God in the Time Machine

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

Sometimes the unqualified successes are less rewarding to think or write about than the interesting failures and the near misses.  That's probably why I've devoted so much space to Grant Morrison's Batman (which finally clicked with the right artist), and it's probably why I keep coming back to Astro City.  But with its latest issue, the final chapter of the long-delayed Book Two of The Dark Age, Astro City may have finally crossed that invisible but all-important line that separates the interesting failures from the merely frustrating ones.

The final issue of Book Two doesn't devote nearly enough space to the bitter falling out between Street Angel and Black Velvet.  It's the plotline that rose to the highest emotional pitch, received the most buildup in Book Two, and most fulfilled its tone of corruption and betrayal.  It also had the best antecedent, owing more than a little to the classic Daredevil/Elektra story but not limiting itself to a replay of the original.  This image certainly seems designed to evoke that climactic scene in which Bullseye stabs Elektra (it would evoke it better if the villain character weren't such an awful design, and the dialogue so atrociously stagy, but more on those later):

Book Two could have built to a climax that captured some of Miller's pathos instead of just trading on our recognition of his iconic scenes, but the comic is continually hijacked by discordant elements of the supernatural--an artificially induced riot (when the previous issue had already set up a wave of crime and looting through perfectly normal causes), a giant demon, a mystical artifact, and a supercharged time traveler who literally wanders in from another storyline.  Street Angel becomes a bystander in his own story, his apperance reduced to just four panels.  But then, Astro City has always been too invested in its bystanders.

The Dark Age has been torn between the kind of comics Busiek clearly loved to read in the 1970s and wants to honor, and the kind of stories he's been most lauded for writing.  The narrative is always breaking out into other dimensions or outer space, yearning to tell stories in the Gerber/Englehart/Starlin mold, and then drifting back to the mundane concerns of its mortal protagonists, Charles and Royal Williams, or the slightly less mundane problems of the street-level vigilantes who have filled most of the backgrounds  in Book Two.  Seventies Marvel could manage these contrasts by distributing them across an entire line of comics; Astro City tries to cram them all into one title.  The result is a book that cannot satisfy any of its conflicting impulses.

Virtually all of the dialogue is expository, as if Busiek doesn't have time to show us anything, yet most of it exposits things we don't really need to know, like the backstory of the utterly superfluous character Hellhound:  "Hold it in, soldier!  The old man taught you!  Use the trapping spell!  Hold it in, hold it --"  That comes awfully close to being another entry in this list, but it isn't nearly as bad as the next panel, in which a news helicopter reporter describes Hellhound's transformation into a demonic giant.  Perhaps Mr. Busiek forgets that we, unlike the reporter's listeners, can actually see the panel he is describing.  His top dramatic priorities are always telling us what we're reading and giving us information about the backwaters of Astro City continuity, no matter what they edge out.

This has often been a problem in Busiek's comics.  Sometimes his Avengers run was more interested in codifying Marvel continuity than adding to it, and his Superman run has been so preoccupied with showing us characters' reactions to a world-ending threat that he hasn't gotten around to starting the threat yet.  He routinely neglects his plotting in the interest of showing us lots of fragments of a bigger picture, the better to situate his stories within a larger universe.  But this tendency is most frustrating in Astro City, where Busiek controls the entire universe and doesn't need to dole out all the pieces at once.  I wonder if The Dark Age would have been more effective if he'd separated out its constituent genres into different arcs, given us one fully-developed cosmic adventure story, one tale of gang violence and urban vigilantes, one cynical, politically relevant journey to the heart of America, and, because I'm writing this sentence, one story in which an ensemble cast of jive-speaking ethnic stereotypes unites to foil the epic machinations of a late Victorian supervillain.  Busiek tries to combine all these story types (except the last one, damn him) not just in the same arcs but in the same issues, producing comics so desperate to replicate all the tropes of 1970s Marvel Comics that they don't have time to do anything with them.

The genre mix can be effective at times.  Busiek crafts a visually appealing end to Black Velvet's tale--not coincidentally in one of the few pages where he zips it and lets the art tell the story--by wheeling in the magically empowered Silver Agent to stop her, not with sais and billy clubs, but with some nicely rendered pyrotechnics.  But he pays for it by bumping the Street Angel down to a weepy spectator who can only gape at the deus ex machina ending.  Busiek gains an incremental advancement in the protracted Silver Agent plot (now running for nearly two and a half years) at the expense of any payoff for the hero we've been following the last three issues (which ran over a comparatively sprightly ten months).

Also, I don't know if the depiction of the people of Astro City, who are overjoyed when a nostalgized hero from the past saves them and fixes all their problems, is meant to suggest something about the politics of the late seventies--it would be clever if it were, the first time the series has said something less than wholly obvious about its setting.  But I get the feeling we're supposed to take the Silver Agent's reassurances only at face value, as proof of his valor and the citizens' rediscovered loyalty and the book's long-running nostalgicore thematics.  For a book that's all about the past, The Dark Age doesn't have much of a sense of period or place; except for a couple of characters with sideburns, nothing in Book Two locates the story in the seventies.  Even the riot and the final issue's title, "Saturday Night Fever," feel wasted, like the comic is just going through the motions.

Brent Anderson's art remains a huge problem.  Except for the aforementioned page with the Silver Agent and Black Velvet, his action scenes are lifeless; anatomies are stiff or contorted; character designs are overwrought or uninspired, or both; backgrounds are under-rendered, if they're present at all.  This fight scene looks like it was composed with Colorforms.  (Or would that be Cray-o-forms?  And what happened to the bar's interior?)

I can't speculate on the reasons for the long delays between issues of Astro City, but if it's Anderson's art, the end result is no longer worth the wait.

Character design is still one of the book's greatest deficiencies.  You can immediately spot the Alex Ross-designed characters because they possess a trace of the mystery or grandeur of the iconic characters they're meant to evoke.  The others just muddle through the background, hoping we won't notice they're all composed from the same limited repetoire of quirks.  Somebody, either Busiek or Anderson, has a weird predilection for mashup characters who fuse two aspects into one body.  This issue alone sports Umbra, the Astro City Irregular who's partially bathed in shadow, and Jitterjack, the handsome customer up above who teaches us that combining two boring character designs does not yield one interesting one.  Not to mention all the characters like Black Velvet or Hellhound who contain internal dualisms, less graphic but equally cliched--Jitterjack even points out the similarity in his broken dialogue, because, again, why would Busiek show us something when he can tell us? 

Maybe all these dualistic characters are meant to draw on venerable superhero conventions, or maybe they're supposed to convey some signal theme for this arc.  But as I read the latest issue I could only interpret them as unintended but all too appropriate symbols for The Dark Age:  they try to compress too much into one figure, and end up with nothing.

Comments

[connor]

Dear Dr. Singer,

What did you think of the latest Batman (699)? I can't help thinking it was kind of a bust.

Sincerely,
Connor, Age 22
Formerly of Dartmouth (You helped me with my thesis)

[Marc Singer]

I'll probably have a post up soon, just out of a sense of obligation from having written about the first two parts. That shouldn't signal any disappointment with the issue--I loved it, but since it was devoted entirely to wrapping up the plot I don't think I have a whole lot new to say about it.

[Stephen Frug]

I read the first five (I think) Astro City trades, and enjoyed them, although less and less as they went on -- I felt like I'd sort of gotten the point with the first one, and while it was amplified in the later trades, there seemed to be less & less value in the additions. I haven't sought out this latest series (part one or two), and this sort of confirms my decision not to. Oh, if it shows up at my local library I might read it. But I'm not going to go buy it.

Frankly, I wonder if this particular vein is mined out, and it might be time to move on to something else.

[Marc]

I had high hopes when The Dark Ages started, despite my longstanding qualms with Astro City, because I thought Busiek's palpable love for the comics of the Bronze Age might produce something different from the usual condemnations of modern comics and celebrations of their supposedly innocent forebears, something that got to the heart of why the Bronze Age fascinates him. Instead it's just extended the condemnation back to the 1970s while the storytelling (once the consolation for the book's simplistic recitations of familiar themes) has deteriorated. If Book One was a sign that the vein was mined out, Book Two may be the canary dying in its cage.

[Ken Lowery]

I had completely forgotten about that JLA/Avengers post. Good god, what a waste of money that was.

Astro City is a peculiar beast for me. As with so many "classics" new and old, I came to the party very late, so I got to sit down and read a lot of the trades all in one shot. I was feverishly addicted at the time (up through Family Album, which I think is the third one but I'm not sure could someone please number these damn things) but once I stopped I found I didn't miss them. Right now the only thing I could tell you I distinctly remember is that spiffy supernatural hero for the, uh, vampiric part of town. Oh, crap, was that Top Ten?

Busiek seemed to stay away from pastiche, which is how I got three books in, but after awhile I pretty much got the idea he wasn't doing anything but recodifying comics history into his own personal canon, which when considered with your opinions about his Avengers run, may just be what he does all the time.

Once I figured out (more subconsciously than not, I admit) that, while a reasonably good story, recreation was all he wanted to do, I lost interest, and fast. If I want to be reminded of really great stories from years past... I'll just go read them myself.

[Marc]

Amen.

That spiffy supernatural hero was the Hanged Man in Astro City. Depressingly easy to confuse with Top Ten, isn't it? Although Top Ten never subsumed the story to the pastiche the way this does.

(Actually, I can't shake this weird suspicion that the Hanged Man is this volume's Simon Magus, still fighting the good fight after something killed or transformed him in the 80s. Busiek is still great at implying these fake continuities with all their little twists and turns, but if that story ever made it onto the page I would probably be just as frustrated as I am here.)

To end on a slightly more upbeat note, everybody should go check out Ken's blog for his fantastic movie reviews. The Pirates of the Caribbean 3 piece isn't just spot on; the last paragraph is one of the most intelligent and damning summations of geek culture and its darlings I've ever seen.

[Ken Lowery]

Ahem, well, thank you. That means a lot coming from you; I always thought this blog was a place that I simply wasn't smart enough to comment on. I'm not a dunce or anything, but I can recognize when folks are operating on a different level. So, thank you. That's very encouraging.

I don't believe I have any reviews hitting tomorrow, but I'll have three up next Friday: Darjeeling Limited, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and We Own the Night. I was less than impressed with the former two, and I'll be seeing the latter Monday night.

[Prankster]

Just to be Mr. Geek Continuity Guy, The Hanged Man has supposedly been around since the 19th century, so I doubt Simon Magus is him. Unless the fact that the character is a parallel for The Spectre is supposed to indicate that the character has had several host identities over the years, and Simon is one of them.

On a much more simplistic level, I always get a little frustrated that we never know, and may never find out, what happened to the various Astro City characters of the prior eras. That also touches on the frustrations with the books' painfully slow release schedule, which has taken us mostly away from modern-day Astro for several years now. I actually suspect The Dark Age would go down a lot easier if we'd gotten the fist 8 issues within a year--the Silver Agent story would seem more continuous, for starters.

And yes to Anderson's artwork, which, given how late the book is, is unforgivably sloppy. I've seen people on the Astro City forums suggest to Busiek that he should rotate writers--which was what they had planned to do in the first place--but he refuses to consider that idea. The man's loyal to his friend, which is nice and all, but the book which could have been his masterpiece is suffering because of it.

[Marc]

I think you're right about the release schedule.

I'd forgotten that Busiek said the Hanged Man has been around a while (although that seems to have mostly been imparted in Visitor's Guides and the like; there's only one on-panel mention of it). Funny that he hasn't shown up in any of the Dark Age issues, especially when less period-appropriate characters like the Gentleman have popped up in a couple of crowd shots. What could be less 1970s than a square-jawed white guy flying around in tails?

So this means we have yet another character like the Old Soldier or now the Silver Agent with a conveniently undefined history and a knack for showing up whenever the writer wants him to, to do whatever the writer needs him to. If the bifurcated characters are becoming repetitive, Busiek's many gods from the machine are even worse.