Kurt Busiek has been on something of a hot streak for me lately, serving up intriguing dark fantasy in the Conan the Legend one-shot, fantastic adventure in Arrowsmith and classic super-hero action in JLA/Avengers. So I'm a little disappointed that my favorite project of his, Astro City, is more uneven of late than it was when he first created it. The first part of this story grabbed me and I was fascinated to see the outcome, but the second part solves the mystery of the Blue Knight and the tricky problem of Oleck's legal battle in a fashion that didn't quite fall into place for me. There are certainly some surprises, and the thematic elements of the story that examine the failure of trust in authority figures (including traditional super-heroes) makes for a strong undercurrent, making this a good story, but when compared to the really great Astro City tales, it falls a bit short.
There were two big mysteries at the heart of this story, and they required enough room to set up and explore that Busiek and Anderson decided to do a multi-part story instead of all self-contained issues, which had been the original mandate of Local Heroes. However, while this story definitely merited more than one issue, it sort of felt like it didn't quite fill two. Oreck's musings on the nature of his dilemma in the courtroom, and indeed many of the courtroom sequences in this issue, felt superfluous after having read the previous issue, and even the interesting examination of the social shift taking place began to feel repetitive.
Busiek does solve the two mysteries in this issue, though, and he deserves credit for the clever twist involved in the identity of the Blue Knight. Though it left me with a couple unanswered questions or at least unsatisfactory answers (Oleck's dreams seemed awfully coincidental, for instance), it seemed like a logical enough resolution, and made the Blue Knight an interesting enough character that I'd like to see him again. The mystery, or at least the dilemma, of how Oleck was going to get out of the deal he'd made with the mob boss, is not quite as satisfying. It plays nicely into Busiek's theme of justice versus law, but it seems too easy, and given how many pages were spent on reiterating the problems, I would have liked to have seen some of those pages devoted instead to a more complicated and more difficult resolution to a complicated problem.
As always, Brent Anderson provides solid, realistic art that takes the reader right into the world of Astro City. Specifically, he takes the reader into the ground level of a super-hero world, so that we see the regular guys in their regular lives in the regular buildings, and the super-heroic elements seem like magical or dangerous intrusions. His work this issue looks a little more sketchy than I'm used to, as if he left more details for Alex Sinclair's colors to fill in, but it seems like a deliberate stylistic shift rather than a rushed art job or anything of that nature.
All in all, Local Heroes has been a good, if not great, return to the world of Astro City. It has become clear that there are corners of this world that interest the creators more than they do some segments of the audience (sometimes I'm in those segments, sometimes not), but given the scope of the stories, that's hardly unforgivable. There's enough examination of comics history underneath the surface to make the stories intriguing even when the surface of the tales aren't as engaging. And though Busiek's style has influenced mainstream super-hero stories so that Astro City no longer seems as unique as it once did, it's still a deeply imagined and engaging world that should grab the attention of any longtime super-hero fan.
