Description

Created by Kurt Busiek with the collaboration of Alex Ross and penciller Brent Anderson, Astro City is a anthology comic book series with several volumens, set mainly in the fictional town known as Astro City, a modern metropolis where the civil population must live with the fantastic superpowered citizens and their adventures. The main characteristics of the series is the more intime perspective of the stories: the stories either see the world of superheroes through the eyes of the non powered inhabitants of the city, common people trapped in a fantastic world where flying saviors and alien would be conquerors interrupt the day to day life, or either follow how the most personal powered characters, heroes and villians alike, spend their personal lives trying to survive the demands of their fantastic work and deal with more mundane problems like keep their personal lives in order or dealing with having children and retirement.

Another aspect of the books is the existence of a chronology than spans several decades of superhero activity, with each era of the city living with different heroes and several legacies in active and deconstructic the point of view of these adventures.

Even if some stories are not strictly located in the namesake city of the series, many of these adventures are related to characters who had lived or had knowed the town, either humans, heroes, villians, aliens or gods of different mythologies.

Characters

The characters of Astro City were designed by comic book creator Alex Ross, who has been the cover artist of the all publications. Most of them are based in known archetype characters, but given spins by Busiek to reference the diferent eras of the USA comic books. There are expies characters to Superman (Samaritan, Atomicus), Batman (Confessor), Robin (Altar Boy) Wonder Woman (Winged Victory) Captain America (Silver Agent), Iron Man (N-Forcer) Captain Marvel (the Gentleman), The Fantastic Four (the First Family), the X-Men (the Crossbreed, the Irregullars), Dr. Strange (Simon Magus), the Punisher (the Blue Knight), Spider-Man (Jack-in-the-Box) among many others. Also, many times, different characters are created to explore the different eras of the same character (Atomicus and Samaritan, as expies from a Superman of the 50s and the 90s, for example).

Villians also have a chance for the spotlight with a different and personal view of the things with characters like the aging ex villian Steeljack, the Mock Turtle or even the day to day life of alien people like Zozat of the Zirr invaders or the inhuman being known as the Living Nightmare.

Also, civilian characters have a constant , if not bigger presence on the series, sometimes following the life of the inhabitants of the city for decades, like in the Dark Age saga, with the brothers Charles and Royal Williams as main focus or with revisitations of characters in different points of their lives, as in the case of Marta Dobrescu and Mike Tenicek.

Recent incorporations like the Broken Man and Tillie Armstrong has been showed to be able to broke the fourth wall and talk directly to the reader, who had hinted a uncoming threat to that world.

Publication history

Astro City is creator-owned by Kurt Busiek. Originally published by Image, later would be published by Homage, a division of Wildstorm, before being published directly by Wildstorm comics, (then a DC comics imprint) and later by Vertigo. The last issue of Astro City, the That was then... Special, was published by Image Comics again.