Issue #4: Safeguards (November 1995)



Theme: Grow where you’re planted.


Focus Civilian: Marta lives in the bedroom community of Shadow Hill, a horror-themed suburb where everyone routinely uses crosses, wolvesbane, and other magic wards to protect themselves from tentacled menaces of the shadows. She commutes daily to her job as a law clerk in Astro City and dreams of being like her redheaded boss Darcy Conroy. (The frequency of redheads in comic books far outstrips real life.) Supervillains attack her office building, convincing her that she’s better off staying near home and marrying that nice older butcher Vasiliu like mom always said she should.


Places: Shadow Hill sits in the shadow of Mount Kirby, a nice acknowledgement of how the long shadow of Jack Kirby lies over all modern comic books. City Center is what they call downtown Astro City, where most of the heroes and villains are. Groza’s bagel shop and Zenio’s Market are in Shadow Hill. The neighborhoods of Fass Gardens, Rensie Avenue, and Derbyfield lie between it and Binderbeck Plaza, (Otto Binder and C.C. Beck were stalwart creators for Fawcett’s Captain Marvel comics) where Marta works downtown. The Quad Cities are in Iowa here, as they are in our world.


Villains: Demolita the queen of jackhammers leads the Unholy Alliance which includes Flamethrower, Glowworm, Spice (clad in Black Queen dominatrix gear with a whip, and of course she has a deceased partner named Sugar who probably wore white lace), and melty-looking muscleman Slamburger (which is either ridiculous or secretly awesome as a codename).


Heroes: The Hanged Man floats silently around Shadow Hill on patrol each night, decked in skintight black with a noose on his neck and a bag over his head. A supernatural villain for a supernatural suburb. Deadman analogue? Maybe more The Spectre. Winged Victory sports a Wonder Woman-esque Greek outfit, complete with a gravity-defying skirt of leather straps that faithfully point toward her feet even when she’s flying horizontally. Plus big feathery wings. She also runs dojos for young women which worry some of the parents of Astro City about a “cult” forming around her. The First Family make their debut; there are six of them total, but only one, the son Nickie Furst, gets a name this issue. One is a big Thing apparently made of rocks. One (the daughter?) has a fiery Kirby Krackle energy-form, making a sled of energy for the five other to ride. Bald guy Furst has a big gun, and redheaded lady Furst can become a giant or incorporeal. Dad Furst has sci fi gadgets. Very FF/Challengers. Nickie prevents Slamburger from raping Marta, a threat which seems frankly a little out of place in the midst of the ongoing super-fight; more on that later.


Other Civilians: Mister Irons drives the city bus to Shadow Hill. Grant, Miller, Conroy, McConnell, and Ingersoll have a large law practice. Darcy Conroy, a former D.A. and now a partner at the law firm, is ridiculously young for either of those roles and is dating Nickie from the First Family. He has given her a broach with a giant “F” to summon the team in time of trouble. Zeezeezeezeezee… Steve interviews Darcy for Channel 4 TV. Billy, Shellie, and Jenny work with Marta. Nicu is Marta’s passive, silent father.


Miscellania: A wall calendar in Marta’s office correctly has the date November 1995, and a bus poster advertises a jazz festival Nov 10-12, which was indeed a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday that year. Given the length of her commute, I’m surprised she doesn’t board the bus before dawn at that time of year. She's shown walking to the bus stop as dawn is breaking. Marta’s house is a typical horror film Third Empire style. Oddly, the word balloon placement implies that the kitchen is on the second story. There’s an odd narrative gap between page nine (Marta recalls her grandmother’s lessons) and page ten (a nightmare sequence already in progress) that makes me feel like my trade edition lost a page somehow, or else I just don’t understand the narrative flow there.


My Two Cents: The story trades on the irony that despite the Lovecraftian demons of her sleepy Slavic-looking hometown, the real Unholy Alliance can be found downtown. Brent Anderson is terrific at drawing different people with different faces, a sadly rare skill in superhero comic books. He draws Marta as clearly Jewish, and this issue riffs on the storied anxiety of early 20th century Jewish immigrants, voiced explicitly by Marta’s mother, that their children will forget their roots and run off with some Gentile from the big city. (Full disclosure: My own paternal grandfather was an Ashkenazi Jewish childhood immigrant who in his early 30s married an Episcopalian beauty pageant winner in her late teens, at a resort in New York. They raised three boys outside of organized religion.) The other threat that rural folk (Shadow Hill is so far away from Astro City that they only get one TV channel clearly) always think of for their daughters in the big city is that everyone gets raped. I live in a small town and was recently regaled with the tale of a local father who, when his daughter moved to New York City, did not get a good night’s sleep the entire several years that she lived there. So this issue offers a surprisingly conservative tale for modern comics, especially from a big city boy like Boston-bred Busiek. “Don’t go chasing waterfalls. Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.”

I deliberately avoided looking up Rensie while writing this; apparently it's a surname acronym used by Will Eisner?


And indeed, the bald guy is named Julius, but we don't learn that for a few issues yet.


I consider your notion complementary to mine. Marta decided the grass was not greener.

"Rensie" is Eisner spelled backwards.

Also, the "Ingersoll" in the law practice is a reference to Bob Ingersoll, a lawyer and comic book writer who wrote a column called "The Law Is A Ass", first in print in CBG and then online.

Fass Gardens is named for Myron Fass, an artist who became a publisher. He put out a few color comics in the mid-60s, including the version of Captain Marvel who could shout "Split!" and have his body parts separate and operate independently. But his biggest success was his Eerie Publications line of low-budget black & white horror mags.

Winged Victory's name comes from an ancient Greek statue, but except for the wings she doesn't look like the statue.

You did nothing wrong. Some websites shrink images when linked this way to save bandwidth. Wikia, the source of your image, is known to do that. The weekly cover contest warns people not to use wikia images for this reason.


Unrelated musing: how come nobody worries about bandlength?

Disney did the same thing with Lt Robin Crusoe, USN.  It was credited to Retlaw Yensid, as the basic idea came from him.

Eisner used several names in that period, as did Kirby (and some others).  Sad to say that was an advantage to taking a less ethnic name.  Even Schwarzenegger was billed as "Arnold Strong," as Hercules (Hercules in New York aka Hercules Goes Bananas).  It was an even bigger thing for many Jews, as Stanley Lieber can attest.

Of course, we haven't mentioned that The Hanged Man comes from the tarot, which was a brilliant idea for a supernatural character.  It set the character apart from the numerous magicians and wizards, while still paying homage to characters like the Spectre.  It also reminded me of Glen Cook's Black Company series of fantasy novels.  In the original trilogy, we are introduced to a land where a powerful sorcerer had turned other wizards into his acolytes, with names like The Hanged Man, the Howler, Soulcatcher, etc...  Those names resonated and gave a greater sense of dread than Garak the Destroyer or Siegfried and Roy.

Thanks! I broke down and made an imgur account like everyone else, so I could post the full size picture.