Kurt Busiek's Astro City: The Annotations

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               KURT BUSIEK'S ASTRO CITY VOL. 1, #1
                            In Dreams
  collected as part of the LIFE IN THE BIG CITY trade paperback
                       Narrator: Samaritan
                   Date: August 8th-9th, 1995
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Cover:    The flying figure is Samaritan. Samaritan is a character
          in the style of DC's Superman -- he is generally regarded
          as a leader amongst heroes, is amongst the most powerful,
          and is dedicated to doing good for the sake of doing
          good, even to his own detriment. The two heroes also bear
          obvious physical similarities: short, dark hair, a long
          cape, and a distinctive chest emblem (in Samaritan's
          case, this is a stylized dove, a symbol for peace). The
          building behind Samaritan is the AstroBank Tower.

1/1:      This is Samaritan. Note the blue hair: for much of comics
          history, people with black hair (such as Superman) would
          have their hair colored a mixture of blue and black to
          provide contrast; this is a reflection of that practice.

4/5:      Samaritan keeps his costume concealed in a secret panel
          behind the "World To Come" poster.

6/1:      Though Astro City's exact location in the United States
          is unknown, we can still roughly estimate Samaritan's
          flying speed as about 1600 miles per second, or 5760000
          miles per hour -- over eight thousand times the speed of
          sound.

 /3:      The energy field is Samaritan's Empyrean web.

7/1:      First mention of the Pyramid Assassins.

 /2:      This is Samaritan's alter ego, Asa Martin; note that the
          name is an anagram of his super-hero name. Like
          Superman's alter ego Clark Kent, Asa Martin wears glasses
          he doesn't actually need, sports a different hairstyle
          from Samaritan, and works in the field of journalism
          (although Asa is a "fact checker", not an actual reporter
          like Kent). The magazine he works at (according to the
          door sign) is the "Current": "Astro City's Feature
          Weekly". The "Astro City Rocket" newspaper headline (seen
          better in 7/3) reads "Jack-In-The-Box Captures Brass
          Monkey"; first mention of Jack-In-The-Box II and the
          Brass Monkey.

 /5:      "Heywood" is Thomas Heywood (1574?-1641), one of the
          principal English playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean
          drama (his plays included "The Captives", "The Fair Maid
          of the West", and "If you know not me, You know no
          bodie"), as well as an accomplished author (notably "An
          Apology for Actors"). Robert Greene (1558?-1592) was
          another foremost playwright and author of the sixteenth
          century, and was a major inspiration for Shakespeare's
          comedies and romances with works such as "Pandosto" and
          "The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth, slaine at
          Flodden". To be precise, Asa has quoted from Greene's
          1592 work "A disputation betweene a hee conny-catcher and
          a shee conny-catcher".

8/1:      The article reads as follows:

                    FAMOUS "FIRSTS"
                    45 Years and Three Generations of Adventure

               Dr. Augustus Furst arrived in his hometown of St.
               Paul, Minnesota, this past May, to give the
               commencement address at the Harold Jordan Memorial
               High School graduation exercises. There was a brass
               band, and a parade, and throngs of admirers from as
               far away as Boston, Massachusetts and Fairbanks,
               Alaska. But there were also people who know Dr.
               Furst personally, and who've known him since he was
               a student at "H.J.'s," as the locals put it. "He
               was a science nerd then, and he's a science nerd
               now," says Mamie Didrickson, 64, Furst's date to
               his high-school senior prom. "But he's a really,
               really famous science nerd."

               Indeed. In between high school and today have come
               four wives, innumerable enemies, a pair of super-
               powered adoptive children (born to an ex-wife and
               an exotic enemy), a marriage for one of those
               children that shocked the world, the globe's most
               famous grandchild and, of course, a lifetime of
               adventure and lasting fame as head of what the
               world has come to know as "The First Family."

               It's been a heady ride for Dr. Furst and his
               younger brother Julius, starting back in 1950 with
               what was supposed to be a research field trip to
               Romania. "Some fancy scientific muck-a-muck had
               been having trouble with something behind the Iron
               Curtain," says Julius. "They thought is was some
               unreadable energy-flux whatsit that was drainin'
               energy from one'a their manufacturin' plants --
               they didn't know it was Onggu the Omnivorous.
               Nobody knew about that until Gus got there.

               "Anyway, they'd seen some stuff Gus wrote in one'a
               those science journal things he used to clog up the
               livin' room with -- he was only 14 when he wrote
               it, but they didn't know that -- they figgered he
               was the only man for the job and

          The typo in the third paragraph ("is" instead of "it") is
          present in the actual article. Harold Jordan Memorial
          High School refers to DC's Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal
          Jordan. The "Memorial" is a probably a reference to a
          mid-Nineties story in which Jordan went insane after the
          destruction of the city where he once lived, became the
          villain Parallax, and later perished saving the Earth.
          First mention of the First Family (who bear similarities
          to Marvel's Fantastic Four) and Onggu the Omnivorous.

 /5:      First mention of Dr. Saturday.

 /6:      FBU is Fox-Broome University. John Broome was a premiere
          writer of the Silver Age for DC. Gardner Fox (1911-1986),
          one of DC's most influential writers of the Golden and
          Silver Ages, helped create characters such as Zatara, the
          Sandman, Starman, Doctor Fate, Hawkman, and the Flash,
          devised the Justice Society, and originated the Earth-
          1/Earth-2 concept which ultimately led to the DC
          "multiverse".

9/1:      Note the poster to Samaritan's right. This is the first
          mention of the Astro City Irregulars, a group of teenaged
          wanna-be heroes.

 /4:      First mention of the Honor Guard, a team in the vein of
          DC's Justice Society/League of America and Marvel's
          Avengers in that it is comprised of the best and
          brightest of Astro City's superheroes.

 /5:      First appearances of (left to right) MPH, the Black
          Rapier, Cleopatra II, Quarrel II, N-Forcer, and Beautie.
          MPH (which, of course, stands for Miles Per Hour) is a
          speedster in the vein of DC's Flash or Johnny Quick, or
          Marvel's Quicksilver. The Black Rapier is the team
          leader. N-Forcer resembles Marvel's Iron Man, as he
          appears to be at least partially reliant on his armor
          (which has been updated constantly over the years).
          Quarrel appears to be a heroine of the variety of DC's
          Huntress or Green Arrow, or Marvel's Hawkeye. Beautie
          looks like a life-size Barbie doll. "Big Red": the
          Fawcett/DC Captain Marvel (himself a Superman derivative)
          is often referred to as "The Big Red Cheese".

10/1:     First mention of the Gnomes of Glittertinden and the
          Deacon. Glittertinden probably refers to Glittertind,
          Norway's tallest mountain and a member of the Jotunheim
          chain which in mythology was the home of the Giants.

  /2:     First mention of the Zonn.

  /4:     First mention of the Xenoform.

  /5:     First mention of the Tourist.

11/2:     First appearance of the Menagerie Gang, who are similar
          in motif to DC's Golden Age Batman villains The Terrible
          Trio.

13/4:     The woman on the lower right is Winged Victory.

14/1:     Biro Island is the site of Astro City's prison; it is
          named after Golden Age writer/artist Charles Biro (1911-
          1972).

  /3:     "Cicero Street": Cicero was the cat in "Mutt and Jeff".

16/2:     The date of this story is shown to be August 8th, 1995.

18/1:     First appearance of the Living Nightmare.



Release History:
Version 1.3 released 11th July 1998
Version 1.2 released 14th March 1998
Version 1.1 released  8th March 1998
Version 1.0 released  4th March 1998

Notes:
Citation format is page/panel. For instance, 18/1 refers to page
18, panel 1. Two-page spreads are treated as a single "page" for
the purpose of panel enumeration; for example, 6-7/3 refers to the
third panel on a spread covering pages 6 and 7. Issue number is
included if different from the issue being annotated, with issues
from Volume 1 specified as such.

KURT BUSIEK'S ASTRO CITY, its prominent characters and their
likenesses are trademarks of Juke Box Productions. All quoted text
is copyright Juke Box Productions.

Additions, corrections and comments should be sent to the editor.
Reproduction of these annotations, in whole or in part, without the
permission of the editor is forbidden.

Sources:
"Comic Art & Graffix Gallery Virtual Museum & Encyclopedia"
(http://www.comic-art.com/enter.htm)

"The Greatest Golden Age Stories Ever Told", Biographies: Creating
The Greatest by Mark Waid, DC Comics (1990)

"Who's Who In Astro City" (http://www.bonner.rice.edu/morrow/kbac/
kbacww.html)

Contributors:
Shannon Patrick Sullivan, shannon@morgan.ucs.mun.ca (editor)
Robert Carnegie, robertc@ecsumail1.ecsu.org
Carl Fink, carlf@panix.com
Jess Nevins, jjnevins@ix.netcom.com
Derek Richman, drichman@kilstock.com