I can’t save everybody–people die even while I’m saving lives here–but I can still do what I can.
In my dreams I fly. I soar unfettered and serene, laughing at gravity and at care. The clouds embrace me as a friend and the wind lazily tousles my hair. I lose myself in the sun and sky.
“But except in dreams you’re never really free” — Warren Zevon, Desperados Under the Eaves
Today, August 10, marks the 25th anniversary of the introduction of one of my all-time favorite comic book series, Astro City. To mark the occasion, I would like us to read through Astro City #1 together.
August 10 is also the day I celebrate my cats’ birthdays. We don’t know the exact date, but Selina and Kyle were born pretty close to 9 years ago today. Here they are then and now.
It also happens to be my half-birthday. I am a little older than the cats.
Astro City is a comic about superheroes, that celebrates a love of superheroes. It is perhaps comics’ answer to Watchmen, a bleak deconstructionist series that tries to break down what it is that makes the superheroes tick. Astro City is the series that puts them back together and shows us superheroes in all their glory and unfettered potential.
If you want to read along, this story can be found in the first Astro City collection, Life in the Big City. And, as I’m writing this, it’s available for free on Kindle.
The best online resource for all things Astro City and an invaluable help in preparing this post is Herocopia.
The creators
Kurt Busiek
Kurt Busiek is pretty close to my favorite comic book writer. His stories reflect an infectious enthusiasm for comics and superheroes.
My introduction to his work predates my paying any attention to the names of creators. Very early in my Marvel reading, I loved What If…?. It was the way I first got to know the story of the Marvel Universe, through these stories of what didn’t happen. Several of the ones I was reading at the time were written by Mr. Busiek.
He’d spent some years doing bits of work here and there for several comic companies, usually superhero stories. His most notable early work is probably the creator-owned Eclipse series The Liberty Project, with artist James Fry, concerning super-villains reformed as government agents. Its themes would echo in Astro City and in the stories of his Marvel superhero team, Thunderbolts.
He edited and oversaw a high concept science fiction anthology Open Space, which saw a variety of veteran prose science fiction writers tell comic stories within a shared universe.
To my mind, Marvels is what propelled him to stardom. I won’t say much here, as we’ve already spoken much of Marvels, which I see as the centerpiece for the primary project of this blog, reading through the story of the Marvel Universe. In fact, check back in a week or so for a read-through of Marvels #1.
In many ways, Marvels is the forerunner of Astro City. Both celebrate superheroes while looking at superhero stories from a different angle.
Alex Ross
Alex Ross combined two genres of art that are usually kept far from each other and did it well. Paintings evoking a grounded realism used to depict superheroes in all their fantastic splendor.
He got his start on a Terminator miniseries and then worked on a story for the above-mentioned Open Space.
Like Busiek, he made his name with Marvels. We’ve already covered Marvels #0, essentially Ross’ prototype pitch for Marvels. We’ll be covering the rest of the series in due course.
Besides Marvels and Astro City, my other favorite work of his is the DC comic Uncle Sam, made with Steve Darnall. It concerns the spirit of America, who has been having a rough time. He is no longer quite sure who he is and he keeps finding himself transported to different moments in American history, all of which have disturbing echoes in the present. (Disturbing echoes in the then-present of 20+ years ago and disturbing echoes today.)
With Mark Waid, he famously told a story of the future of the DC superheroes in Kingdom Come.
While Alex Ross is known for his style of painting that’s unique within the superhero genre, I think his often unappreciated strength is as a character designer. Check out this page of designs from Earth X, his vision of a future for the Marvel superheroes, echoing (but superior to) Kingdom Come.
This would be his contribution to Astro City. He draws all the covers, but also works with Kurt and Brent on the character designs.
Brent Anderson
Brent Anderson is the artist for Astro City, having drawn almost every issue for 25 years. We’ll see samples of his work below and it will speak for itself.
He has done odd Marvel and DC comics here and there over the years. He was the regular artist working with Bruce Jones on Marvel’s Ka-Zar the Savage.
My favorite work of his (after Astro City) is X-Men: God Loves Man Kills, with Chris Claremont. The X-Men must face a zealous and influential pastor who is calling for the extermination of mutants.
Kurt Busiek’s Astro City #1: In Dreams
Published by Jukebox Productions and Image Comics. Lettering and design credited to Richard Starkings & Comicraft. Coloring and production credited to Steve Buccellato & Electric Crayon.
“In my dreams I fly.”
The story begins with an ill-clothed man asleep, dreaming of soaring through the air. Kurt Busiek loves superheroes and is writing this series for people who love superheroes. I suspect a good many people who love superheroes have imagined themselves flying through the sky like Superman. So this man’s dreams may seem familiar.
There’s a twist. The man basically is Superman. We learn this when he awakens and has to put on his costume to fly to the Philippines and stop a giant wave.
He’s not Superman. His name is Samaritan. The character seems to be inspired by Superman, or at least the archetype that Superman represents.
We then get a day in the life of Samaritan. We learn his life is very busy. So many lives to save, so little time.
When I first read this story around 20 years ago, I imagined this as a day in the life of Superman, seeing the character as Superman with the serial numbers filed off. My initial reaction was actually that this was a great story, but that I wished the writer had put it in an issue of Superman instead.
There was some truth to my instincts, but I also missed a lot of what was going on here on that first read. Samaritan really isn’t Superman. He is Samaritan. We will get to know him over the course of this series, just as we get to know his city, Astro City. The character pulls from influences, but he’s a character with a voice and a story all his own.
And this was a great way to meet him.
Watch what happens over the course of the day. He saves lives; he battles villains; he visits places in the city; and he teams up with other superheroes.
A world is being birthed and fleshed out in front of us.
The city
We get to know Astro City. The local bank is Astrobank. The local paper is the Astro City Rocket. Samaritan works there as a proof-reader in his secret identity as Asa Martin. The Astro City Firefighter’s Association presents Samaritan with an award. He helps fish the Sea Blaze out of the water for the local Maritime Museum.
A local prison is on Biro Island, likely named for comics legend and Crimebuster cocreator Charles Biro.
A local university is FBU; we get to see it when Samaritan staves off disaster in their bio-labs. In a later issue, we will learn that stands for Fox-Broome University. Likely a tribute to legendary comic creators Gardner Fox and John Broome. Both prolific writers of DC superheroes in the ’40s and ’50s, responsible for creating too many characters to name, but I’ll try to give a few for each.
Gardner Fox cocreated Flash, Sandman, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, the Justice Society of America, and the Justice League of America.
John Broome cocreated Captain Comet, Detective Chimp, Phantom Stranger, Elongated Man, and numerous Flash villains like Captain Boomerang and Professor Zoom the Reverse-Flash.
We learn the world–Astro City in particular–is full of superheroes. Samaritan is a member of the Honor Guard, which has echoes of the Justice League and the Avengers. We meet his teammates: Quarrel, Cleopatra, Black Rapier, N-Forcer, M.P.H., and Beautie. All will show up often in the series, some occasionally taking center stage for an issue. In this issue, we learn their names, what they look like, and the rest is left to our deduction or imagination–or until we learn more in coming issues. For example, M.P.H. is a speedster and his powers come from some alien DNA he’s infused with.
Other heroes are only mentioned in passing or in the background. The First Family seem to be a respected team of celebrity superheroes. The Irregulars seem to be teenage superheroes. We’ll get to know them all as the series progresses.
A headline informs us of a fight between Jack-in-the-Box and Brass Monkey. Jack-in-the-Box will be a key character in issue 3, which stars a small-time hood who learns his secret identity. In that same issue, the fight with Brass Monkey will be mentioned again, and we’ll get our first glimpse of the villainous Deacon that Black Rapier warns of in this issue.
There are aliens out there. A race called the Zonn recently attacked. The Xenoform is an alien protoplasmic shape-shifter. Neither has been mentioned again, to date. We will soon get to meet the Tourist, whom Samaritan describes as an “extraterrestrial gadabout”. In my mind, that conjures a picture of Marvel’s Impossible Man.
Other villains we meet include Dr. Saturday and the Menagerie Gang. The Menagerie Gang all have animal-themed masks. One is named Foxie Loxy. We’ll see them again.
Pyramid is some type of criminal organization whose assassins Samaritan thwarts. Definitely not the last we’ve heard from them. We see a pretty epic fight between Samaritan and Living Nightmare. We learn a lot about the Nightmare’s history and origins, and get hints of a connection to one Dr. Prochnow. The Living Nightmare will haunt us again.
The point is there’s a big world here, and the creators have put effort into the details. We get really only a tease of it here, and 25 years later, you still get the sense we’ve barely scratched the surface of the rich history of Astro City.
It’s the background details to Samaritan’s day. But none of them are throwaway details. Everything and everyone has their own story. The series carries itself as though this world is already fully formed, and each issue just pulls the curtain open a little more, revealing another piece of the tapestry that is Astro City.
Next issue will take us back to 1959 and show us a glimpse of Astro City’s past through the eyes of a young journalist who’s got a scoop…
56 seconds
“There’s no time. There’s never any time.”
Another thing is happening as Samaritan goes about his day. He narrates what he’s up to, whether it’s fighting the Living Nightmare or attending an Honor Guard meeting. Along with the narration, he keeps counting time.
Seventeen seconds, a third of a second, 1.1 seconds…
Why? This comes back to flying. He shouldn’t really need to just dream of flying like we do. He’s Samaritan. He can fly. He can soar through the air. He doesn’t need to wait for his dreams.
And he does fly. From Astro City to the Philippines to Turkey to Germany… He does soar all over the world and even into outer space.
After rescuing a cat, he hovers in the air for 2 seconds to reassure the young girl that everything is all right. And it nearly costs a man in Boston his life.
It’s a powerful moment. Even more so when he notes he mustn’t waste time like that in the future. Imagine the weight of responsibility on his head when he knows 2 seconds of idle time could be life or death. Yet, he still accepts an award and attends a superhero meeting. These are also responsibilities. Yet, every second he is not saving lives, somebody is dying. Every person he saves represents someone else he couldn’t. He seems to be trying to come to peace with this. He knows he can’t save everybody. But he still does what he can.
“…but I can still do what I can. Can’t I?”
It requires the complete sacrifice of himself. He would love to meet a woman, maybe find love, family… he would probably like to accept his coworkers’ offers to go out to lunch. But he has had to let go of everything he might want in order to save lives.
In particular, he doesn’t get a chance to fly. Over the course of an entire day, traveling all over the world, he spent 56 seconds in the air, almost always in a quick rush from one place to the next. He wants to spend time in the air, to truly fly, free like a bird.
But except in dreams, you’re never really free. So in his dreams, he flies.
Reading Great Comics
This is the second entry in our “reading great comics” series.
