Wildstorm Comics

After a first half built around a central question that took its time setting up characters and mood, Astro City # 15 concludes the two part storyline focusing on Ellie, an elderly woman with a mysterious past and a proclivity for repairing robots. But while the first half of the story felt very deliberately paced, focusing on setup, part two feels positively overflowing with exposition and story momentum, taking off at a run early on and not stopping for the world.

‘Where do all the robots go?’. It’s a pretty good question, when one thinks about it, just another of the many things comics never really address. When mad scientist X, Y or Z comes in to town, the proud new owner of something large, shiny, ambulatory and looking to cause some ruckus, and said shiny thing is quickly reduced to a collection of paperweights of various size…where do they all go? As always, Astro City is here to shine a light on the lesser-known side of any comic book universe, the robot junk yard.

For a while now, Astro City has been in what you might call a familiar rut. Not in a bad way, per se, but a period of distilling the core ideas and motifs of the series down, of perfecting the formula that made Astro City great. But something like this can only be done for so long before it gets stale, and thankfully it seems that Busiek and co. were aware of this, as Astro City #13 is nothing if not a shakeup, an experiment, a step out of the normal pattern. And also thankfully, it’s a darn good one.

Having a villain as the main character is something Astro City has indulged in before, on occasion, usually in the form of stories of redemption, like the early classic The Tarnished Angel. Issue 12 of the current series, The Deep Dark Woods, pulls a similar move, but the name of the game this time around isn’t redemption but addiction.