WONDERCON ‘08: ASTRO CITY SPOTLIGHT PANEL - NEWSARAMA

February 23rd, 2008 | by admin |

Original Post here: Tales from the Longbox

Astro City is really great stuff, I hope Busiek will be able to put this stuff out for a long time.

WONDERCON ‘08: ASTRO CITY SPOTLIGHT PANEL
by Ian Brill

As his creative partner Brent Anderson sat by his side Astro City writer Kurt Busiek declared that “I would promise you wonderment and delight but I’m going to do what I usually do at spotlight panels. I’ll talk about a few things and then just take questions. It sure beats planning.”

Announced was release of the Astro City: Beautie Doll special this week. The third volume of Astro City: The Dark Age was next, followed by a one-shot starring the character Astra, the fourth volume of The Dark Age and then a Silver Age special. The future is unplanned past that point. The first collected edition of The Dark Age storyline will appear in June, collecting the first two Dark Age mini-series.

Audience questions were then attended to, starting with an audience member asking if Busiek has Astro City’s entire storyline’s mapped out.

“We don’t have a roadmap,” Busiek said. “Unlike Sandman, where it’s building to a conclusion, it’s a series and we’re telling stories.”

Ideas like the Beautie Doll story were thought out before the first issue. Busiek said he had many stories he’d like to get to, one for instance concerning 18-year-old former sidekicks going on a soul searching road trip, but there’s no grand plan. Busiek does wants to do a story about super-pets playing poke and that might be their last issue, telling the crowd if cover artist Alex Ross has to draw dogs playing poker he’ll walk off the book.

Anderson told Busiek that he was impressed with how much of Astro City did seem predetermined. Busiek admitted that he did have the general idea down before Anderson was involved and from there, even with no great forethought, he can flesh out the rest of the story.

The idea of deconstructing/reconstructing superheroes was brought up. Busiek said he sees the point of the series as taking what we’ve learned from superhero deconstruction and putting the genre back together in a way that works for him. He employs a metaphor that the history of the superhero genre is like a map. First there is only one city, one type of superhero story. Then someone like Stan Lee or Frank Miller tells everyone that there are whole new cities to explore. Everyone else follows in their footsteps to those new cities. Busiek says the point of what Lee, Miller, Alan Moore and others did wasn’t for the rest of us to copy them but for the rest of us to be inspired and find new areas of the superhero genre to discover for our own.

When asked about what the view of superheroes in Astro City is, Busiek told the crowd that the crowd while Marvels is firmly about the point-of-view of the regular person witnessing these strange magnificent creatures Astro City changes its perspective from character to character. In particular was the story early on of Marta, the resident of Shadow Hill who works in Astro City. The story was rewritten numerous times because the goal just wasn’t being accomplished. What the story was meant to be was of a young woman who learns to appreciate her home. That’s where she is not dependent on the superhero like she is where she works. What was coming out was just the story of a woman in retreat. Busiek figured out that the reason why this story was giving him so much trouble was because American stories are mostly about conquering new frontiers and not about how great things are back home. When the story came out, Busiek achieving what he wanted with it, there was a lot of feedback just about Marta’s decision at the end. Busiek realized it was because he was writing against the American “man-o-myth.”

An audience member said that this particular comic book story was the only one he could get his mother to read. The mother said the story had to be written by a nice Jewish boy because it was about growing up in the Polish ghettos of Warsaw. Busiek replied that when his own mother read the Marvels story about Galactus’s arrival she told him it was the best Cuban Missile Crisis story she ever read.

When asked if the occurrence of the current Dark Age story line is due to Busiek being burnt out on writing things from the superhero perspective Busiek replied that he wasn’t burnt out but that the past two continuing storylines, <>Confessions and Tarnished Angel, were from the point-of-view of people very close to the superhero world. Concerning the pace of the story Anderson said that when he’s in the middle of working on a story it can feel like forever. Reading the story in completed form, he used Tarnished Angel as an example, everything reads swiftly. Anderson said that’s due to Busiek’s masterful sense of pace.

When asked about who in comics, besides themselves, is charting new courses in the superhero genre Busiek and Anderson had a hard time recalling anything on the stands today that stood out to them. Busiek did praise Electric Girl from AiT/Planet Lar as doing something completely different with the approach to a superhero character. Busiek also mentioned The Umbrella Academy from Dark Horse. He said it’s following the path of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol but doing a very good job at it.
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