Kurt Busiek's Astro City 1

Short Review: Not a (great) alternative Superman title. Honest.

You know, it's getting so that a man can't depend on anything. Used to be, Image was synonymous with crap. Liefeld, Larsen, McFarlane, Silvestri, all did bad superhero comics. Some were the same bad superhero comic they'd done before, slightly revised, and some weren't, but they were Bad, dammit. Now, in the last year, things start to look up. Groo, The Maxx (to be fair, the Maxx was here for quite a while), Alan Moore on WildC.A.T.s, and now this. Thank god Rob Liefeld's still turning out unadulterated fecal matter, or I'd have to go out and evangelise Image.

Anyway, onto the story, which is the first of an apparently non-continuous (as in, not a single unifying viewpoint) series of views of superhero life in superhero-filled Astro City. First off, the story of Samaritan, a mild-mannered newspaper researcher with a secret identity as a selfless protector of the people. This will sound familiar to all fans of Kal-El, but the twist given by Kurt Busiek is the examination of a life tirelessly devoted to humanity, and how a person could hope to survive mentally and physically under this pressure. There's an incredible sense of wonder and belief about the whole thing, and at the end, I believed, which is all that's expected. Brent Anderson's art is wonderful, and Alex Ross's cover art is Alex Ross's art, which is to say, brilliant. A great comic.