{[['
']]}
']]}
Astro City #4
Publisher: DC Comics (Vertigo imprint)
Cover Date: November 2013
Release Date: Sept. 11, 2013
Cover Price: 3.99
Pages: 40
Format: Standard, glossy pages.
Editor: Kristy Quinn
"On the Sidelines"
Pages: 30 | Story Grade: A
DUKE"S NUMERIC ASSIGNMENT: 82.50
Cover: 8.75 | Plot: 8.75 | Script: 9.75 | Layout: 9.00 | Artwork: 6.50 | Production: 7.00 | Editing: 7.50 | Value: 8.00 | Collectibility: 8:00 | Gosh-Wow: 9.25
THE CREDIT BOX
Writer: Kurt Busiek
Artist: Brent Eric Anderson
Colorist: Wendy Broome
Letterers: John G. Roshell & Jimmy Betancourt of Comicraft
Cover: Alex Ross
Asst. Editor: Jessica Chen
Executive Editor: Shelly Bond
MAJOR CHARACTERS (in order of appearance)
• Martha "Sully" Sullivan (2nd app., origin) • Unnamed go-between who looks like Moloch (1st app.) • Majordomo (1st app.) • Magda [surname unrevealed] (1st app.) • Samaritan
THE BOTTOM LINE, UP TOP
This is how you give your narrator a voice. One can't help but get a sense for the main character, and a feeling that no one else could have told this tale. This is really a great book that explores what happens when you have super-powers, but have no driving need to go out and right wrongs, or rob banks. My only complaint is that Brent Anderson's art looks terribly rushed. He's a great draftsman as I know from past experience and his layouts are near impeccable. But there are parts of this issue that look like I feel when an editor is breathing down my neck as the presses start to roll. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
SYNOPSIS
Martha "Sully" Sullivan is enjoying breakfast at The Millrace, an Astro City restaurant, between film jobs, when she is approached with a job offer. When the go-between will not take no for an answer, she uses her telekinetic powers to threaten him with a fork. The man promises Sully she will regret her choice.
Sully then recounts her early life, having presumably gained her powers while in the womb when her mother was a bystander to a "mento-field" fueled battled between Prof. Borzoi and The Gentleman. As a teen, Sully attempted to become a super-hero named "Mind-Over-Mattie," but lost her nerve after stopping a carjacker in a manner that caused him multiple injuries.
Back in the present Sully is overcome by a gas booby trap in her apartment, at which time her mind turns again to the past, when she tried her hand at being a super-villain, only to find herself having too much integrity to take the cash she telekinetically forced out of a slot machine.
As Sully wakes up, she finds herself at the feet of Majordomo, a new super-villain intent on creating an army, willing or not, of people like her who have super-powers but not the ambition to use them for personal, unearned gain.
Thrown in a cell to begin her "indoctrination," Sully recalls how she finally found a use for her powers in the film industry, helping movie directors realize their vision by flipping objects and people on screen, controlling explosions, or moving animatronics. She also remembers the people like herself whom she's met, people who also use their powers in everyday jobs, often in the film industry, rather than for super-heroics or villainy. These people, including Sully's good friend Magda, who can talk to machines, formed a loose-knit social group called The Sideliners , some of whom Sully recognizes among Majordomo's captives.
Just then, Magda speaks to Sully through her watch, advising that she's gained access to Majordomo's helicarrier. Once Marga disables to collars that nullify their powers, the Sideliners break free and bring down the airship, while Sully incapacitates Majordomo, advising that he's too stupid to know he's taken the name of a servant as his would-be world-conquering moniker. The Sideliners then turn Majordomo and his henchmen over to E.A.G.L.E. and go their separate ways, but only after exchanging contact info with potential new members of their group found among Majordomo's captives.
Back at The Millrace, Sully is again trying to enjoy breakfast when Samaritan lands for a brief talk between emergencies. He says the Sideliners could have called on Honor Guard, but Sully insists she and her friends can take care of themselves, that, in fact, they need to fight their own battles. Samaritan then says that at least his group can try and find a way to mitigate the trouble villains like Majordomo cause for the Sideliners, given the number of times they've proven useful, and flies off, leaving Sully to finally enjoy her muffin in peace.
COVER — 8.75/10
This is really a fantastic cover. Alex Ross gets the look and the hand gesture just right, such that no cover copy is needed. We known instinctively that this woman is signaling disinterest in the super-heroic chaos happening beside her. With a lesser artist, this pose could just as easily have looked like the woman is waving the heroes on to battle, or to do her bidding.
Of course, on a second look I notice there are a couple of villains facing the opposite direction form the heroes. So, I guess rather that everyone racing off to action, as it at first appears, what we are actually seeing is the battle taking place right here and now.
My only complaint is that the pastel colors of the cover logo blend into the background. It would have been better, I think, to have made the colors a bit brighter and the letters a bit bolder, to make them POP out from the scene, rather than sink into it.
PLOT — 8.75/10
The plot here is pretty simple — bad guy kidnaps super-powered civilians to do his bidding, super-power civilians kick bad-guys ass. What makes this so great, however, is that Busiek is able to tell a complete story within the covers of a single issue in a way that makes this simple plot seem so completely elegant. In almost any other comic, the writer would have stretched this plot over at least four issues, but Busiek deftly compresses where he needs to, focuses on what's important, and gives us a complete reading experience with no lingering questions. Not a bad day's work.
My only disappointment is that Magda did not come on scene until after the fight was over. I was really expecting, was actually longing for, an aerial dogfight between Majordomo's minions and Lizzie, the jet-powered Model T — talk about "Chitty, Chitty, Biff! Pow! Smash!" That would've been awesome!
SCRIPT — 9.75/10
The key, of course, is Busiek's script. Much of the story is narrated by Sully as she tells her life's story, and that could easily have become quite the chore to wade though. However, Busiek imbibes her with a voice that breaths with a life all its own. We come away feeling we've been told a very unique tale that nobody else could have recounted in quite the same fashion. We feel that we know Sully and, more than that, that we want to know her.
Now, compare this issue to The Flash #23.1, also out this week. Both stories are character driven, with the protagonist narrating his or her own backstory. Both also include a humanizing element to increase reader identification — in The Flash, it's the narrator's love for the soothing sound of crickets, here it's the longing for the taste of a singularly delicious English muffin. But while Sully seems like a fully-realized individual — we can almost hear her voice in our head as she speaks — the Reverse-Flash comes off less well, his words seeming as if they could have been spoken by anyone who happened along at that moment.
With The Flash, its like building blocks being put in place — "this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened — whereas here it's more like Legos, coming together in a way that's both unique and completely natural, as if they couldn't have made anything else. And, by the end, Sully has given so much of herself that the reader can't help but feel a closeness to her, rooting for her and actually cheering her on as she finally gets to savor that perfect English muffin.
Apart from how Sully drops telling details about herself while moving the plot along, Busiek does nice tricks with his other characters. Magda only gets a few lines, but is so infectious in her manner that one can hardly wait until she makes another appearance. Samaritan, frankly, sounds more like Superman that Superman has in years, maybe decades. And Majordomo sounds wooden and two-dimensional, but on purpose, as if to caricature arch-villains everywhere.
On that latter front, I suppose if I had been editor I would have tried to talk Busiek into adding a panel of Majordomo not using villain-speak, to make clear that his manner and mode is a put on, based on how he thinks he's supposed to sound. I can picture Majordomo turning to one of his henchmen as Sully is hauled off and saying something like, "Was that too much? I don't think that was too much. Do you think it was too much? Weeeell . . . what if it was? Pop always said go big or go home and I am going for global domination here after all."
The other thing I like about Busiek's Astro City work is how adept he is at what I call "The Mr. Leslie Effect." In the original Star Trek, you had a bunch of recognizable characters forever running in and out of the action, sometimes as part of the main story, more often lurking in the background. It cemented the impression that the Federation was not limited to the primary bridge crew, that there was an entire world of actions and reactions taking place all around them. It forced the viewer to invest a bit of themselves in the show as they perhaps wondered what these ancillary characters did when not on screen. Whether the viewer creates their own fan fiction based on those unseen moments, or just idly notes, 'Hey, I've seen that dude before," it enhances the world-building at play by giving the viewer parts of that world that belong to them alone. It's the same in comics and one reason why, if you're writing the Legion of Super-Heroes, you don't actually want every member to take a starring turn. Here, I wonder what that battle between The Gentleman and Prof. Borzoi was like, I wonder at what adventures the Sideliners have had in the past, and how they aided the Honor Guard, I want to know who Starpower is and if Sully knows him in his civilian identity without knowing who he is. Part of me wants Busiek to answer these questions some day. But part of me doesn't, because by the time he does I will have answered those questions in my own mind, and those scenes belong to me now.
LAYOUT — 9.00/10
Anderson's work is as strong as ever. Every panel compliments the script and moves the story along without distracting from it. I love, love, love that he does not go for crazy panel shapes or break the panel border, unless doing so actually benefits the story. As with coloring, there's a lot of things one should not do in designing a comics page just because one can.
My only concern this time around is the page in which Sully threatens Not-Moloch with a fork. I thought at first that Sully was holding it on the far end from off panel and that Not-Moloch grabbed it out of her hand. It was not until the following page that I realized Sully was actually using her power to levitate the fork. I'd love to know from Busiek if that misdirection was intentional. It could have been, and that would not have been an invalid choice as it prolonged the mystery of why someone wanted so desperately to hire this old lady, and gave a little zing to the scene with the realization that the conversation had gone down with a little more menace that at first supposed, and not on the part of the character who seemed most menacing. However, it didn't work that way for me as a reader. When I found out Sully was telekinetic, I turned back a page to reread the fork scene and came away thinking, "Well, that wasn't very clear at all," rather than, "Point to you, Messrs. Busiek and Anderson, you rascals."
ARTWORK — 6.50/10
I hope I've made clear that I really, really like Anderson's work. However, I do think Astro City could use an inker. The inks looks rushed in a lot of places. In others, the lines are unnecessarily thick. The fork scene, for example, looks like a couple of panels that could have been lifted from Tom Mandrake's work on The Spectre. In other places, such as when Sully is walking home from the casino, or Majordomos cape, it looks like lines were literally scribbled in with a magic marker.
I would much rather have an inker who can compliment Anderson brought on board, and Astro City kept on an monthly schedule, than suffer delays, or work that is less than Anderson is capable of. Now, for my money, any inker that is hired must be someone who is adept at old-fashioned brushwork. Anderson's work would look best I think, if embellished by someone like a George Klein or a Murphy Anderson. Hey, Anderson and Anderson, that would have been a sweet combination.
PRODUCTION — 7.00/10
The coloring on this book was kind of hit and miss for me, mostly because of the photoshopping techniques. That kind of effect generally works best when the painted-in image is far behind the characters. The blue skies streaked by thin white clouds works very well, for example. Also, in an exception to the rule, the pattern used for Sully's prison cell adds a nice texture that enhances the sense of isolation. The sidewalk outside the bar here Sully and Magda meet sort of works okay, probably because of the shadowing, which mitigates the sense of characters standing on a screen by given the walk a sense of perspective. The opposite happens when Samaritan visits Sully on the restaurant patio. With no shadow to lend the deck some perspective, the colored pattern does not look at all like a floor receding into the distance. Instead, it looks exactly like what it is, a vertical pattern with some artwork pasted on top of it. I'll note also that the effect used for grass where the helicarrier lands looks fake as hell and distracts from the art, rather than enhancing it, as do the cloud-filled skies. The panels where a flat green in used to fill in grass and trees works much, much better, and probably took half the time to render.
I don't have much to say about the lettering, and that's usually good thing. By and large, the lettering that is best is the lettering one fails to notice.
But there are two other production problems, both of which I would lay at the editor's feet. The scene where Sully wakes up after being gassed is rendered in a blur effect. This technique almost never works for me but it is a particularly egregious choice here. The blur is meant to signal Sully's wooziness upon waking up, but it's HER vision that would be blurry, not that of the person looking at her. If the panel had been drawn from her perspective, as if we're looking through her eyes, it might have made sense. But, as it is, it's a fine example of someone doing a thing that's technically possible with the coloring without thinking about why they are doing it.
The other issue I have is the pixilated image of the next issue displayed on the letter's page. I see that all the time in the newspaper industry, when someone runs a photo (it happens most often online) that is fu*ked up, just to run an image of some sort. You don't have to. Nothing is an option. It's better to replace the image with nothing, if you have nothing else available, than to scream, "Hey, everybody, look at what a bunch of ass-clowns we are!"
EDITING — 7.50/10
So, not much to sat say about the editing. As usual, most every critique given above ended up dinging this category for points. Basically, I get the idea that this issue was successful because of Busiek and Anderson and the choices they made before handing in pages, not because of a strong guiding hand along the way.
VALUE — 8.00/10
At 40 pages of content, 24 pages of story, and a letters page (Yay!) Astro City is one of the better buys in the current world of comics. It's a book that will take up a good 25 to 30 minutes of your time, which makes parting with that $4 a fair bit easier. Better, an issue like this one presents a complete story, which for my money means added value. I'd much rather pay to get beginning, middle AND end than just a bit of stuff in the middle, any ol' day.
COLLECTIBILITY — 8.00/10
The regular availability of trade collections tend to depress the market value of Astro City back issues. Still, I think this book will remain more collectible than most. For one thing, with so many first appearances by characters with real break-out potential, it could become a key issue. But, more to the point, it's a done-in-one story, meaning, for me at least, the story is more memorable, making it a bit harder to part with than books that may just have parts of a story and so read better in collected form. If there are many collectors who think like me, they may hang on to this issue in later years while letting go of other comics, even Astro City comics, in favor of the trade editions. That potentially makes this a harder-to-find issue in years to come. Also, keep in mind that this is a fourth issue, which is usually the last one retailers order before seeing how the first issue sold. Orders generally continue to decline, but can sometimes start to tick upward after three months of hedging bets. So, you've either got a book that could be the lowest selling of the early issues in a run, or one that ends up flooded with second and third prints, hiking the value of the original.
THE "GOSH-WOW" FACTOR — 9.25/10
Well, I think I've covered this petty well. I think the best thing I can say about this issue is that I am now more excited for future appearance by the Sideliners than I am for Honor Guard. And seriously, whenever I am this close to writing a letter to the editor asking for another outing of a new character, like I might have done back in the day, that is truly a gosh-wow moment.
DATA ERRATA
Pages: 40
Story Pages: 24
Other Editorial Pages: 4
Circulation: TBD
Panels: 108 (4.50/pg.)
Words: 3,102 (129.25/pg.)
Story Reading Time: 18:20
All Content Reading Time: 22:10
Story Cost (cover price/story pages): 16.63¢/pg.
Content Cost (cover price/all editorial pages): 14.25¢/pg.
Entertainment Cost (cover price/reading time): 21.77¢/pg.
Total Entertainment Cost (cover price/reading time all material): 18.00¢/pg.
Interior Ad Pages: 12 (including 10 of house ads)
House Ads: (Just think if these had been paid ads! $1 comic!!)
- Vertigo imprint "Defy" campaign, 3 pages
- Unwritten original graphic novel
- Trillium limited series, 2 pages
- Coffin Hill new series
- Hinterkind new series
- The Wake limited series
- Fables Encyclopedia hardcover reference guide
Product Ads:
- New York Comicon
- DC Collectibles Sandman and Death bookends
Cover Ads:
- (inside front) WB Arrow season one DVD
- (inside back) Midtowncomics.com new comic subscription service
- (outside back) Batman: Arkham Origins WB Games video game
Additional Editorial Material:
- Untitled letters page (one page)
- "Desktop" — Preview of Coffin Hill (two pages)
- "Graphic Content" — Promo/indicia page (one page)
Characters: ~20 (including five majors, listed above)
Minor Characters (in order of appearance, not counting background "civilians")
- (cover only) Winged Victory(wing only) • Natalia Furst • Spice • M.P.H. • Gloo (?) • Unknown villain with multiple red eyes
- An unnamed carjacker • Professor Borzoi (mention only, 1st?) • The Gentleman (mention only) • Jack-in-the-Box (cameo) • Jermey, a failed movie director turned FX coordinator • Lenny, a film director • Marty, Sully's agent (mentioned only) • Majordomo's unnamed henchmen, 13 in all, two with speaking parts • Eddie, an apparent member of the Sideliners • Gloria Williams (1st app.) • Sherm Howarth (1st app.) • Colin O'Carr (1st app.) • Brian Morgenstern (1st app.) • Surandra Sethi (1st app.) • Carlos Andriani (1st app.) • Lizzy, Magda's sooped-up Model-T (off panel, 1st mention) • Starpower (cameo, 1st app.) • Additional unnamed super-powered civilians • E.A.G.L.E. (cameo) • Assemblyman (mention only) • Dr. Saturday (mention only, 1st?)
Settings: 8
- Astro City • The Millrace, an Astro City restaurant (1st app.) • Las Vegas • A Los Angeles bar • Four movie sets • Majordomo's helicarrier
Gadgets, Gizmos and Cool Tech:
Post a Comment