It’s not the best of Astro City (and it feels awkward when trying to work with race and gender), but it’s not the worst either. I enjoyed reading some stories I hadn’t read before, and some of them were really well done.

I was invited this week to give a sermon in January for an online congregation from Toronto. Last time I preached there, I referenced a story from Astro City and got told in a YouTube comment that mixing comics and the Bible was bad taste. Tempted to double down in January, but that would be petty.

As I wrote earlier in the week, I gave today’s sermon for the Toronto Congregation’s inclusive online worship service. The service was recorded and can be found at the YouTube link below:

I really enjoyed participating with Beyond the Walls. I had some idea of how much work they put into making this look like a professional production, but getting to peek behind the scenes and see how much work they put into juggling different cameras, testing and managing audio, and everything else made me really appreciate what they do all the more. I especially appreciated the images that John picked out to accompany my words, and it was also a delight to see the French translation of what I’d written. I really like my local congregation, but I’m more and more convinced this kind of thing is the future of Community of Christ. I also deeply appreciated all the other contributions to the service: John Hamer’s introduction to the parable made so many important points about interpreting the parable, the experience that Tom Webber shared was moving, the music was wonderful, and the whole thing was an uplifting way to spend my Sunday.

This is new Astro City material for me, even though it’s been around for a while. There’s still a lot of what makes Astro City great in the long “Dark Ages” story, but not enough to make it shine. I think I like Astro City best when it takes a quick dive into an interesting story, plays with some tropes, and just hints at a broader world and continuity. This tries to explain too much and be too connected, and in doing so, I think it loses a lot of the magic. I also felt nervous the whole time about a white creative team working with two black protagonists; it felt like it skirted the edge of stereotype sometimes.

This volume isn’t quite as good as the last (mostly because of the filler material that it concludes with), and it has some of the same problems with trying to do diversity but sometime undermining itself. However, I still think the best superhero stories are the ones that pick at and play with tropes, and I haven’t seen anyone do that better than this series.

I love Astro City. It is definitely not perfect (the creative team is a bunch of white guys, and sometimes, that’s painfully obvious), but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best wholesale reimagining of superhero tropes out there. I’ve read every single story in this volume before, and I read them now with a more critical eye than in the past, but I had a great time rereading them all. Glad that these large collections are on hoopla, and looking forward to reading the rest.

I was worried this was going to be a gritty take on Astro City, but now I’m just mad they took the name of my favorite superhero for a different story.

When I was in college, I ran into a friend on my way to a professor’s office hours. He saw that I had a copy of Superman for All Seasons with me and gave me a hard time about it—he was much more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan (these were the days when this was primarily a reference to comics, not sprawling cinematic universes) and just didn’t get the appeal of Superman—how could you do anything interesting with a character that powerful? Fortunately, the reason that I like Superman for All Seasons is my best answer to that question: What makes the Superman character interesting is not the magnitude of his power but the ways that he chooses to exercise it. I don’t find at all interesting any comics that take the format of “Superman must prove himself stronger than increasingly stronger adversaries,” but I find absolutely fascinating the many Superman comics—and other comics clearly playing with homages to the character—the ones that ask themselves why such a powerful character would use that power for good.