Astro City: Life in the Big City

Never let it be said that I do not leap to grant the wishes of my loyal readers! Or at least, that serendipity does, ’cause my semi-boss semi-randomly loaned me the first two volumes of the Astro City series within a day of when lots of people here recommended I read it soon. And I put loaner books on the top of my reading queue, as you do, which means I have already read one such, and the other is not all so far behind. Astro City has a thousand stories: Life in the Big City is a very episodic series of vignettes about six of them. And they’re really all quite good, but I think the whole exceeds the sum, because they are merely “quite good”, aside from the first one which is basically a meditative work of genius on the negative sides of being a hero.

But taken as a whole, the book has to accomplish a lot of things in a very small amount of space. It introduces an entire world with decades of history, and, okay, since there are decades of comic history and everyone always starts these parallel worlds back in the late ’30s when the superhero comic was born, I suppose it’s fair to say that people have a frame of reference there. But in addition to the world itself, it introduces decades of heroes and villains, tragedies and triumphs, all of which I have learned only enough about to know for a fact that I want to learn more; and yet I will almost certainly never accomplish more than scratching the surface. This is the kind of depth you can’t always count on getting out of multiple volumes of doorstop fantasy series, and it’s just scattered around like leaves in the fall, underfoot and part of the landscape, barely remarked upon from one vignette to the next. And I guess this is why I’m so impressed, because it has the feel of a new author writing stories in a world that has actually existed with decades of continuity all along, this being just the current batch of events; except for how that continuity does not in fact exist. And then the stories themselves take you from the petty to the profound, the average to the alien, and obviously not to every stop along the way, because that would be stretching the metaphor and the praise both a little thin. But at the same time, I can’t help believing that if the series went on long enough, “every stop along the way” would be entirely possible.

2 thoughts on “Astro City: Life in the Big City

  1. Mike Kozlowski

    The thing I like most about Astro City is that it basically allows non-superhero-comic-readers to understand what they’re all about, and that it manages to get across that sense of depth and rich history along with some better-than-average characters and writing.

    Short of reading hundreds of comics written over a period of decades (which: who’s going to do THAT?), it’s the only way for someone to get that experience.

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