So after the first Moore, Miller and Martin–led flush of superheroes (they weren’t deconstructed. Just, briefly, respected), things returned, more or less, to status quo, and a pendulum swing gave us, in the early nineties, superhero comics which were practically contentless: poorly written, and utterly literal. There was even one publisher who trumpeted four issues of good writers as the ultimate marketing gimmick—every bit as good as foil-embossed covers.

There is room to move beyond the literal. Things can mean more than they mean. It’s why Catch-22 isn’t just about fighter pilots in the Second World War. It’s why “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is about more than a bunch of people trapped inside a supercomputer. It’s why Moby-Dick is about (believe fifty thousand despairing college professors or not, but it’s still true) a lot more than whaling.

And I’m not talking about allegory, here, or metaphor, or even the Message. I’m talking about what the story is about, and then I’m talking about what it’s about.

Things can mean more than they literally mean. And that’s the dividing line between art and everything that isn’t art. Or one of the lines, anyway.

Currently, superhero fictions seem to break into two kinds: there are the workaday, more or less pulp fictions which are turned out by the yard by people who are trying their hardest, or not. And then there are the other kind, and there are precious few of them.

There are two obvious current exceptions—Alan Moore’s Supreme, an exercise in rewriting fifty years of Superman into something that means something.

And then—and some of you might have thought that I might have forgotten it, given how far we’ve got into this introduction without its being mentioned, there is Astro City. Which traces its lineage back in two directions—into the world of classic superhero archetypes, but equally into the world of The Kryptonite Kid, a world in which all this stuff, this dumb wonderful four-color stuff, has real emotional weight and depth, and it means more than it literally means.

And that is the genius and the joy of Astro City.

Me? I’m jaded, where superheroes are concerned. Jaded and tired and fairly burned out, if truth be told. Not utterly burned out, though. I thought I was, until, a couple of years ago, I found myself in a car with Kurt Busiek, and his delightful wife, Ann. (We were driving to see Scott McCloud and his wife, Ivy, and their little girl Sky, and it was a very memorable and eventful evening, ending as it did in the unexpected birth of Scott and Ivy’s daughter Winter.) And in the car, on the way, we started talking about Batman.

Pretty soon Kurt and I were co-plotting a complete Batman story; and not just a Batman story, but the coolest, strangest Batman story you can imagine, in which every relationship in the world of Batman was turned inside out and upside down, and, in the finest comic book tradition, everything you thought you knew turned out to be a lie.