Astro City #45 - "Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes"

[laughing_tree]

We always need new superheroes. But actual new ones, reflecting the modern day, rather than reflecting yesterday. Unless reflecting yesterday is the point of the story. But the idea that we don’t need new superheroes is like not needing new romances or new detectives. The moment you don’t need new characters in genre stories, the genre is as dead as Latin. It’s not a crime that superheroes don’t age, but it’s a problem that superhero series don’t more often age and die and get replaced. Imagine if Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski and other modern (well, relatively) PIs couldn’t get an audience because Sam Spade and Race Williams were taking up all the shelf space. If you’re writing X-Men and your metaphors are about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, that’s not all that much more modern than if your metaphors are about the Red Scare and McCarthyism. Ask yourself new questions, and put the results in your stories. Steve Englehart juiced up Captain America by asking what Captain America meant to the early 1970s. What does he mean now? What does Superman represent to the world? How does that, whatever it is, fit into the world today? Same for Batman, same for Wonder Woman. Tell stories you couldn’t tell ten, twenty, fifty years ago. -- Kurt Busiek

Comments

[icon_uk]

I've loved the idea of the mutable embodiment of music that we've seen through this arc, but I have to say that, even as the jaded old comic fart that I am, I did NOT see that twist coming! :)

[scorntx]

It is one of the smaller joys of Astro City that it has been able to spend forty-five issues building a slow burn on this story arc.
(Smaller, because it's Astro City. There's a lot to enjoy, y'know?)
Plus, the Living Music folk are pretty interesting themselves.


-"I didn't so much change... as shatter"-
"Change, my dear, and it seems not a moment too soon... I refuse to change. I don't want to go. It's strange, it feels different this time... but the moment has been prepared for. Our future is in safe hands. I do hope the ears are a bit less conspicuous this time. Where's there's life there's KIDNEYS!"

(sorry. Couldn't resist.*
*isn't sorry in the slightest.)

[leoboiko]

> The moment you don’t need new characters in genre stories, the genre is as dead as Latin.

That is very uncharitable and unfair, not to say mean.

Latin still have a lot of new developments and interesting stuff going on, it's unfair to compare it to fossilized, permanent-status-quo, sliding-time-window commercial superheroes.

[bradygirl_12]

Methinks a lot of comics writers resent the fact that people want the old heroes, often ignoring their new creations. Could be because heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman are timeless in a way, speaking to people no matter what era. There's a reason superheroes are considered modern man's version of the old gods/myths.

And, if you like older music, so what? New isn't automatically great, just as old isn't.

[philippos42]

Tom Wolfe and a reference to Sylvia Warner's "The Phoenix"! All right!