“Welcome to Astro City”
Cover Price: $2.50
Bargain Price: $0.25
Cover Date: September 1996
Kurt Busiek’s Astro City is always a joy. For the uninitiated, each issue of the series tells the story of a regular person living in a world filled with super-hero analogs. This particular issue deals with a single dad and his two daughters moving to the eponymous city and their first experiences with a super-heroic disaster. It’s a pretty low key story and, at first blush, might seem unexceptional or, for your friendly neighborhood blogger, difficult to talk about, but the low key stuff really is the strength of Astro City as Busiek time and again mines the super-heroic world for little moments that, while profound, are dealt with in such a perfectly casual manner that his incredible insight into what it would be like to live in the Marvel or DCU can be momentarily missed. In this issue, it’s the quiet moment when the residents of our protagonist’s apartment building ascend to the roof, some with lawn chairs, to watch the apocalyptic battle taking place in the skies overhead. It’s real Lee/Kirby end of the world stuff, dangerous beyond human comprehension, but the people stand and watch, knowing that, should the worst happen, the brick and mortar of their home won’t protect them, but never truly fearing that such an end will occur. Of course the heroes will win, they always do and you may as well watch, even if, for many of the bystanders, it’s as common as the rain.
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