By: Kurt Busiek (story), Brent Eric Anderson (art), Alex Sinclair & Wendy Broome (colors)
The Story: Reform school for robots.
The Review: Much as I love the superhero genre, I recognize its limitations as much as anyone else does, and Astro City frequently helps me in this regard. By constantly abridging the superhero material to their essence—hero versus villain; punches, blasts, explosions; rubble and property damage; inevitable triumph of good over evil—Busiek reveals that the most interesting parts of a superhero story are the things that take place outside of it.
Busiek applies this approach so often in Astro City that it’d almost be formulaic if it didn’t yield such wildly different results each time. This issue, he explores the aftermath of a common feature of superhero battles we often take for granted: the wanton destruction of robots, giant or otherwise. In doing so, he takes something we would never give a second thought to and finds the emotional layers hidden underneath.
At the center of this excavation is Ellie,* an older woman who scavenges (and, if necessary, digs up) the sites of superhero-robot battles, reconstructs the machines, and gives them a new lease on life. No longer violent pawns of their villainous masters, they become Ellie’s dearest friends, the subjects and employees of her robot museum in the Arizona desert. They go from indistinguishable copies of various models—Cyberwings, Skuttlebugs, A-Taxx 7Z—to individuals with such domestic names as Jeremy, Davey, and Rinaldo.
As you can imagine, Ellie is an eccentric old bird, but an endearing one. Very quickly, you catch on to how much repression she’s under, though we only see glimpses of the past she desperately tries to avoid: her as a homeless vagrant, pushing her cart around outside an electronics store; her, younger, locked into a torturous-looking piece of high-tech headgear and screaming as it’s activated. She relates to her mechanical charges because of their affinity as “[p]oor, broken things.”
For this reason, you can understand why she indulges her nephew Fred’s many obvious flaws, despite knowing better. We don’t need Ellie’s familiarity with Fred’s past troubles to see that he’s only going to ruin her peaceful, if somewhat lonely life. Well-intentioned, but hopelessly entitled and blind to his own faults, he pins his failures on anything other than himself: “I should have been [successful]!
You know how it is. Everyone out to screw you, as much as they can.” His thoughtless opportunism not only wrecks the spirit of Ellie’s robot museum, it disturbs Ellie’s hard-won stability and leads him to cooperate with someone who’s clearly out to take advantage of her genius. Fred operates almost exactly to type as the unscrupulous loser relative who just gets in everyone else’s way; he’s like Lucas from Transformers: Age of Extinction, except we probably won’t be so lucky to see him freeze-incinerated.
There’s a looseness to Anderson’s art that, while far from unsightly, mars what would otherwise be rather attractive conventional artwork. At the same time, this slight imperfection makes the non-costumed characters look all the more human. Anyway, Anderson excels where it counts, which in Astro City means the characters’ expressions and body language. Ellie is fully realized in this issue, her nervous smile as she claps to interrupt Fred’s rant exposing her averseness to conflict, her wide, boisterous gestures showing how she comes to life as her machine friends do.
Conclusion: The threats in the issue are a bit obvious, but the rest of the plot and character developments come from Busiek’s usually interesting angles.
Grade: B+
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: * Who happens to share my own niece’s nickname, which hopefully isn’t a portent of my niece’s future.
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Conclusion