Kurt Busiek's Astro City: The Tarnished Angel Book

Alas, poor dejected Tarnished Angel! Steeljack is an ex-con trying to hew to the straight & narrow, looking for work and a fresh start while staying right with the law... until circumstances intervene and he must fight for greater things - even if that means going against the law and straying onto more crooked paths. a classic post-war noir plot for a classic comic.

Astro City's fourth volume takes the tone of its story and the look of its imagery directly from all of those grey and ambiguous movies and paperbacks of the 40s. our down-on-his-luck hero is even purposely drawn to look like a fleshier Robert Mitchum. Astro City is a city of superheroes and supervillains with a magnificent history of those two camps that goes back generations - and this comic contains all of that. but this is more a story of sadness & obsession & redemption than it is one of colorful people battling each other in the air. this is not a shiny adventure. and there is more than just one tarnished angel in this book... there is the brooding disgraced hero El Hombre and there is the sweetly deluded villain The Mock Turtle, both standing out in interesting contrast to our melancholy protagonist. there is a destructive femme fatale and a couple hommes fatale as well. and there is plenty of tragedy and tarnish to go around, for those on the street and for those up in the air.

Busiek really did an excellent job with this one. the story is emotional in an adult sort of way, deeply-felt and resonant, and all about how people fail, and fail again, fail and keep trying, fail from betrayal, fail from betraying themselves, fail and then sometimes actually succeed. the writing is superb and the art is top-notch. I loved this one, it really moved me.


"He's not smart. He's not brave. And he doesn't want the job. But he has something the people of Kiefer Square desperately need.

He's hard to kill.

He'll have to be."