian learns the tricks of the trade: everything from fighting to detective work to getting a formal education. His new career as boy wonder unfolds in the midst of a series of crises. There's a serial killer on the loose, and neither the cops nor the superheroes are having any success in finding the culprit. The mayor is trying to distract the populace from the city government's lack of efficacy by agitating against the heroes. Last but not least, there's an alien invasion of Earth in the offing!
This book is really, really good, and I say that as somebody who's not into conventional superhero comics. Even though it's not the first book in the series [1], Busiek does a good job of in-cluing, so that the novel is completely self-contained. Plotting, characterization, world-building: it's all very well-done. The artists do a good job of conveying mood and tone. The depiction of the main character, Brian, is occasionally inconsistent; it's only noticeable because of the overall high quality, but I found it disconcerting. The Confessor is a great character, and his artwork is consistent, and quite striking. (Again, I'm wishing I had a scanner so I could illustrate what I'm talking about.)
One of the aspects of Astro City that I really like is the realism. Note, I don't mean "grit." What I mean is the way Busiek applies the rules and conventions of human society to the superhero genre. There are different classes of superheroes, who fill different roles. There are local heroes who mostly work in a law-enforcement capacity, and there are high-powered heroes who go on interstellar missions, fight cross-dimensional invaders, and rescue the UN Security Council from supervillains. Different heroes have different outlooks on life; some are grandstanders, some are political activists (for non-superhero causes, we're not talking X-men here), some are evangelical Christians who spend their free time proseletyzing at the bus station.
A nice thing about this trade paperback is the "extras" included in the package. The introduction by Neil Gaiman is nice, as is the gallery of cover art from the original pamphlets--including preliminary sketches, rejected concepts, and what I assume to be photographs of models upon which the final artwork was based. But, what I really like is the section of annotated concept art, wherein the artists discuss how they developed the appearances of various characters. I love stuff like that!
[1] Hawk lent me three, and I didn't know which one was first, so I picked the one with the best cover.
