Astro City

The hyper-kinetic, teeth-baring, under-characterized comics of the early 90s were reacting against the talky, overwrought melodrama of mid-80s superhero comics. They too ran their course and were replaced by a wave of cleanly heroic yet thoughtful titles in the second half of the 90s. Marvels. Kingdom Come. All-Star Superman. Top Ten. And the longest-running of them all, Astro City, in which Kurt Busiek mashed together all his favorite ideas from half a century of Marvel and DC titles, then played them out in real time from the perspective of average Joes and Janes caught up in a world beyond their control. Stand-alone issues meshed with short series and the occasional long running background story in a tale that's approaching thirty years in the telling, making it the definitive life's work for Busiek and his primary artist, the great Brent Anderson. These pages come from early in the second Astro City series, mostly from a story arc in which the Batman-like Confessor trains a protégé while concealing a dark secret of his own.