About The Gameĭir="ltr">Meet Fennel, a young fox and the newest kit in town. ![]() Sign up for the Slate Book Review monthly newsletter. See all the pieces in this month’s Slate Book Review. Volume 7: The Dark Age Book Two: Brothers in Arms. Volume 6: The Dark Age Book One: Brothers and Other Strangers. Its characters and storylines are not darker or more sophisticated answers to the worlds in earlier superhero comics so much as they are those worlds’ own best selves they are what readers who loved superhero comics-and complained about them, and wanted to live for a while inside their worlds-have wished that those comics could be.Īstro City by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, and Alex Ross. A finicky reader might object to its nostalgia, but you might as well object to rock songs using guitars. An Astro City plotline almost never has its climax in a fight stories can turn sentimental, but they never feel compromised or look rushed. What’s special about Astro City is not just the frequent focus on non-superpeople, but the detail, the consistency, and the patience that its quiet stories require. Most of The Dark Age takes place in the Reagan years, when movies, politicians, and many comics celebrated a selfish, callous, stubborn vigilantism that is exactly not, in Busiek’s view, what superheroes should be. The self-aggrandizing crime fighter Crackerjack ties up miscreants and presents them to cops: “I don’t suppose you’ve got any evidence,” one officer asks, that “they were actually doing something criminal?” Other storylines implicate corrupt, or thoroughly compromised, police the longest one so far, The Dark Age ( in two volumes) follows a troubled black cop and his impulsive criminal brother as they track down the henchman who killed their dad when they were kids. And Busiek (who calls himself a “woolly-headed Massachusetts liberal”) says a lot more in his stories: about the limits of institutional power, about separatism and solidarity, about the mixed blessing that is law enforcement. ![]() In the latest collection, Victory, she’s accused of colluding with villains and must decide whether to help-and whether to accept help from-boys and men: That is, she must choose between versions of liberal and radical feminism, or else show other heroes why that’s a false choice.Įven the most conventional superhero dust-ups say something about society: that it’s worth saving, for instance, or that unusually powerful entities are sometimes required to save it. “She’s both angrier than Wonder Woman,” Busiek elaborated, “and more scared that she’s lost herself in her heroic identity.” On the other hand, she wears metallic bracelets and a Greek-inspired costume that shows off her legs, and she owes her powers to a magical island and an all-female “Council of Nike.” “I fight for women, backed by women,” she says. ![]() Samaritan-whose powers, costume, and visage recall Superman-isn’t Superman, Busiek insisted in a recent conversation: “He isn’t an alien, he didn’t come here as a baby, he’s not a reporter, he’s not from a farm.” Winged Victory isn’t Wonder Woman-she wears a helmet, she has giant eagle wings, and she runs a chain of women’s self-defense schools (which double as shelters). It is not, however, doomed to repeat that history. Comics history is American history: Astro City speaks to both.
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