The world of comics is lousy with Superman homages. Marvel has Hyperion, Sentry, Blue Marvel, and Guardian. Homelander and Omni-Man show the dangers of being Superman. Anime fans have All Might in My Hero Academia. Heck, DC itself has Mon-El, Icon, and Apollo (no, Captain Marvel doesn’t count). While all these versions have their positive attributes, no homage quite captures the beauty and optimism of the original article. None, except the Samaritan, the star of the 1995 story “In Dreams.”
Most of “In Dreams” follows a day in the life of the Samaritan, a day he divides into half-seconds as he goes from one emergency to another, interrupted only by social obligations he owes (ie, receiving an award from the city). Only when all his work is done can the Samaritan sleep and dream. And what does this Superman analogue dream about? Flying, floating through the sky without obligation, without meeting any demands. Such an insight would rarely happen in an issue of Superman. But they happen all the time in the pages of Astro City, the brilliant superhero comic by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, and Alex Ross.
Welcome to Astro City
At first glance, Astro City bears little difference from the countless other superhero comics you’d find at a local comic shop. It’s filled with variations of recognizable characters, just slightly tweaked to avoid copyright strikes.
Samaritan fights alongside the Honor Guard, a variation of the Avengers and the Justice League, complete with a take on Thor (Cleopatra), a take on Ant-Man and the Wasp (Wolfspider and Hummingbird), and an Iron Man homage called Assemblyman. There’s also a Fantastic Four copy called the First Family, and characters that recall Wonder Woman (Winged Victory) and Batman (Confessor). The whole crew fights against the Chessmen (imagine if Intergang took notes from the Royal Flush Gang), Maneater (a killer Orca, but one more like the Wonder Woman nemesis Cheetah than the Batman villain Orca), and the Astro City kingpin of crime, the Deacon.
Yet, Busiek, Anderson, and Ross fill the city with other characters that don’t have any clear analogues, characters who exist only to celebrate the superhero comic genre. Chief among these is Jack-in-the-Box, a clown-based superhero who fights crime through merciless quips and goofy gadgets. Busiek may have reused a rejected Spider-Man pitch for Astro City #3, the issue that first debuts the character, But Jack-in-the-Box has a strangeness that makes him entirely his own. The same could be said of the living Barbie doll Beautie or the evil mastermind the Conquistador.
Whether original creations or obvious riffs, these characters allow Astro City to do what it does best: playing with the tropes of superhero stories to find moments of pathos that Marvel and DC too often ignore.
Sympathy for the Supervillain
Nothing demonstrates this tendency better than the 1997 story “Show ‘Em All,” published in Astro City#10. “Show ‘Em All” focuses on Hiram Potterstone a.k.a. the Junkman. Once a talented engineer at a research firm, Hiram was pushed out of the company due to a mandatory retirement rule and his advanced age prevented him from getting employment anywhere. Because he couldn’t earn an honest living, Hiram used his talents for evil, taking on the persona of the Junkman and relocating to a local junkyard. There, he repurposed discarded appliances and electronics to become his gadgets.
There’s just one problem: Hiram doesn’t want to go quietly. So when he overhears others gushing about the superheroes, Hiram can’t help but let some details slip about his perfect heist. The revelations don’t lead to his undoing. No one takes the information and gives it to the superheroes, so that Junkman can pay for his crimes. Instead, no one believes him. They laugh at Hiram, refusing to accept that a feeble old man like him could ever outsmart a superhero.
And so Junkman returns to Astro City and again starts committing crimes. But this time, he doesn’t do it in secret. Instead, he stages spectacular capers and draws the attention of superheroes, battling them out in the open. He even beats most of them, before finally losing to his arch-enemy Jack-in-the-Box. In the final pages of “Show ‘Em All,” Hiram sits in the courtroom and listens to the prosecutor outlines his crimes, smiling with satisfaction when the prosecutor gives him full credit for being a criminal mastermind.
Super, Human
“Show ‘Em All” doesn’t do anything groundbreaking on a plot level. It’s just about a criminal who robbed some banks, and eventually was stopped by a superhero. The same is true of “In Dreams,” a story that’s just about a Superman-type saving the day again and again. Such stories have been told countless times since superhero comics were invented in 1938.
But Astro City isn’t about reinventing the superhero plot. Busiek is certainly capable of telling high-concept action stories; after all, he was making Astro City around the same time as his legendary run on The Avengers with George Pérez, which includes the mind-bending series Avengers Forever, and shares a lot of DNA with the DC Comics crossover, JLA/Avengers. That’s just not what he’s interested in here.
Instead, Astro City gives Busiek space to examine the actual human beings behind the outrageous costumes. And unlike most stories about superheroes with feet of clay, he doesn’t immediately veer toward the cynical. This isn’t Watchmen, with its ironically impotent superpowers, or the fascist madness of The Dark Knight Returns. Astro City is just a collection of stories about people. People who wear cool costumes and travel across dimensions, people who can fly through the sky. But also people who just want to be recognized for their achievements and just want to dream at night. People like you and me.
