Astro City – Issue 1 – Dreams and Duty.
By Samuel Mauricio Junior
Astro City is Kurt Busiek, Brent Andersson and Alex Ross’s critically acclaimed supehero story. A series of several comics that seek to explore the human side of an extraordinary world inhabited by super-powered champions and menaces.
The first issue of Astro City gives us the story of Samaritan, the Superman-esque caped wonder of the titular city. We get to see how his responsibilities as a hero completely take over his life, and how something like the luxury of flying for the pleasure of it is denied to him.
In my dreams I fly.
The very first sequence of this issue shows what can be expected from this story. We see Samaritan flying naked and completely free with a warm smile in his face. That’s until his super-threat alert goes off and his dreams send him back to Earth. After framing our protagonist as this larger than life figure, the book has him go through a very human scene as he picks up his uniform from his closet and flies as fast as he can while thinking about how there’s never enough time thanks to his work.
The beauty of this sequence is how it shows us the scope of what Samaritan is, and then gives it a dose of humanity that fully grounds him giving a strong aspect of relatability to the story. It’s all in how Samaritan waking up like someone’s getting up for work, picking his uniform from his closet, like he iron it and left it ready to start his day contrats with the figure flying freely in his dreams.
Once the Samaritan is out of his apartment we get to see what a day on his life is like, through several panels showing his many heroic deeds as the day goes along, a big motif in these sequences is how he counts the seconds between each moment to make no time is wasted while he saves people from all manner of threats. It’s a great way to show us just how big the responsibilities Samaritan deals with are and how much they weight on him.
Not even through his secret identity as Asa Martin, who works verification in a magazine, he gets a minute to rest. It’s another way to show how much Samaritan’s role as a hero takes over every aspect of his life, his Clark Kent persona is not an aspect of his personality, but purely a disguise he uses to have access to information so he can predict and stop as many disasters as he can.
Through Asa Martin we see how Samaritan builds emotional walls around him. He doesn’t allows himself to be friends with his colleagues or even be in a romantic relationship, all because he does not have time in his life for anything that doesn’t involve making sure the world is in one piece and still there the next day.
I can’t save everybody — but I can still do what I can.
What’s beautiful about Astro City is that it’s a story that does not seeks to destroy the genre like so many others that that show superheroes as flawed and frustraded people. Samaritan is a very somber figure that goes on about how exhausting his life is, but he is still a hero in every sense of the word. We see several displays of decency, both big and small, that are completely genuine and illustrate just how many lives he impacts everyday. It is never implied that he secretly resents or despise the people he protects, and his altruism is never questioned or showed as naivety as he is very aware that he can’t save everyone, but also that every life he saves matters.
Astro City is is a superhero book through and through. In it we can have the introspective narration about the strenuous daily journey a hero goes through everyday, juxtaposed with a fight against a lab experiment who’s living embodiment of human fear. We see him fight robots, giant proto-plasmatic life forms, save cats from trees and join other superheroes to stop bank robbers wearing animal masks. Astro City never stops being a superhero story, as it shows no need to sacrifice the more ludicrous aspects of the genre to explore complex characters and build an interesting world.
Astro Thoughts
Kurt Busiek writing in this first issue is tight. No page here is wasted as we see Samaritan’s day as a scattershot sequence of events, from stopping disasters, to super-team meetings, to fighting super-villains, it all shows just how busy a single day in the hero’s life is. Busiek narration for the Samaritan gives him a somber and tired voice, always remarking about how he can’t even enjoy the simple things like the view as he flies because he needs to get to every disaster as quickly as possible. It paints Samaritan as a noble, but tragic figure, making easy to sympathize with and relate to.
The art team manages to translate what Astro City is going for to great effect. Brent Anderson’s artstyle is reminiscent of classic superhero stories, Samaritan is a squared jawed, cape wearing superhero, but with a look of constant exhaustion that’s beautifully contrasted with the hero’s version in his dreams that carries a vibrant smiles. the constant shift of scenarios gives the artist the chance to show us a lot, from cityscapes, to natural disasters, to super-team headquarters, to nightmare monsters that are all very well done.
Once the Honor Guard makes their appearance we get to see Alex Ross’s contributions with a set of diverse characters that have fantastic designs all telling their own stories throuh visual, leaving the reader curious to the possibilities that these characters may offer.
All of it is brought together and elevated by Steve Buccellato’s colloring, a mixture of warm colors and heavy shadows that gives the book more of the classic superhero feel to it, but grounding it, making the world of Astro City almost palpable. Samaritan is again a great example of that, as his red uniform with a white star and blue cape is a very striking image, but the heavy shadows highlighting his melancholy bring him down to Earth, something that’s beautifully illustrated by him falling and entering his dreams both in the beginning and ending of the book.
The lettering by Richard Starking is very well done. The narration boxes and speech balloons do a great job of guiding the reader’s eyes through the pages, it complements the art and it gives a good flow to a story with a lot of dialogue.
Astro City is a fantastic template for any cape comic to follow. Through great writing and art it creates a fully realized world that’s extraordinary and weird, but also grounded and human. It’s first issue tells a beautiful story about a hero who has no time to live a life because of his reponsabilities, but who will also never stop helping, because that is all he can do.
Astro City Issue 1
Writer: Kurt Busiek
Artist: Brent Andersson
Letterer: Richard Sparking
