The Extraordinarily Human World of Astro City — Issue 1

By Samuel Mauricio Junior

Astro City is Kurt Busiek, Brent Andersson and Alex Ross’s critically acclaimed supehero story. A series of several comics that seek to explore the human side of an extraordinary world inhabited by super-powered champions and menaces.

Image for post — Image source: Image Comics

The first issue of Astro City gives us the story of Samaritan, the Superman-esque caped wonder of the titular city. We get to see how his responsibilities as a hero completely take over his life, and how something like the luxury of flying for the pleasure of it is denied to him.

In my dreams I fly.

The very first sequence of this issue shows what can be expected from this story. We see Samaritan flying naked and completely free with a warm smile in his face. That’s until his super-threat alert goes off and his dreams send him back to Earth. After framing our protagonist as this larger than life figure, the book has him go through a very human scene as he picks up his uniform from his closet and flies as fast as he can while thinking about how there’s never enough time thanks to his work.

The beauty of this sequence is how it shows us the scope of what Samaritan is, and then gives it a dose of humanity that fully grounds him giving a strong aspect of relatability to the story. It’s all in how Samaritan waking up like someone’s getting up for work, picking his uniform from his closet, like he iron it and left it ready to start his day contrats with the figure flying freely in his dreams.

Once the Samaritan is out of his apartment we get to see what a day on his life is like, through several panels showing his many heroic deeds as the day goes along, a big motif in these sequences is how he counts the seconds between each moment to make no time is wasted while he saves people from all manner of threats. It’s a great way to show us just how big the responsibilities Samaritan deals with are and how much they weight on him.

Not even through his secret identity as Asa Martin, who works verification in a magazine, he gets a minute to rest. It’s another way to show how much Samaritan’s role as a hero takes over every aspect of his life, his Clark Kent persona is not an aspect of his personality, but purely a disguise he uses to have access to information so he can predict and stop as many disasters as he can.

Through Asa Martin we see how Samaritan builds emotional walls around him. He doesn’t allows himself to be friends with his colleagues or even be in a romantic relationship, all because he does not have time in his life for anything that doesn’t involve making sure the world is in one piece and still there the next day.

I can’t save everybody — but I can still do what I can.

What’s beautiful about Astro City is that it’s a story that does not seeks to destroy the genre like so many others that that show superheroes as flawed and frustraded people. Samaritan is a very somber figure that goes on about how exhausting his life is, but he is still a hero in every sense of the word. We see several displays of decency, both big and small, that are completely genuine and illustrate just how many lives he impacts everyday. It is never implied that he secretly resents or despise the people he protects, and his altruism is never questioned or showed as naivety as he is very aware that he can’t save everyone, but also that every life he saves matters.

Astro City is is a superhero book through and through. In it we can have the introspective narration about the strenuous daily journey a hero goes through everyday, juxtaposed with a fight against a lab experiment who’s living embodiment of human fear. We see him fight robots, giant proto-plasmatic life forms, save cats from trees and join other superheroes to stop bank robbers wearing animal masks. Astro City never stops being a superhero story, as it shows no need to sacrifice the more ludicrous aspects of the genre to explore complex characters and build an interesting world.

Astro Thoughts

Kurt Busiek writing in this first issue is tight. No page here is wasted as we see Samaritan’s day as a scattershot sequence of events, from stopping disasters, to super-team meetings, to fighting super-villains, it all shows just how busy a single day in the hero’s life is. Busiek narration for the Samaritan gives him a somber and tired voice, always remarking about how he can’t even enjoy the simple things like the view as he flies because he needs to get to every disaster as quickly as possible. It paints Samaritan as a noble, but tragic figure, making easy to sympathize with and relate to.

The art team manages to translate what Astro City is going for to great effect. Brent Anderson’s artstyle is reminiscent of classic superhero stories, Samaritan is a squared jawed, cape wearing superhero, but with a look of constant exhaustion that’s beautifully contrasted with the hero’s version in his dreams that carries a vibrant smiles. the constant shift of scenarios gives the artist the chance to show us a lot, from cityscapes, to natural disasters, to super-team headquarters, to nightmare monsters that are all very well done.

Once the Honor Guard makes their appearance we get to see Alex Ross’s contributions with a set of diverse characters that have fantastic designs all telling their own stories throuh visual, leaving the reader curious to the possibilities that these characters may offer.

All of it is brought together and elevated by Steve Buccellato’s colloring, a mixture of warm colors and heavy shadows that gives the book more of the classic superhero feel to it, but grounding it, making the world of Astro City almost palpable. Samaritan is again a great example of that, as his red uniform with a white star and blue cape is a very striking image, but the heavy shadows highlighting his melancholy bring him down to Earth, something that’s beautifully illustrated by him falling and entering his dreams both in the beginning and ending of the book.

The lettering by Richard Starking is very well done. The narration boxes and speech balloons do a great job of guiding the reader’s eyes through the pages, it complements the art and it gives a good flow to a story with a lot of dialogue.

Astro City is a fantastic template for any cape comic to follow. Through great writing and art it creates a fully realized world that’s extraordinary and weird, but also grounded and human. It’s first issue tells a beautiful story about a hero who has no time to live a life because of his reponsabilities, but who will also never stop helping, because that is all he can do.

Astro City Issue 1

Writer: Kurt Busiek

Artist: Brent Andersson

Letterer: Richard Sparking

Ruby Rose and Her Unattainable Ghost.

By Samuel Mauricio Junior

Summer Rose is one of the most frustrating character in RWBY, she’s an integral part of so many characters narratives, but at the same time is one that we know so little about. But you know who else knows very little about her, who her sister has to constantly remind us has no form of connection or memory of Summer Rose? Our dear Red herself, Ruby. Yeah, if what Yang said a number of times in the show is true, Ruby has no recollection of her mother, all she ever had were stories told about her, which probably shaped Summer to be this amazing, bigger than life, heroine in Ruby’s mind. The way I see it, almost every aspect of Ruby’s narrative is about her trying to connect in some way to her mother.

As a character Ruby is almost a superhero, an inspiring and unreluctant adventurer who’s always ready to help people just because is the right thing to do. When you put that in context of this ideia Ruby’s view of who her mother would very much plays into that. Having only know Summer in stories her family told her, (and knowing Tai’s, Qrow’s and Yang’s personalities and how they would tell a story to a child), Ruby must view her mother as this amazing gentle hero who only did good in her life, and blessed every heart she touched. To me that construct of Summer informs Ruby actions, how she tries to uphold that ideal and live up to that example, her desire to be a huntress so she can help as many people as she can, it’s all a way she found to create a connection to her mother. To learn from her and be someone she would be proud of.

Also, living her life as a way to pay respect the ones she lost is not something out of character for Ruby. Her motivation from volume 4 and forward have been very much about keeping the memories of people she loved and lost alive through her actions.

Another moment that plays into that in a more direct way is when we see Ruby talking to her mother’s grave. Though I can’t tell from personal experience, in stories, talking to the graves of lost loved one usually is a way for characters to keep their memory and bonds to those loved ones alive. But Ruby doesn’t have memories and a bond to Summer, she never had any form of relationship with her mother. All she has is stories, pictures and a piece of rock with her name on it, and she tries her best to create a connection to Summer through those objects.

I even see that in her clothing. If I’m not mistake, Miles did say Ruby models herself after Qrow, but I think few will disagree with me that her clothes are far more reminiscent of Summer’s than they are of Qrow’s. And what would that mean? Well that it’s a way to try to create that connection to her mother by to looking like her and, through that, trying to understand who she was. Why she wore the clothes she wore? Why she chose the weapons she used? Why she chose to live the way she lived?

But unfortunately, Ruby will probably never have that connection, unless she finds some recording Summer left forher, or something happens that allows her to talk directly to Summer. Ruby will forever have this ghost in the form of her mother that she will never fully understand and connect to. But thankfully, thanks to her friends, both the ones going with her in her journey and the ones she moves forward for, she’ll have more than enough bonds to live a great life.

Summer lost the chance of seeing her daughter growing up, but she left an incredible legacy that shaped Ruby into the hero Remnant needs her to be. And now, we get the chance to see Ruby build her own legacy.

Nora — Warrior, Sister, Friend

Nora Valkyrie is without a doubt one of the most beloved characters in RWBY, her spunky hyperactive personality can captivate anyone, as well as her capacity of reducing the biggest monster in Remnant to dust, and her boops that take anyone’s breath away. But for someone with such an upbeat personality, Nora has one of the darkest backstories in the show, which, when contrasted with her current history, makes her into one of the most amazing characters in the whole show.

In “Kuroyuri”, the tenth chapter of volume 4, we see Nora as a kid for the first time in one of my favorite moments of visual storytelling in anything.

This image tells so much about what her character has been through. The way she holds the bread shows that she’s famished, her dirty clothes show that she’s been surviving alone for quite a while. The design of the clothes also gives a lot to speculate on: the more western influence gives the ideia that she’s not from Kuroyuri, possibly not even from Mistral. Than another great scene gives something to speculate about what happened to her family.

The fact that Nora freezes when the Grimm attack shows that she went through something similar before that traumatized her to a great extent, most probably the death of her family. Here’s where we get into a lot of my speculation: I like to think that, given her real life cultural influences, Nora’s family were travellers who didn’t stay for a long time in the kingdoms and prefered to wander through Remnant, like vikings, (only without all the pillaging and murder, Raven already has that part covered). To me that could also explain how a child would survive for so long on her own in such a dangerous world.

Seriously, congratulations to the CRWBY for informing so much about a character using mostly visual storytelling. It’s a rarity, especially with so many stories that try to milk every aspect of their foundation. It was done incredibly well here.

But to me what make Nora such a great character is not just her dark and tortured past, but the reading you get of the character when you analize her in the context of that past.

When it comes to her personality: having Ren at her side allowed Nora to be happy again, more than anything she could be a kid again. So Nora’s explosive, exagerated and childish attitude that we all love so much comes from her finally being able to reconnect with the childhood she lost with her family.

But there isn’t the risk of Nora becoming lost in an imaginary reality where she relives her child days forever. That’s because of the other side of the thunder goddess: the warrior side of Nora. With Nora as a warrior we have a courageous and fierce brawler who’s always ready for a fight. She relishes in combat and brings a big smile every time she’s charged up for battle and has the chance to fight every giant monster in sight.

But even then, she’s also kept from being a one dimensional brute who’s in love with violence. It’s all thanks to her relationships with her loved ones. Nora’s loyalty to the people she loves is to me her greatest attribute. That goes from her love and dedication to Ren in upholding their promise of keeping each other safe.

To Nora being ready to protect Ruby at the smallest suspicion that someone could be a threat to her.

To her fraternal love towards Jaune, talking in a very calming and comforting manner when he doesn’t understand what’s happening to him when he awakens his semblance.

And all those elements together gives us a powerful, lovable and caring warrior who’s ready to break the legs and everything else from the scariest beings in the world to protect the people she loves.

Who’s overall a well rounded and layered character who’s not defined by a single aspect of her narrative, and who’s every second of screentime is a delight.

Basicaly, Nora Valkyrie is the best.

The Legend of Wonder Woman – Reinventing Icons

Reinventing a almost eight decades old icon might be one the most scary and challeging tasks a writer might face. Fortunately, writer and artist Renae De Liz was more than up to the task with her beautiful retelling of Wonder Woman’s origin: Legend of Wonder Woman.

Harking back to the character’s World War II roots, De Liz retells the history of Diana’s universe brilliantly. From the birth of the Amazons, to her adventures in Paradise Island, her meeting with Steve Trevor, her trip to Men’s World and her heroics as Wonder Woman.

By exploring themes that have been central to Wonder Woman stories, and reworking aspects from the Golden Age in a amazing way, De Liz crafts a tale full of heart and imaginantion, with great heroic adventures and heart gripping moments.

Princess Diana is given a beautiful character arc. We see her growth by witnessing several moments of her life. Her childhood as a inconsequential child eager to learn how to fight and protect her home. Her late teen years as a compassionate young woman exploring the wonders of her home. Her time on our world, as a warrior lost in a land she doesn’t understand. And ultimately, her years as Wonder Woman, where she becomes a full blown superhero, ready to dedicate her life to the protection of the entire planet.

Diana’s missions is reimagined. Now her journey to Men’s World is imposed on her. She’s stranded on a world engulfed by war, wanting only to go back home. But, through the bonds she forms with the people she meet, and who learn to love her, Diana regains her strenght. And thanks to her empahty and sense of duty to the innocents suffering with the horrors of war, she realizes where she’s really needed, and with time, what she has to become.

It’s a powerful tale that starts with the instrospection of a child wanting to be a warrior, to the epic and cosmic scope of a hero chosen by the spirit of Earth to protect the planet.

Her supporting cast follows suit with excellent reimaginations of characters from Wonder Woman’s history. Hippolyta, the immortal queen who wanted nothing, but a child and is ready to do everything to protect her daughter. Alcippe, Diana’s mentor and a powerful warrior loyal only to her people. Steve Trevor, a dorky, but absolutely charming and good natured Air Force pilot who serves as Diana’s love interest. And Etta Candy, Wonder Woman’s insanely charismatic and loyal partner in butt-kicking. It’s a fantastic cast with their own journeys and themes, that are made greater by their relationship with Diana.

And of course, a great superhero comic needs great villains and threats to be overcomed. Throughout the series Diana faces several challenges. Treacherous Amazons leading a conspiracy agaist her mother. Undead soldiers tricked into coming back to life. The Duke of Deception, a tragic figure shackled by his anger and the manipulations of higher forces. The wrath of the gods themselves. And even the bringer of armageddon who came from the stars.

Through and through Diana keeps fighting. Even in her darkest moments, she remains a hero. Always ready to extend her hand to those in need and break the chains of terror and oppression with a all-powerful truth that empowers her: We are worth fighting for.

This is without a doubt, one of the best Wonder Woman comics ever published. Keeping true to the character’s core. Delivering several fun adventures. And being some of the best superhero comics have to offer.