Dark Ages

Astro City: The Dark Age, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson

Astro City has always been most effective at implying stories it never has to tell.

By that standard, a double-page spread in Astro City: The Dark Age Book Two #2 is the purest Astro City storytelling we've seen in a while, as a desk covered with police reports brings us up to speed on the city's heroes and villains of the seventies.  Busiek's knack for conjuring fully-grown comic book continuities from an economy of detail is on full display.  Take for instance the character of Bamboo, who combines a vintage Dragon Lady stereotype with a strong dose of Talia, right down to her supervillain father and her rumored romance with the Black Rapier.  Any reader who knows the comics Busiek is referencing can immediately fill in the character's entire publication history (the Black Rapier's bare-chested duel with Bamboo's father on the steppes of Central Asia in 1971, her brief flirtation with the side of good in the early eighties, her sudden relapse after a brutal brainwashing at the hands of one of her father's lieutenants, the child she bears the Black Rapier in an out-of-continuity prestige format graphic novel in 1987, recently brought back into the regular title by a hot writer following a bloody and self-righteous universe-wide continuity reset)--therein lies Astro City's genius and its greatest flaw.  Because the histories we tell ourselves, poor patchworks of comics past though they are, will almost always be more satisfying than the rare ones Astro City chooses to show us.

That may be what's holding back Astro City: The Dark Age, Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's exploration of the Astro City and, by extension, the superhero comics of the 1970s.  Since the second Astro City issue was released back in 1995, the franchise has invested no story with more significance than the fate of the "poor, doomed Silver Agent," betrayed by the people he served to their eternal shame.  When Busiek and Anderson finally revealed that fate in the first book of The Dark Age, the anticipation had been building for a decade.  Maybe any story would have been hard-pressed to live up to those expectations, but the one they provided fell far short.

The early stages of the plot were an unusually faithful point-by-point retelling of a single story, Steve Englehart and Mike Friedrich's Captain America/Committee to Regain America's Principles/Secret Empire/Richard Nixon shoots himself in the head extravaganza.  The narrowing of inspiration worked against Astro City's normal pastiche of comic book continuity--if you can even have a pastiche when you're working from a single source.  When it was faithful to that source, the Silver Agent's tragedy was nothing more, could be nothing more, than a replay of one of the mustier stories from the seventies; when it finally deviated from that script, it ended up as something far less.  Busiek presented a Silver Agent who passively accepted his fate, who went to his execution without complaint even though he had to know he'd been manipulated.  Yet Busiek allowed us no access to his motivations--the real story--because The Dark Age was filtered through the worm's-eye bystander viewpoint that has been Busiek's specialty since Marvels.  (It's worth noting that The Dark Age's focus on two brothers, one a cop and one a criminal, had its origins in a projected Marvels sequel.)  Charles' and Royal's story is not without interest--by Book Two they seem to have stepped into a seventies cinema of mob wars and crooked cops--but Book One's focus on their grudges with superheroes felt like a distraction from the greater dramatic potential of the Silver Agent story.

(I should add that The Dark Age is scheduled to run through four books of four issues apiece and it's only halfway through the second one.  It's possible that later books will address this glaring omission and clue us into the Silver Agent's final hours.  Then again, Book One of The Dark Age wrapped up a year and a half ago and we've only seen three issues of Astro City since then.  We won't see for the next one for at least two months.  If the series keeps to its present schedule we'll be lucky if The Dark Age wraps up before 2010.  That tests the limits of reader patience and trust; if the book is going to come out at such a sluggish pace then it has to offer closure in smaller doses, and each book has to tell a complete story on its own.)

To its credit, The Dark Age aspires to be more than just another self-aware comic book, connecting its genre commentary to the larger cultural malaise of the seventies.  Astro City's superheroes change from friendly authority figures and wisecracking daredevils into angry outlaws and grim vigilantes at the very moment when the American people lose faith in their leaders after Vietnam and Watergate.  These trends complement each other beautifully, yet the book merely connects them without attempting any further exploration: neither one says anything all that new or perceptive about the seventies.  The result is a story whose meaning feels as predetermined as its end.

Even the craftsmanship fails to meet the usual Astro City standard, especially in the area of character design.  Meet the Apollo Eleven:

They have a great name, but it commits their designer to about four characters too many;  several of the Eleven would simply never be superheroes as they are rendered here.  The little green guy with the big head might make a corny Mxyzptlk-type pest, and the furball could be a comic relief animal sidekick from a particularly dismal Saturday morning cartoon, but the brain-and-tentacles thing couldn't be anything more than a villain--and a quickly forgotten one at that--while the tall, stretchy Gray is too Whitley Streiber, an invader from another genre and medium entirely.  If this seems like a minor complaint, consider that the aesthetic keystone of Astro City has always been its posture as a comic book from a real, decades-old continuity you never read until now.  The Apollo Eleven are too weird and inhuman to achieve even the fleeting career of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and their appearances only remind us that the pastiches of Astro City aren't quite as spot-on as they used to be.

Other characters don't even get the cool names.  I suppose "Energy" Brown could be trying for a Cleopatra Jones vibe, if it were trying at all; it doesn't help that as Anderson's drawn her, you can barely tell she's female--I had to check against her police dossier.  Meanwhile, small-time crook Joey Platypus wouldn't even make the grade as a Dick Tracy villain.  This is probably deliberate, the weak design suggesting their low position in the hierarchy of comics characters:  they have about as much visual distinction as Boss Morgan or Cockroach Hamilton, and about as much import.  But there's something trivial and pointless about a comic filled with characters that advertise their own irrelevance--and not as comedy, a la the hilarious "Buck Wild" parody in Milestone's Icon, but as some elegiac letter to the comics of the author's youth.

And not, I'm surprised to say, a love letter.  Unlike Buck Wild or the Silver Age pastiches of Alan Moore's Supreme, The Dark Age hasn't yet shown us why its source material is worth reproducing.  The Bronze Age of the 1970s is a fascinating stage in the history of superhero comics, when the mad rush of invention and reinvigoration of the Silver Age gave way to a consolidation of what came before, when industry changes put the fans in charge of the comics, when market changes sent the companies running to new genres, when the turbulent politics of the times appeared directly on the comics page.  It's the period that laid the building blocks for the artistic revolutions of the eighties and beyond.  It's the period that produced some of my favorite comics, not just the ones I remember from the cozy, unreflective fog of childhood but the ones I discovered or rediscovered as an adult, and obviously it produced some of Kurt Busiek's favorites too.  But the Dark Age has yet to capture most of that.

It has replicated one feature of the early Bronze Age:  the way its much-referenced superhero epics will often disappoint you when you finally read them.  I have spent most of my life reading Marvel comics that alluded to the Captain America/Committee to Regain America's Principles/Secret Empire/Richard Nixon shoots himself in the head extravaganza, but I'd never read the story until last month.  That was when I realized all those tantalizing flashbacks and footnotes had the luxury of pointing right to the money shot, Nixon blowing his brains out, and its aftermath, Cap's obligatory 1970s Journey to Find Himself, not the eight months of maundering plotlines and wild coincidences and utterly absurd master plans that preceded them.  References to the Celestial Madonna story always showed the sublimely bizarre double wedding at its finale, not the tedious origin of the Vision or the weak Don Heck art.  These are quintessentially seventies stories, rooted in the mythology of the Marvel universe yet lacking both the wild energy of what came before and technical polish of what came after.  They are the awkward adolescence of a genre, which perhaps explains why they make such excellent objects for nostalgia, but adolescence is something you only want to live through once.

The seventies won't always let you down.  Jim Starlin's Thanos stuff holds up surprisingly well, and the ensemble-cast comics like Tomb of Dracula or, especially, The Deadly Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu are some of the high points of the decade.  But these tend to be the comics that strayed farthest from Silver Age superheroics.  The Dark Age nods towards the seventies' forays into science fiction with its two-page recaps of cosmic epics, transparent stand-ins for the work of Starlin, Englehart, and Steve Gerber, but it never quite embraces the decade's genre diversity--Astro City's gallery of urban vigilantes extends only so far as Luke Cage and the Punisher.  Busiek's retelling of the Bronze Age hasn't strayed far from superheroes or from Marvel continuity and it's that age's lumbering continuity behemoths that disappoint most, bound to a past they can neither escape nor equal.

Busiek, a writer of considerable talent and craft, is all too able to recreate the past that inspires him, but he looks back to a time that was already looking backwards.  The Dark Age, like Bronze Age it simulates and emulates, has high ambitions but gets dragged down by the weight of its antecedents.  The copy is too perfect.

Comments

[Saxon Brenton]

With regards to the character designs, I have to offer up this nitpick: the initial design and subsequent character development for the Thing of the Fantastic Four indicates that monstrous appearance does not automatically correlate to being a villain. However, there's a two-fold problem for the Apollo Eleven in trying to tap into a vibe like that. Within the story setting their character concept is, IIRC, that they're rather remote from humanity and distrusted by it, so you're not likely to see the brains-and-tentacles thing wandering around the equivalent of Yancy Street and getting the opportunity to show what a swell guy he is. And stepping outside the setting, the storytelling style of _Astro City_ more often than not focusing on the point-of-view of the normal people means that we, the audience, are unlikely to see any stories of the A.11 hanging out wherever it is that the hang out, thereby depriving the brains-and-tentacles thing of the opportunity to show what a swell guy he is. (And when you factor in the glacial pace of _Astro City_'s publication, those chances drop significantly).

On a related but vastly more trivial matter, the furball looks more like one of the stupid stupid rat creatures to me.

[Prankster]

I'm nearly positive that The Dark Age volume 4 will end--presumably in the mid-80s--with an epic clash involving time travel (perhaps evoking Crisis on Infinite Earths?) and it's at that point that we'll find out what happened to the Agent during that period of missing time. He did, after all, say, "There are tough times ahead," clearly suggesting that he'd seen them firsthand. But the reappearance of the Agent at the end makes sense both thematically (a return to the genuine heroism of ages past, which Busiek has already implied happens sometime around 1986, when The Samaritan first appears) and as a unifying motif.

What's odd and frustrating about the delay is that the current structure provides a perfect opportunity to use fill-in artists on the one-shot specials--and Astro City is one book that seems naturally suited to having a revolving-door art team. In fact, Busiek admitted in a letter column that that was how the series was originally planned. But no, he now insists he won't let anyone but Anderson draw the series. Baffling.

[Marc]

Especially since Anderson's work has been so stiff and unimaginative lately (and presumably a factor in the massive delays).

I wouldn't be surprised if The Dark Age ended with a scene that points to Samaritan's rescue of the Challenger in 1986, drawing the "Dark Age" to a close and setting the stage for the superhero renaissance that Samaritan sparks. Which would be a little self-serving, since that would tacitly praise Astro City's own role in the retro/"reconstruction" fad, even if that happened a decade later in realtime. And I expect we will see more Silver Agent--around 2009.

Saxon, you're right about the monstrous appearance, but the Thing and the Hulk (and Blok, and the Beast...) are still recognizably humanoid and they have heroic physiques. A third of the Apollo Eleven don't pass that test and would make terrible superheroes. That big gas giant guy would make a pretty decent tormented monster hero in the mighty Marvel mold (I hope his name really is Gas Giant--that would pretty much consign him to the Astro City version of Nextwave thirty years later) but the rest violate the premise that these could be actual comic book superheroes.

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

Marc, is any of Astro City worth reading? I tried both Life in the Big City and Family Album. Neither seemed any better than anything else I've read by Busiek. Are other volumes better?

[Jacob T. Levy]

You're right about the Bronze Age's funny status. It gave us a lot of epic universe-building stories that just aren't much fun to read: the Kree-Skrull War, for example. The Satellite Era of the JLA that's now everyone's benchmark for greatness had about one year of great storytelling.

And... shh, don't tell... after everything that's been learned about comics storytelling since then, the Dark Phoenix Saga seems awfully stilted, padded, and weirdly paced...

[Prankster]

To be fair, I'm pretty sure Busiek has been stating pretty much since the beginning of the series that in the AC universe, the "Dark Age" ended around 1986 with the arrival of the Samaritan. The "reconstruction" started as wishful thinking in the pages of Astro City, Supreme, and to a lesser degree Kingdom Come, and ended up coming true.

[Marc]

It's more the whole narrative of "dark ages" and "renaissances" that's self-serving--who doesn't include themselves in the renaissance? This narrative is already at least a decade old and I don't need to see another iteration. At least he isn't treating "darkness" as if it were an ontological feature, though the title comes awfully close.

Jacob: The Satellite Era of the JLA that's now everyone's benchmark for greatness had about one year of great storytelling.

I assume you mean Englehart's year, but even if you don't I'll proceed as if you do.

I like Englehart's seventies DC work a great deal. I don't mean to imply all of the seventies superhero stories are disappointments; the later in the decade you go, the more polished they get. (And I have a soft spot for the Dark Phoenix story, although the Proteus story that preceded it was probably the series' high point.) Englehart's DC work in particular joins a Marvel-style interest in backstory with a Silver Age DC polish and self-sufficiency--you don't have to have read a million other Batman or JLA stories because he's adding new pieces to the narrative rather than stretching to accomodate every possible old one. It's a synthesis of the classic Marvel and DC styles that wouldn't be matched until the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans a couple of years later.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, we see almost no seventies DC influences in The Dark Age. (Maybe we'll get an Englehart-style Confessor story after the Deacon comes to power... well, no, we won't; at best we'd get the Confessor and the Deacon moving through the background of Charles and Royal's story.) The exclusive focus on Marvel continuity pushes the series to emulate some the decade's most awkward comics.

[Marc]

As for Astro City, Jones, I think the first series back in 1995-96, collected in Life in the Big City, had the strongest, most consistent work. The longer story arcs, Confessions and The Tarnished Angel, both have great promise that somehow dissipates by story's end. The Tarnished Angel has a wonderful penultimate issue and a disappointing finale.

Family Album... I think that was a catchall collecting one of the series' best-crafted stories (the Junkman) with some of its worst forays into the petty epiphany. Local Heroes collects the very worst, and is best avoided.

If you didn't like Life in the Big City, Astro City may not be for you. But I'll let others weigh in with their recommendations. What do you think?

[Stephen Frug]

Haven't read the recent Dark Ages stuff, but that aside, of the first five or so trades, Life in the City is pretty clearly the best. If you don't like it I wouldn't pursue other Astro City volumes.

And... shh, don't tell... after everything that's been learned about comics storytelling since then, the Dark Phoenix Saga seems awfully stilted, padded, and weirdly paced...

Very much so.

[Bruce Baugh]

What the Dark Phoenix storyline has going for it, though, is invention. You're seeing stuff get done for the first time. Despite all its weirdnesses, and some of the early glimpses into Claremont's fetishes that would mess up many a story later, I re-read it every so often and still dig it - not in an ironic "ha ha it clunks and I'm so superior for seeing it" way, but in a spirit not very far removed from what I first felt reading it issue by issue as it came out. I feel much the same way about the Great Darkness story, which has some really weird blips and blivets, but nonetheless has a power to command my attention.

[BrianGPhilbin]

Here is part of the issue with reading comics like this that are so groundbreaking. Marvels was Busiek's first foray into the Citizen-POV story and Astro City was a continuation of that idea. Reading these stories 10-12 years after the fact puts one in the position of likely having read other material that bases itself on the same concept - which was original at the time.

(Same with the Dark Phoenix Saga, BTW - that episodic storytelling style that jumped from scene to scene became more polished as the writing craft in comics in general did so)

At any rate, if you didn't like Life in the Big City, then - as indicated previously - KBAC is not for you. I find it to still be a wonderful read, but mostly because I've been there since the start. It was my favorite comic book for the first 5 years or so and then they stopped making it with any regularity. I agree that it would be fun to see other artists on the book, but I doubt that Brent Anderson's work is in any way slowing down the book's schedule. It's not as if he has so many gigs that he doesn't have the time to do the book.

Just my 2¢

Pax, harmonia,
Brian G. Philbin
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