Welcome back, Astro City.
The Kurt Busiek/Brent Anderson creation – a superhero world that pays homage to the characters we all know and love but focuses on the rank and file citizens living in such a strange and wondrous place – has remained consistent through its various publishers, and we’ve got a new Astro City #1 under the Vertigo banner now, although it is actually the 60th issue in the pantheon. This issue manages to be safely familiar and kind of risky at the same time.
It’s familiar in that it’s in the same world we’ve seen throughout those 60 issues, complete with the benevolent Samaritan safeguarding Astro City from threats, as well as profiling an ordinary joe named Ben Pullam, his reunion with his daughters, and his eventual involvement in a story of cosmic proportions. It’s risky in that the first thing we see is this purple guy called The Broken Man, serving as a fourth-wall breaker and narrator who seems to be recruiting us, as readers, into his network of monitors for something-or-other, and it introduces us to a new hero named American Chibi, who is essentially an anime character come to life, complete with bobbleheaded proportions.
Why are those risky? Because they’re both ideas that could seem either too “clever” or too cloying for their own good if handled poorly – not that we expect Busiek to handle anything poorly. He tends to have a gentle, respectful touch to his superhero storytelling, even when dealing with high-octane action or murky moralities. The Broken Man threatens to become annoying at first, but Busiek eventually corrals the concept to the point where the meta-text serves a story purpose rather than being an avalanche of winks and nudges that would burn out its welcome in short order. Chibi is one of those things that might make you facepalm at first, but she/he/it is treated like the silly thing it is, making it much easier to roll with the goofball nature of the notion.
The main gist of the story is that a mysterious set of doors just appears over the Gaines River and floats there, and nothing any hero throws at it can affect it. Then, after a time, a full-on Jack Kirby-looking god-figure named Telseth of the Kvurri steps through it with a mighty arrival, and then an amusing dial-down undercutting its cosmic pretention. He recruits Ben Pullam to be his guide to understanding the nature of humanity in the midst of superhumanity. While this may seem a little too on the nose, it does serve as a pretty on-point mission statement of the whole Astro City concept for any new readers who might be climbing aboard.
The new Astro City #1 brings back a more lighthearted tone after the heaviness of the Silver Agent story and The Dark Age, although as the last page proves, it’s not going to be without some tragic underpinnings. Anderson’s classically styled artwork does what it’s always done – it makes this world fit around us, the longtime comic fans, like a warm hug, while the new character additions and amusing Busiek dialogue beats keep the book from seeming stodgy or intractable about its old school vibe.
Astro City is a nice place to visit. It’s good to see the gates are open once again.
