Listen, now. Read this carefully, because I am going to tell you something important. More than that: I am about to tell you one of the secrets of the trade. I mean it. This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it’s the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table.
It’s this:
There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean.
That was it.
Doesn’t seem that important to you? Not impressed? Convinced you could get deeper, sager advice about writing from a fortune cookie? Trust me. I just told you something important. We’ll come back to it.
There are, in my opinion, two major ways in which superheroes are used in popular fiction. In the first way superheroes mean, purely and simply, what they mean on the surface. In the second kind of fiction, they mean what they mean on the surface, true, but they also mean more than that—they mean pop culture on the one hand, and hopes and dreams, or the converse of hopes and dreams, a falling away of innocence, on the other.
The lineage of superheroes goes way back: it starts, obviously, in the 1930s, and then goes back into the depths of the newspaper strip, and then into literature, co-opting Sherlock Holmes, Beowulf and various heroes and gods along the way.
Robert Mayer’s novel Superfolks used superheroes as a metaphor for all that America had become in the 1970s: the loss of the American dream meant the loss of American dreams, and vice versa.
Joseph Torchia took the iconography of Superman and wrote The Kryptonite Kid, a powerful and beautiful epistolary novel about a kid who believes, literally, in Superman, and who, in a book constructed as a series of letters to Superman, has to come to terms with his life and his heart.
In the 1980s, for the first time writers began writing superhero comics in which the characters were as much commentary upon superheroes as they were superheroes: Alan Moore led the way in this, as did Frank Miller.
One of the elements that fused back into comics at that time was the treatment of some comics themes in prose fiction: Superfolks and The Kryptonite Kid, short stories such as Norman Spinrad’s “It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!,” essays like Larry Niven’s (literally) seminal “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”
The resurgence that hit comics at this time also surfaced in prose fiction—the early volumes of the George R. R. Martin–edited Wild Cards anthologies did a fine job of reinvoking the joy of superheroes in a prose context.
The problem with the mid-eighties revival of interesting superheroes was that the wrong riffs were the easiest to steal. Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns spawned too many bad comics: humorless, gray, violent and dull. When the Wild Cards anthologies were turned into comics what made them interesting as commentaries upon comics evaporated, too.
So after the first Moore, Miller and Martin–led flush of superheroes (they weren’t deconstructed. Just, briefly, respected), things returned, more or less, to status quo, and a pendulum swing gave us, in the early nineties, superhero comics which were practically contentless: poorly written, and utterly literal. There was even one publisher who trumpeted four issues of good writers as the ultimate marketing gimmick—every bit as good as foil-embossed covers.
There is room to move beyond the literal. Things can mean more than they mean. It’s why Catch-22 isn’t just about fighter pilots in the Second World War. It’s why “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is about more than a bunch of people trapped inside a supercomputer. It’s why Moby-Dick is about (believe fifty thousand despairing college professors or not, but it’s still true) a lot more than whaling.
And I’m not talking about allegory, here, or metaphor, or even the Message. I’m talking about what the story is about, and then I’m talking about what it’s about.
Things can mean more than they literally mean. And that’s the dividing line between art and everything that isn’t art. Or one of the lines, anyway.
Currently, superhero fictions seem to break into two kinds: there are the workaday, more or less pulp fictions which are turned out by the yard by people who are trying their hardest, or not. And then there are the other kind, and there are precious few of them.
There are two obvious current exceptions—Alan Moore’s Supreme, an exercise in rewriting fifty years of Superman into something that means something.
And then—and some of you might have thought that I might have forgotten it, given how far we’ve got into this introduction without its being mentioned, there is Astro City. Which traces its lineage back in two directions—into the world of classic superhero archetypes, but equally into the world of The Kryptonite Kid, a world in which all this stuff, this dumb wonderful four-color stuff, has real emotional weight and depth, and it means more than it literally means.
And that is the genius and the joy of Astro City.
Me? I’m jaded, where superheroes are concerned. Jaded and tired and fairly burned out, if truth be told. Not utterly burned out, though. I thought I was, until, a couple of years ago, I found myself in a car with Kurt Busiek, and his delightful wife, Ann. (We were driving to see Scott McCloud and his wife, Ivy, and their little girl Sky, and it was a very memorable and eventful evening, ending as it did in the unexpected birth of Scott and Ivy’s daughter Winter.) And in the car, on the way, we started talking about Batman.
Pretty soon Kurt and I were co-plotting a complete Batman story; and not just a Batman story, but the coolest, strangest Batman story you can imagine, in which every relationship in the world of Batman was turned inside out and upside down, and, in the finest comic book tradition, everything you thought you knew turned out to be a lie.
We were doing this for fun. I doubt that either of us will ever do anything with the story. We were just enjoying ourselves.
But, for several hours, I found myself caring utterly and deeply about Batman. Which is, I suspect, part of Kurt Busiek’s special talent. If I were writing a different kind of introduction, I might call it a superpower.
Astro City is what would have happened if those old comics, with their fine simplicities and their primal, four-color characters, had been about something. Or rather, it assumes they were about something, and tells you the tales that, on the whole, slipped through the cracks.
It’s a place inspired by the worlds and worldviews of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, of Gardner Fox and John Broome, of Jerry Siegel and Bob Finger and the rest of them: a city where anything can happen. In the story that follows we have (and I’m trying hard not to give too much away) a crime-fighter bar, serial killing, an alien invasion, a crackdown on costumed heroes, a hero’s mysterious secret . . . all of them the happy pulp elements of a thousand comics-by-the-yard.
Except that, here, as in the rest of Astro City, Kurt Busiek manages to take all of these elements and let them mean more than they literally mean.
(Again, I am not talking about allegory here. I’m talking story, and what makes some stories magic while others just sit there, lifeless and dull.)
Astro City: Confession is a coming-of-age story, in which a young man learns a lesson. (Robert A. Heinlein claimed in an essay in the 1940s, published in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s collection of SF writer essays Of Worlds Beyond, that there are only three stories, which we tell over and over again. He said he had thought there were only two, “Boy Meets Girl” and “The Little Tailor,” until L. Ron Hubbard pointed out to him that there was also “A Man Learns a Lesson.” And, Heinlein maintained, if you add in their opposites—someone fails to learn a lesson, two people don’t fall in love, and so on—you may have all the stories there are. But then, we can move beyond the literal.) It’s a growing-up story, set in the city in Kurt’s mind.
One of the things I like about Astro City is that Kurt Busiek lists all of his collaborators on the front cover. He knows how important each of them is to the final outcome. Each element does what it is meant to, and each of them gives of their best and a little more: Alex Ross’s covers ground each issue in a photoreal sort of hyper-reality; Brent Anderson’s pencils and Will Blyberg’s inks are perfectly crafted, always wisely at the service of the story, never obtrusive, always convincing. The coloring by Alex Sinclair and the Comicraft lettering by John Roshell are both slick, and, in the best sense of the word, inconspicuous.
Astro City, in the hands of Kurt Busiek and his collaborators, is art, and it is good art. It recognizes the strengths of the four-color heroes, and it creates something—a place, perhaps, or a medium, or just a tone of voice—in which good stories are told. There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean, and this is certainly true in Astro City.
I look forward to being able to visit it for a very long time to come.
This was written as the introduction to Kurt Busiek’s Astro City: Confession, 1999. The Batman story idea I talk about, that we came up with in the car, wound up being one of my favorite sequences in “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?,” a Batman story I would write a decade later.