Comic Review: Astro City Metrobook (Vol. 1)
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.
If you love superheroes like I do, then you probably agree that there’s something wonderful about seeing a completely original superhero world that also embraces and builds upon those characters and stories you grew up with.
It mixes that comfort of seeing those old familiar faces with the rush of learning about new heroes and villains and what they can do.
Granted, done poorly, it can feel like shoehorned semi-cameos in a bootleg copy of actually good stories.
But when done right, it can take everything you love about popular superheroes and energize them into something that’s maybe not better, but different, allowing you to start all over and fall in love again without really feeling like you’re starting over.
And boy, does Astro City do it right.
Astro City was created and written by Kurt Busiek in 1995, with art by Brent Anderson and cover art by Alex Ross. It’s a superhero anthology comic, much like the Superheroes short story collection edited by Rich Horton. Like that book, it tells short stories about the day to day lives of the various inhabitants–normal or super–of the titular Astro City. However, unlike that book, this comic is written by one person and takes place in one universe, so there’s a sense of consistency to it all, in terms of style, themes, and quality.
Now, Astro City is a long-running series that has jumped from company to company and is still seeing production today. But we are going to take a look at Astro City Metrobook (Vol. 1), collected by Image Comics, which contains Astro City vol. 1 #1–6 and vol. 2 #1/2, 1–12.
ART
I’ve never been a great art critic, but I’ll say that I definitely like it.
The world of Astro City is depicted in a semi-realistic style by Brent Anderson that’s not supposed to be cartoony, but also isn’t the highly detailed realistic imagery that works like Civil War or Isom intend to go for (with varying degrees of success).
I think this is perfect for Astro City.
I haven’t gotten to the story yet, but Astro City tells grounded stories in a fantastic world. Ordinary people living their lives in a world beyond imagination. And the art does a very good job at selling a world where ordinary people live and work, and gods break time and imagination to impose their will onto the world. Where street gangs and alien invasions pose just as likely a threat.
Some art styles are more suited for a grounded, realistic story. Others are better at telling incredible cosmic tales. Some stories are best served with a specific style to them that might be otherwise uninspired or unappealing, like the “ugly” misshapen people that make up The Dark Knight Returns.
The only issue I had was that some of the big splash pages get very busy. The main character of each story narrates as well, with said narrations often coming between actual dialogue. Expect to see stuff cluttering a lot of the big battle scenes.
Part of the issue there, I think, was that I read it on Kindle. I think I might get a physical copy for the next volume.
And then there’s Alex Ross’s cover art. What can I say? It’s Alex Ross.
As always, he makes the superhero characters look more like gods than anything else. Larger than life, triumphant and heroic, a marvel to behold. If I could describe it in one word, it would be “majestic”.
Again, it’s Alex Ross. What else can I say?
STORY
Astro City is an anthology tale, but each story takes place in a shared universe.
There’s both an overarching story and no overarching story.
This isn’t the MCU, with each individual character’s film just another attempt by the minions of Thanos to obtain some mystical MacGuffins that are actually Infinity Stones. There’s no big shared event the stories build to where they battle some ultimate threat for the fate of the multiverse or something.
At least, not yet. Maybe down the line? Who knows?
Instead, the overarching story is the setting itself. It’s Astro City, an American city where superheroes and supervillains duke it out, and where unimaginable strangeness is just Tuesday. It’s where you can walk past tentacle monsters on your morning commute, or get a pamphlet thrust into your face by a sentient lion asking if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ.
The setting is actually a lot like Herald City in my own works.
Rather than epic tales of superheroics, this comic tells of “ordinary” days in the lives of the denizens of Astro City. Not only do we get “yet another exciting adventure” of Samaritan, Jack-in-the-Box, and others, we also follow the regular people who live and work among them.
The Amazon blurb puts it better than I can:
“A hero dreams of flight. An alien spy prepares for invasion. A young man is mentored by a hero with dark secrets. A street criminal discovers a hero's identity. And much, much more. Step into a world of heroes and see them from a whole different perspective. These are the multiple-award-winning stories that began the epic series and changed how we think about superheroes.”
I think “seeing them from a whole different perspective” is pretty much the key here. These aren’t the types of superhero stories that we would have been used to in 1995.
Instead, we get a reserved woman from the secluded outskirts of the city grappling with whether to embrace the opportunity and growth the city offers her or stay safe in her bubble.
We get a father trying to find a new start in Astro City, only to wonder if his recent move was worth it given the dangers.
We hear a journalist’s story of how he learned in his early days to put his ego and drive aside and really embrace what it means to report the news.
And we see a man haunted by the memories of a woman he’s never met.
We tend to think that only superheroes can have exciting stories, but if you lived in a “superhero city”, even if you were just an accountant or janitor, there’s a good chance you’d have a tale to tell too.
And it’s not like the superheroes are left out. Throughout the book, we learn more and more about them.
Astro City allegedly starts us “in the middle” of each character’s “long-running series”. Casual asides and mentions of past battles, secret origins, and upcoming events are there to peak your curiosity throughout the book. And you aren’t left hanging.
Most of the stories are self-contained, with only a couple of two-parters.
The best tale, however, is the whopping five part series following Brian Kinney, aka Altar Boy, the sidekick to the Confessor. Multiple plot threads and past callbacks converge in the closest thing this compilation has to an epic Avengers: Endgame–style climax.
There’s not much more I can say without spoilers. But the last thing I want to praise is the consistency of the story. Like the art, these stories were written by one person, Kurt Busiek, giving it one of the advantages over other superhero comics that manga regularly enjoys: the adherence to a single creative vision and style. There are no stinkers here. Some of the stories took a couple pages longer for me to really get invested into, and it was hard to disengage myself from the “Confession” arc and focus on something and someone new, but every story here is a winner.
CHARACTERS
To give an in depth description of each character in a short story anthology comic would be a bit impractical. There are so many interesting people–super and ordinary alike–that populate the streets and skies of Astro City and adjacent subdimensions that to do so would turn this blog post into a novella.
But it’s not like I can’t highlight this superhero universe’s most recognizable figures.
Samaritan, aka Asa Martin, is this universe’s Superman. Whereas Superman is an immigrant from another world, Samaritan is an immigrant from another time. He is the hero we all need, but that doesn’t mean he can’t yearn for more.
Winged Victory is this universe’s Wonder Woman. She takes the role of a feminist up a notch, and prioritizes saving women over men, all else being equal. But it’s not because she hates men. She runs schools for women, teaching those that end up there a newfound sense of strength and independence.
Jack-in-the-Box, aka Zachary Johnson, is a bit of a cross of Batman, Spider-Man, and Daredevil. A clown-themed vigilante, he is the primary defender of the streets.
Altar Boy, aka Brian Kinney, is a teenager who came to Astro City to make a name for himself and live a life quite different from the one his father lived. As the sidekick to the Confessor, they are the Batman and Robin of Astro City. Also, I’d say the name and their pairing opens up so many Catholic priest jokes, but this was the 90s. It was a more “innocent” time when you couldn’t joke or criticize that sort of thing.
The First Family is a, well, family of adventurers spanning three generations that used advanced technology to protect not just the city, but the planet, timestream, reality, dimension, and everything else. And, come on, just from the name alone you knew this was the Fantastic Four of Astro City.
That’s just a slice of the interesting characters that make up this superhero world, and I didn’t even mention the ordinary citizens that were the primary focus of so many of its stories.
final thoughts
The world of Astro City is as vast and three dimensional as anything from Marvel or DC, even here in its earliest of depictions. But it doesn’t sacrifice quantity for quality, or focus so heavily on worldbuilding that it forgets to tell a good story.
Despite being an anthology comic, every single story was an engaging experience. Despite the focus on individual characters, a cohesive world with a rich history develops at a brisk pace. And despite the fantastical world of cosmic impossibilities, the stories told feel real and down to earth.
The issues I have with it are few and far between, though there are some. The fact that we are thrown into the middle of this comic book universe’s existence means that there are so many already-developed relationships and events that we’ll likely only ever hear about in passing. I feel like, in order to give the reader the feeling of starting with reading First Family #327 or something like that, there’s years of rich history that we’re only told briefly about and stories we’re missing out on. “The Nearness of You” tells a deeply personal story that hints of an Infinity Gauntlet-style epic event that I would love to read, but doubt we’ll ever see. And the characters’ narration boxes tend to get a bit heavy with the descriptions, as if they really love to hear themselves think. Simple sentences are broken up into way too many boxes that interrupted the actual spoken dialogue and sound way too stilted. Again, though, I read this on Kindle. On an iPhone. I think that wouldn’t have been an issue in the original physical format the book was published in in 1995.
But Kurt Busiek otherwise puts on a masterclass of storytelling in every aspect from worldbuilding to character development. He shows a deep respect for the superhero universes he borrows from and knows how to ensure the audience understands his characters. He knows how to make an impossible world feel real, and he knows that the true main character of Astro City is the city itself.
And now, Busiek is going to be co-writing the pilot to a live action Astro City TV series? Yes, please.
In the meantime, I absolutely look forward to continuing to follow the development of Astro City into its next volume. Definitely join me for that, but if you haven’t treated yourself, get yourself a copy of Astro City Metrobook (Vol. 1). Believe me, you owe it to yourself to watch everything you love about superhero comics get lovingly crafted into a living, breathing world of its own in record time.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!