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Comic Review: Astro City: The Tarnished Angel (Busiek and Anderson)

If you try to do anything as an ongoing series, you are bound to run out of things to say. Look at TV shows that have been on for years, or book series, or just about any long-running comic. If you haven't planned a way out, you'll get trapped saying the same things over and over until everyone gets bored of it.

Astro City tried to avoid that by being an anthology series, with all the stories set in and around the namesake city. And it had a great original premise - telling the stories about superheroes and people living in a world with superheroes that rarely get told. Showing a typical day in the life of a superhero, but focusing on the non-superhero activities instead of the heroic ones. Looking at a family moving into a city filled with superheroes, and how they react to their first supervillain attack. Lots of wonderful ideas.

But eventually, even that idea starts to become something you get used to. And with this volume and its predecessor, the stories have started to seem much more like typical superheroes. The focus has been on more of the superheroes and their heroic deeds. Sure, the stories have been well-written and have played with the superhero cliches instead of embracing them, but they didn't hold that same sense of uniqueness and wonder that the earlier stories had for me.

This volume is about a former supervillain who has server out his prison sentence and wants to make a clean start. Of course, that is a difficult thing for someone who is recognized by everyone as a supervillain due to his steel-jacketed skin. And so it starts as a cliche crime story, rather than a cliche superhero story. And maybe that is my problem - I enjoyed the story, but it wasn't a well-plotted crime story. It was an average crime story, with some superhero elements thrown in. That's not too revolutionary of an idea to me.

Maybe I was spoiled by some of those earlier issues. But I think Kurt Busiek is a much more knowledgable about comics and superheroes than criminals and crime stories, and it showed up here as a weaker storyline. It still had some nice elements, like the Mock Turtle issue, and the Golden Gloves family, but the El Hombre thread fell very flat for me.

The art, of course, was wonderful, although the covers were not too exciting to me. I think I am getting sick of Alex Ross art.

Overall, I enjoyed this thoroughly, but felt like it was much more of a traditional comic book than some of the earlier Astro City. And I'd like to see something that was stretching the boundaries a bit more. And I think it starts showing Kurt's weakness at stepping too far from traditional comic book stories.