ASTRO CITY 4. Click on the image for a larger view.

Ain't it pretty?

Here's what I like about Stephen King's Hard Case Crime books: They're Stephen King books, so they're well-written and enjoyable, and they make Hard Case Crime a ton of money, which is good and helpful and positive and makes good stuff happen.

Here's what I don't like about Stephen King's Hard Case Crime books: Good as they are, they're not hard-boiled crime, or the sort of thing Gold Medal would have published in the 50s. So the covers and package design are cool-but-wrong, like having the Peter Gunn theme as the overture for a Thornton Wilder play.

I'm glad they exist, and I'm glad they help keep Hard Case Crime around. But I kinda want a new Richard Bachman book when I crack open a cover like that. BLAZE, that would have been a great Hard Case Crime book. But with THE COLORADO KID and JOYLAND, I have to keep reminding myself that it's not the kind of book it's packaged as. It's thoughtful and reflective, not lurid and driving.

And I like what they are. I just don't think the wrapping fits so well. Not that that stops me buying and devouring 'em...

My favorite part about Wednesdays. Getting feedback on stories.

Here are a few early reviews on ASTRO CITY 1:

"...absolutely worth the wait." —Greg McElhatton, CBR

"A great read and a wonderful introduction..." —My Geeky Geeky Ways

"A great return for an iconic series." —Aaron Long, Comicosity

Nice to return to that kind of reception!

Happy Astro City Day, everyone!

Not only is the new ASTRO CITY 1, from Vertigo, out in all fine comics stores and on Comixology today, but Comixology also has the first six issues of the series available in digital form, as well—the first issue is free, and the others are a mere $1.99!

It's right here, just like I was saying!

That means that if you've never read the series before (or even if you have!), you can sample it for free, and/or pick up the entire award-winning first volume for around ten bucks.

Ain't we nice?

Here's what's been going on:

As you probably know, I got pretty sick for quite a while, and even after having gall bladder surgery last summer, it's been a long, slow, recovery process. I'm still not back to 100% (or 100% of whatever percent I functioned at, back when things were clicking), but I've recovered enough to get work done more steadily, at least. Not fast, mind you, but faster than the near-standstill I've been at the last few years.

The first evidence of that is that ASTRO CITY returns to publication tomorrow, and I've done enough interviews around the 'net about that that I won't go over the details again (there's a link to one of those interviews in the previous entry), and I couldn't be happier about it. Brent and I have been slowly shambling forward on the book the whole time we've been "gone," but it's great to be back trading e-mails and phone calls with Alex Ross, John G. Roshell and Alex Sinclair as we get issues lettered, colored and cover-arted. Everyone's got new energy and new ideas, so we're working as a familiar, friendly group, and everyone's bringing new stuff to the mix.

[I should take note, here, that Brent's son, Bryce Anderson, has just graduated from high school as we launch the new #1. He was just being born as we started the first series, so that's quite a reminder of the inexorable passage of time, but one to be proud of—and a double reason to celebrate. Congrats to Bryce and his parents!]

Beyond ASTRO CITY: I'm still working on BATMAN: CREATURE OF THE NIGHT with artist John Paul Leon, and while I can't judge the story, I can say that the art's just stunning. Hopefully we'll get going a tad bit faster now that I'm not quite so dysfunctional, and you'll eventually get to see it.

Beyond that, I have other projects in the works, some of which you've heard of and some you haven't, and we'll be launching them as they're ready to go and as my improving health allows. Hope you'll enjoy what's coming.

We will be making a few changes at the blog, here, as we update the software and hopefully make it easier for me to post new entries. Maybe that way I won't just post stuff to Facebook and Twitter and leave in unblogged, like the lazy bum I am.

But hey, speaking of which, J.G. talked me into starting up a Facebook page for ASTRO CITY, and you can find it here: Astro City

Brent, JG, Alex Sinclair and I are all "managers" of the page, and we'll be adding links, previews and other bits of this and that as the spirit moves us and opportunity arises, so you might want to check it out.

And we do intend to get the old AstroCity.com website back up, either as its own site or as part of Busiek.com, and to find a way to resurrect the Herocopia.com project. But give us some time—first priority is getting the books coming out regularly, and providing new stuff for those sites to be about.

Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go proofread the lettercol to ASTRO CITY 2, and then hop in the shower. It's sweaty work, creating new characters like Doctor Sarchophagus, and he's just one of the new characters I outlined today...!

The fine folks at USA TODAY have put up an interview with yours truly, including a 5-page preview of ASTRO CITY#1.

So if you want to get an early look at the Broken Man, American Chibi and some of what's going on in the book, click on over and take a look:

Busiek Takes Fans on Another Trip Through 'Astro City'

You can see the rest tomorrow, at finer comics store evvawhere...!

Out tomorrow. The "regular cover" is the one with Samaritan on it. The "variant cover" is the one with the Ambassador on it. I don't know what difference it makes—they're both Alex Ross paintings, they're both gorgeous, and they both have spiffy design work by John Roshell.

And inside, both have the same story, which kicks off a new era for ASTRO CITY featuring old favorites, new faces, a complete-in-one-issue story and the seeds of lots of cool stuff to come.

I hope you like it!

For those of you attending Wizard World Portland next month, thanks to the generosity of the Wizard World folks, I’ll be signing and giving away this lithograph at the show, while supplies last. Come by and get one!

[click the image to see it larger]

For more show info, go to: Wizard World Portland or, as always, check the Find section.

February 22-24, 2013
Wizard World Portland
Portland, OR
www.wizardworld.com/home-portland.html
Panels/Signings: details to come.

March 1-3, 2013
Emerald City Comicon
Seattle, WA
www.emeraldcitycomicon.com
Panels/Signings: details to come.

March 22-24, 2013
Fabletown & Beyond
Rochester, MN
fablescon.com
Panels/Signings: details to come.

Hope to see you at one of these fine shows!

So, where were we? What, mail to answer? Okay, mail to answer.

First up, from CALVIN:

Hey, Kurt, we met at the Portland show and I bought SUPERSTAR and thought it was great. Any more of this coming out? Thanks and I am looking for more of Superstar.

Not soon, at least. But more Superstar is definitely something I want to get to—if nothing else, I came up with a big sprawling epic story for the character and haven't been able to tell even that one, much less all the others. So someday, I really want to get to that one, at least.

Who's next? Ah, DEAN:

I really hope this isn't the end of Superstar! What can we do to revive his career? He has so much potential, not only to fight evil, but really change to world for the better by inspiring his fans to volunteerism and activism.

Captain Amazing, at one point in the movie, violently rips the Pepsi logo off his costume from among the many others festooning it. Does he wear the pink ribbon of breast cancer, the multi-colored one of autism awareness, the black one in memory of MIAs and POWs? Does he go on talk shows to defend against drinking and driving, teen pregnancy, racism, or illiteracy?

If it's revealed that he can only take the life force of willing givers, that goes a long way to alleviating my former apprehension of his soul vampirism. Superstar is the first hero I know of who has the responsibility to use his power to support itself. Remembering that he uses life force, he has to use it in a way that his fans feel is appropriate or he will lose his fans. With great power comes great responsibility and that is no more true for any superhero than it is for Superstar.

Captain Amazing?

But that big epic story I mentioned above? It's very much about the idea that if he doesn't do what his supporters feel is appropriate, he loses his support—and thus, his power. What happens when his supporters feel he's unworthy? Similarly, what happens if he doesn't want to kowtow to popular prejudices? He's something of a politician-hero, or needs to be, and that's very much a two-edged sword.

I had the pleasure, not long ago, of reading an advance copy of PALISADES PARK, by Alan Brennert. The novel will be coming out from St. Martin’s Press next April, and I recommend it highly.

Let me say up front that I’m a big Brennert fan. I have been since I first saw his work in issues of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD from DC Comics, teaming Batman with other DC heroes. Brennert didn’t tell straightforward adventure stories, he told character stories—of teen heroes Hawk & Dove as maturing adults, thinking back on what their lives had been, of the courtship and marriage of the Batman and Catwoman of DC’s Golden Age, of the repercussions of Batman’s efforts to save the young Bruce Wayne of an alternate timeline from the same tragedy that had haunted and shaped Batman’s life. And whatever else Brennert wrote, whether it was TV series like L.A. LAW or novels like KINDRED SPIRITS, a romance between two disembodied spirits discovering on the verge of death that life is perhaps worth living after all, I sought out his work and couldn’t get enough of it. Everything he writes is imaginative and human, creating richly textured worlds full of engaging, believable characters that don’t so much suck the reader in as welcome him in, enveloping him in story for as long as it takes.

And then, a couple of books back, he took what felt like a quantum leap forward, abandoning the fantasy of his previous work for history, in MOLOKA’I, which I can only describe as the most positive, uplifting, heartwarming novel about decades of life in a leper colony that you’ll ever read. As with all of Brennert’s work, it found a great depth of humanity in its characters, but it did so in a world so outwardly horrific and unsettling that the impact of the book was all the richer for it, mixing tragedy, sweetness, endurance, emotion and hope into a powerful and compelling story. Much as I like fantasy, and much as I liked what Brennert had done before, MOLOKA’I showed that historical fiction was what he should be doing, ushering us into worlds and times that we simply could never see or experience in any other way.

The difference between GRIMM and ONCE UPON A TIME:

The one that was created by ex-BUFFY personnel is the one about a hero who discovers they're the latest in a long line of monster-killers and has to take on the role relatively unprepared, but with the help of an aged mentor and a quirky helper.



And the one created by ex-LOST personnel is the one where everyone's stuck in a location that's pleasant on the surface, only there's a complex mystery going on they have to unravel and lots of flashbacks to their earlier lives before they got stuck in this place.



As for tone, the one created by the Buffyistas feels like BUFFY and ANGEL but at least so far, thinner, and the one created by the Lostians feels like LOST but at least so far, much thinner.

We're following both, here at Casa Busiek, to see what they develop into. They're both watchable, though I'm used to Jennifer Morrison from HOUSE, so I keep wanting her to have snappier, faster-paced, smarter dialogue. Or at least be quicker on the uptake.

[On the great FABLES question: I can readily believe that GRIMM isn't terribly influenced by FABLES, since there aren't that many similarities and there's been a spate of fairy-tale movies that could certainly have gotten the genre some notice. ONCE UPON A TIME has more similarities, though, and in the pilot, the fairy tale characters are referred to as "fables" once, which is odd because, well, they're not. Hard to believe they didn't pick that (and other things) up from Willingham.]

As I've noted before, I try to avoid e-mails that fall into the category of "Can you answer these questions for my school report." I'm not in school any more, and despite that, I seem to have plenty of my own homework to do.

But every now and then, someone finds a way around me on this. Julio, here, tells me:

Hello my name is Julio. I'm a high school student. We have an assignment on interviewing a comic writer. I chose you because you're very talented and we are reading your comic MARVELS. It's very good. by the way.

They're actually reading MARVELS? For class? Well, okay, I guess since I haven't done this in a year and a half, I can do another one. But I'm answering here on the blog, so anyone else who's interested can read it.

On to the questions:

1. What is the work that you are planning on or that you are working on?

At the moment, what I'm working on is ASTRO CITY, the series I do with Brent Anderson and Alex Ross, and KIRBY: GENESIS, which I'm doing with Jackson Herbert and (again) Alex Ross. On top of those two, I also have a series called BATMAN: CREATURE OF THE NIGHT to write, a novel featuring ARROWSMITH, a character I co-created with Carlos Pacheco, and a new series called THE WITCHLANDS.

2. What was your first work?

My first professional comics work was a 7-page "Tales of the Green Lantern Corps" story that appeared in GREEN LANTERN #162, back in 1982. That same day, POWER MAN & IRON FIST #90, which I also wrote, came out as well, but I didn't actually write that story until about a month after the Green Lantern story, so I count GREEN LANTERN #162 as my first.

3. What was your proudest moment?

In comics? It was probably when the first reviews and reader reactions started coming in for ASTRO CITY #1. Alex Ross and I had won a lot of awards and gotten great reaction for MARVELS, but getting that same kind of response to something that I'd created from scratch (with the help of Brent, Alex and others, but not any pre-existing characters or publisher's universe) was a real thrill, and really made us feel like we'd accomplished something worthwhile.

4. What is the most challenging aspect of working in comics?

For me, it's the deadlines. Comics are usually monthly, so if you're writing a series, you need to write a new issue every month, month after month, for as long as it lasts. If you're writing more than one series, that just means more deadlines. It can be exhausting—writing one good script is a lot of work, but doing it time after time after time requires a lot of stamina.

I used to be able to write a script a week, but the longer I do this, the harder it gets to maintain that kind of speed.

5. What is the most rewarding aspect of working in comics?

It's hard to say which is better: Getting to collaborate with talented artists, letterers, colorists and editors, so you're all working together to make a comics story that's the best it can be—or get to reach a large audience of readers, who want you to tell them a story in the first place. The idea that an audience is out there that wants to read what I write is what keeps me doing it, both because telling stories to people is why I write in the first place, and because it's the fact that those readers buy the comics that allows me to keep writing them.

6. What does it feel on having an amazing gift such as writing?

It doesn't feel like a "gift," it feels like a skill. Something I learned by practicing it and getting better at it over time, just like someone who practices piano, or practices at playing baseball, will get better and better. It can be a lot of work, but it's worth the effort.

7. How was it like working with Ross on MARVELS?

Alex is one of the most thoughtful and dedicated artists I've ever worked with. Doing MARVELS with him was a lot of fun, because we both put a lot of thought into how best to tell the story, and we each had a lot of input into what the other guy did. He had suggestions and ideas on the story, and I had suggestions and ideas on the art. We'd go back and forth, talking over even the smallest details—sometimes we'd be on the phone for hours, talking about stuff that most readers would never notice. But even if a reader doesn't consciously notice it, it made the story better, and helped us make the stuff the readers did notice all the more real and effective.

I still work with Alex, on ASTRO CITY covers, and on the KIRBY: GENESIS series, and it's still a rewarding and enjoyable experience, because of the attention and thought Alex puts into what he does.

8. Do you have new ideas?

Tons of them. I have more ideas than I could use up in a lifetime—and I come up with new ones all the time!

The better you get at writing, the more easily ideas come, I think. It's one of the best parts of the job, coming up with new things, new stories and new ways to tell them.

* *

Hope that helps!

Here's an e-mail I figured I'd deal with separately, so it doesn't get lost amid the others.

Eric Sellers asks...

Did the forums linked at your website and the Astro City homepage get deleted or moved? I tried accessing them from your website but it said it didn't exist and then the Astro City homepage link wouldn't connect with anything.

Yeah, they don't exist any more.

I'm not 100% sure what happened—it was while I was dealing with some pretty severe fatigue issues, so I wasn't listening as well as I might when it was explained to me. But I think it had something to do with the forums generating exponentially-growing spam attacks or something, meaning it was taking up more and more server time, and eventually it got too much to handle, and the guys at Comicraft didn't have the resources to keep running them.

The forum was never quite what I wanted it to be, in any case. There was always a spam problem, so anyone who wanted to register for the boards had to be manually approved by the webmaster, which I think prevented people from signing up and joining in.

What I'm planning to do is, sometime between now and when we're ready for ASTRO CITY to start coming out again, I'm going to line up another message board for discussions. For now, those "Comment on this in our forum" links are probably still going to hang around, even though they don't lead anywhere, so that when we have a new forum, we can just slot that in and have the links direct there.

In the meantime, if you're looking to respond to something, or want to keep up on whatever I'm babbling about at the moment, the best places to find me are:

• on Twitter, where I'm @KurtBusiek

• on Facebook, at The Official Kurt Busiek Page

Since spouting off on Twitter or Facebook is easier than writing a blog entry, even, I'm a lot more active there than here. I hope to change that, in time, but for now, theyr'e good places to find me and/or keep up on what's new.

* *

Also, in case anyone's wondering why they signed up for the newsletter and haven't gotten any, the answer is simple:

There isn't any newsletter.

Again, there should be one someday,so when this site was being put together, Design Wizard John Roshell put in a sign-up option, and I've been dutifully saving e-mail addresses for that happy day when I'll have a newsletter to send. For now, though, all that exists of it is that list of e-mail addresses.

So don't let that stop you from signing up for it, but don't be surprised if you don't get anything for a while.

* *

And that's the story of all the stuff that doesn't exist around here!