Astro City: Confession

Astro City: Confession written by Kurt Busiek, illustrated by Brent Anderson.

This is an absolutely great cover for the trade paperback by the way.

First off I’m going to admit I’m not a huge fan of Astro City or Kurt Busiek.  Even after saying that I’d heard this trade was the best of the bunch storyline wise for Astro City.  After finishing it I’ve got say I’m not more close to being a fan than I was before I read this book.  There’s just something about Busiek’s writing style that I don’t like.  I liked the story line but it was the execution of it that I had a problem with.  He had enough content in the story for way more than the six or so issues here and he should have used more space to tell the story.  The more space would have given the story a more epic feel, instead of the cliff notes version I felt I read.  Even as I think about this I know what the problem is and why I’m not a huge fan of Busiek’s writing, everything seemed to happen so fast with little time to become fully involved with the story.  He writes with a comic book mentality.  Everything comes out in quick, expository bursts, nothing has time to build, characters don’t get developed, and panels seem like nothing more than just there to get information out.  I can see why people, who are Marvel or DC fans, really did his work because his ideas and concepts are much better than Marvel and DC offer, yet he writes them in a familiar way for those fans.  I can understand why superhero comic fans like him, but I’ve got to say from what I’ve read of Astro City and other things he’s written I’m not  a huge fan.  This book didn’t him any favors either, as far as I’m concerned.  I love the concept of a vampire super hero but I just feel it was so under developed and didn’t rise up the concept stage.