Volume 2, Issue #7: Eye of the Storm (March 1997)

Theme: If you can’t fix the problem, shift the blame.

Focus Hero: The Confessor’s vampire secret was deduced by his protégé Kinney at the end of the previous issue. At that time, The Confessor seemed proud of his student’s detective skill, but now he lashes out with a “Now you’ll hate me too, right?” speech that Kinney doesn’t seem to have earned. Now that Confessor has been revealed as a monster (= lower class person), Kinney the doctor’s son suddenly has the social upper hand and assured Confessor that they can still be friends, he knows he means well by night-stalking the criminals, etc. Kinney’s first name is Brian. Confessor tells his story to Brian on the Cathedral parapet: He was Jeremiah Parrish, a priest who came to Astro City in 1869 to supervise Cathedral construction under Cardinal Grandenetti. He dallied with an apparently young woman in Shadow Hill and got a bite on the neck for his trouble. He wears a cross on his chest even though (and even because) it hurts him. I guess it doesn’t hurt him enough to prevent him from doing most of the usual vampy super-things, and he sees it as a form of self-flagellation to keep him from vampy sins. After being discovered as a vampire by his fellow priests, he hid for decades, until Air Ace inspired him to take up the cowl and fight crime. He says he chose a sidekick to have someone to train, but Kinney thinks it’s because he was lonely.


Other Heroes: Honor Guard defeat a mysterious alien ship in earth orbit. They took their own space shuttle up there and parked it right beside the aliens. Hope there wasn’t any shrapnel from the battle! Cleopatra, Samaritan, and Beautie don’t need space suits. N-Forcer is always in a containment suit. Two other members of the team (Quarrel II and M.P.H.?) need EVA space suits, but they still engage the alien ship at close quarters. We don’t see any individual aliens. They have some unexplained reason to consider this to be a “scout ship,” which means they’re going to be watching for more and bigger of the same in the future. (Obviously this is for the benefit of the reader, to tie this story to the Mr. Bridwell story from Volume 1, but within the story it’s not fully explained what Honor Guard knows, and how.) The heroes’ ratings are tanking with the populace. Black Rapier, leader of Honor Guard, intends to use the “contact matrix” at the Museum of Modern History (per a newscaster, but the art shows him actually outside the Museum of Modern Art; is this a mistake from the authors or a comment on media errors?) to ask Starwoman for information about the aliens, but E.A.G.L.E. troops prevent him from entering, for no clear reason.

Mordecai Chalk is missing in Shadow Hill after entering last issue to investigate the murders. Lonestar is a Texan hero, and The Colonial is in Australia. I guess their ratings are down too.

Civilian Villains: The mayor of Astro City, established last issue as antagonistic to the heroes, demands that they turn the wreckage of the alien ship over to the Federal government. His jurisdiction over a battle in outer space is unclear, as is his interest in whether the Feds get the debris. Isn’t he supposed to be concentrating on the Shadow Hill serial killings? Get on it, dude! Maybe he’s just looking for a distractor for the media. But then again, we know there are shapeshifting aliens running around....

Deputy Mayor Barry Daniels has some unkind words for the heroes too. Most of the heroes comply with the mayor’s demand to “register,” but some (El Robo and two unknown supers are seen) resist and are incarcerated. We haven’t gotten to see how heavy hitters like Samaritan and The Gentleman respond to the mayor’s ultimatum. Surely he would attempt to enlist them as enforcers, as seen in Marvel’s recent “Civil War” event.

Other Villains: The promised alien fleet is shown approaching Earth at the end of the issue. The aliens are shown speaking in their own alphabet. I bet it’s transliterated English. Has anyone sussed this out?

Miscellanea: A random civilian comments that heroes shouldn’t be trusted because of how things were in the seventies. A bad decade in their world too, huh? We see people on the street drinking cans helpfully labelled “Beer.” An on-the-nose brand name, but OK.

Places: Gottfredson Bridge and Shuster Expressway appear on road signs.

My Two Cents: The suddenly unreasonable mayor is the new plot point in this issue. The problem with being in charge is that people give you both credit and blame for whatever happens, regardless of your actual involvement. Hero approval ratings are at a generational low, despite the recent “saved everybody from Thunderhead” event, in part because of a string of deaths in a notoriously dangerous suburb, but also because the hot weather has made everyone testy.

The religious details are wonky. “Cardinal” refers to someone who gets to vote for the next Pope, but that person has another job most of the time, usually a bishop, archbishop, or Vatican administrator. A survey of Wikipedia’s list of the Cathedrals of the USA shows that they are all named after hoary persons from church history (the Virgin Mary has a solid plurality), not contemporary persons. So is “Cardinal Grandenetti supervising construction of a cathedral bearing his name” a statement of some sort, or just a spurious detail that we shouldn’t mind?


Likewise I wonder about the vampirism. Parrish says that he became a vampire after being drained of blood by a vampire. But in most vampire mythoi, it takes more than that to become a vampire; otherwise every vampire would be creating other vampires every night, and there would soon be no normal people left. So vampire mythoi often require some extra step, like drinking vampire blood, in order to get vamped yourself. It’s a nice touch that the priest rises from the dead after three days, though.

Volume 2, Issue #8: Patterns (April 1997)

Theme: Do the right thing even if you get punished for it.

Focus Heroes: The Confessor (Parrish) and Altar Boy (Kinney) are still working through some trust issues. Kinney wants to hang up his cape due to the persecution, but Parrish gives him a pep talk about doing good as its own reward, etc. Shut up! You’re not my real dad! They collar some looters, then almost get caught in an E.A.G.L.E. sting operation intended for Crackerjack. Kinney’s identity is somehow known to the government, and they try to intimidate him and Parrish into retiring. The mayor gives a twilight speech, probably timed to draw Confessor out of hiding, which it does, and has a squad of cross-wielding soldiers ready for him. The Confessor is publicly revealed as a vampire and grievously wounded with a gun that fires massive wooden stakes, but he also gets to perform an unmasking of his own…

Focus Villains: Mayor Stevenson was indeed an alien duplicate, as I speculated in the last issue. The Confessor shoots him through the heart with a wooden stake, and everybody sees it, but not before the city (and the planet?) fills with alien troops.

Other Heroes: Malachi Chalk, cyborg demon hunter, comes out of Shadow Hill on a stretcher. Winged Victory was captured by E.A.G.L.E., as were some of the Irregulars. The Crossbreeds are hiding. Honor Guard are hiding in their invisible floating forces, being hunted by the… US Air Force? So this persecution isn’t really the Astro City mayor’s personal crusade, but also actually the whole Federal government apparently? I call shenanigans. Samaritan has gone to Asia to avoid the whole situation. The First Family are camped out behind a force field surrounding their home, which we learn is in the observatory atop Mount Kirby. Jack-in-the-Box is presumed dead after skirmishing with E.A.G.L.E. over Astro City harbor. The Experimentals got their stasis pods confiscated. The Gentleman and The Hanged Man are still at large. The former is presumably hiding. The latter... is he still patrolling, but E.A.G.L.E. is just scared to go after him in Shadow Hill at night? Or did he get driven underground too? We haven’t seen him in action yet. Blue Knight and Pale Horseman are cited as examples of bad heroes. From the seventies?

Places: Kinney argues with his classmates at Mooney’s Pizza. Grantray Electronics store gets looted. Centennial Park hosts a large meeting.

My Two Cents: I still don’t understand how Feds like E.A.G.L.E. are working for the mayor of Astro City to run distant operations like cordoning off Honor Guard’s floating fortress. Is E.A.G.L.E. now going to immediately reverse course and start fighting the aliens? When Parrish gives Kinney a pep talk, we see again that Kinney recognizes the good moral example his father set for him, but he’s too angered to give his dad actual credit. The mayor's actions last issue seem more reasonable now that I know he's an alien bent on neutralizing the heroes as prelude to alien invasion, but he would have done better to impersonate the President, not just one city's mayor.

My introduction to superheroes.

If you think about it, though, it would be easier to get to a mayor than the president.  Plus, the biggest concentration of heroes is in Astro City.  If they can control that, they can manipulate the info and persuade the government to do their bidding.  Now, Busiek could have aided that premise by having an alien replace a key advisor and have them advising the president on those actions, only to be eventually revealed.  However, Busiek was keeping the story tight on Brian; so, that might have been distracting.  

As it is, the EAGLE troopers are revealed to be aliens, so it is possible that the Air Force jets were also disguised aliens and we are just assuming it is the military.

Volume 2, Issue #10: Show ‘Em All (September 1997)

Theme: Fame is better than fortune.

Focus Villain: Hiram Potterstone, the Junkman, was once fired for hitting retirement age and supposedly being too old to help the company. Now he robs banks with gadgets made from scrap like toy soldiers and a broken Etch-a-Sketch. He lives it up on various beach resorts, but permanent vacation loses its lustre. What good is winning if no one knows it? So soon he’s back robbing just for the thrill of success. He bests M.P.H. in Chicago and The Black Rapier in New Orleans. (Last issue, Black Rapier was in Astro City. Visiting?) But he takes the greatest pleasure in getting captured so that all the TV cameras can record the prosecution lawyer pontificating about all his clever schemes. It’s fine; he can always break out of police custody whenever he wants.

Other Heroes: The Birds of Paradise capture Senhor Tecnico. Jack-in-the-Box is the one who finally collars Junkman…for now. JITB was presumed dead during a skirmish with E.A.G.L.E. a few issues ago… he got better!

Corporations: There’s a garbage company called Rodriguez Hau… something. Edgefield and Wickersham Office Supply Company is now the pithier EdgeCo.

Miscellanea: It’s mentioned that Astro City experienced an alien invasion last month. Is that a reference to the Enelsians from last issue? If so, I am confused about the timeline, because also in the last issue, Altar Boy said, “It took me four years. Four years of travel. Of study. Four years of training” before he took on the mask of The Confessor. I thought at the time that he was saying that after the death of The Confessor, he spent four years preparing to take his place. But if the Enelsian invasion (and thus the Confessor’s death) was just last month, then the four years refers to the time since his move to Astro City. But in that case, was he living in the dorm at the prep school for four years? Does that mean he entered as a freshman, i.e. a fourteen year old? If so, his job at Butler’s and his defeat of Gluegun becomes even more surprising. Or did he live at the high school beyond graduation thanks to The Confessor’s intervention? But his buddy Chet was around the whole time too. I can’t make sense of it.

My Two Cents: In Junkman we see the philosophical opposite of The Confessor, who preferred to do good while leaving his name unsung due to the shame of his vampirism. The tale also tries to provide a plausible backstory for why a villain would repeat the same modus operandi repeatedly, even though the chance of getting caught escalates. The mark of the true nerd is that he doesn’t care if people like him, as long as they say that he is smart and knowledgeable.

According to the sketch pages at the back of my trade edition, Alex Ross designed the Junkman in homage to his own Uncle Sam character, who was of course based on Flagg's Uncle Sam, who was based on Flagg. So we're like four levels deep there.