"her dark plastic roots"

[sergebroom]

If you want to get re-acquainted with superhero comics and to again feel the awe and the pleasure, take a look at Kurt Busiek's AstroCity. I's published irregurlarly, but always worth the wait. His latest is a standalone titled Her Dark Plastic Roots. It follows his trademarked approach to comics, where he takes a trope or a stereotype or some silliness of the genre and, instead of demolishing it with the hammer of realism, plays with it as is but with a twist.

This one is the story of Beautie, one of the members of AstroCity's Honor Guard. Not only is she strong, but she can also fly. And she's a doll. Literally. A life-sized Barbie-like doll who doesn't know who or what she is, and who begins to wonder one day in a toy store displaying many action-figures based on her.

They don't think. There's nothing but air and the molded roots of their plastic hair behind those flat painted eyes. She knows that.

But sometimes she wonders, nevertheless. If they feel like she does. Or if they know something. Something she can't quite--

Comments

[ko-kissaki.livejournal.com]

I wish I liked superhero comics more. So much of the time, the characters have just come off to me as being so flat, or borderline incompetent or maniac--comes of being raised on manga and indy as long as I could read, probably, and not the girly shoujo stuff.
(Mom was an illustrator, so I grew up in ConSuites, looking over the shoulders of harried artists; the magic I get from comics is decidedly different than the magic that most lasses my age might get.)

[ko-kissaki.livejournal.com]

Whoops! That's me, come_love_sleep, using my kendo journal. Sorry!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Of course, superheroes are a fantasy, not in the sense of stories with magic in them, but in the sense that we know we wouldn't want that in the real world, but we can pretend that we do, with some constraints so that the pretense doesn't go beyond where we're willing to go.

That being said... There IS plenty of oh-hum stuff out there. But that's the way with everything. There is also some good stuff. Busiek's Marvels mini-series of 1993 is what rekindled my enjoyment of the genre.