A man dreams, and in his dreams, he can fly. He soars through the air unfettered and serene, laughing at gravity and at care. But eventually the alarm clock rings, and he wakes up feeling heavy and old. He shuffles over to the closet and gets dressed. Then he opens the window and shoots off into the sky.

He's Superman. (Or an approximate thereof, anyway.) But he's only in flight for fractions of a second at a time, racing from disaster to disaster. And so the only flight he gets to enjoy is the imaginary kind, in his sleep.

This is the sort of thing Kurt Busiek does in Astro City, of which The Tarnished Angel is the fourth collected volume. (The story above is from the first.) Whereas Busiek's work on such titles as Avengers is straightforward superhero stuff — while it's as good as any other stretch of the series, it's also not vastly different in tone or style from those other stretches — Astro City is another project altogether. It's the flagship title for the "reconstructionist" movement in superhero comics, which requires a little bit of history to explain, so, very briefly and glossing over a bunch of important stuff: in the mid-80s, after decades of good guys in tights punching bad guys in the mouth, writers such as Alan Moore and Frank Miller started what came to be known as the deconstructionist movement in comics, poking into the psyches of their characters and pointing out that, y'know, dressing up like a humanoid bat and prowling the streets beating on criminals as revenge for the murder of your parents suggests that you might not be the most well-adjusted fellow on your block. But other creators took the wrong lessons from magnificent characters like Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, and deconstructionism devolved into "grim 'n' gritty": "Hey, if we suggest the hero's fucking his sidekick, it'll be all, like, profound and stuff!" At long last, the reconstructionists like Busiek came in and said, okay, we've seen how you can get into the characters' heads and come up with a new angle to make the whole genre fall apart. What if you apply the same techniques to try to make the genre work better than before? What if you combine a sophisticated approach with the wonder of watching people do things that people can't do, with the power of being able to trot out walking, talking metaphors for anything you like?

Well, you get stuff like Astro City, where the Superman riff is brilliant in that "that's the most obvious story idea no one else thought of" way — as is the Batman riff (Confession, the second volume), as are most all the stories that are based on ideas not keyed into specific existing characters. The Tarnished Angel introduces us to a metallic Robert Mitchum, the Steel-Jacketed Man, fresh off a twenty-year prison sentence, who returns to his old neighborhood to find that someone is picking off hoods — and in this neighborhood, every family includes at least one person matching that description. Hired to help find the killer — Steeljack is no detective, but at least he's tough — he soon finds himself knee-deep in a permutation of the Henry Pym arc that ran through Avengers in the early 80s. Neither Busiek's writing nor Brent Anderson's art is flashy, but both are rock-solid: Busiek knows how to tell a story, and Anderson (unlike many flashier artists) actually knows how to draw, differentiating faces (and making use of a palette of more than three emotions), as good with architecture and animals as he is with musclemen, and most importantly of all, making everything just look really good: these pages are appealing. Like the previous three Astro City volumes, well worth checking out.

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