We were doing this for fun. I doubt that either of us will ever do anything with the story. We were just enjoying ourselves.

But, for several hours, I found myself caring utterly and deeply about Batman. Which is, I suspect, part of Kurt Busiek’s special talent. If I were writing a different kind of introduction, I might call it a superpower.

Astro City is what would have happened if those old comics, with their fine simplicities and their primal, four-color characters, had been about something. Or rather, it assumes they were about something, and tells you the tales that, on the whole, slipped through the cracks.

It’s a place inspired by the worlds and worldviews of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, of Gardner Fox and John Broome, of Jerry Siegel and Bob Finger and the rest of them: a city where anything can happen. In the story that follows we have (and I’m trying hard not to give too much away) a crime-fighter bar, serial killing, an alien invasion, a crackdown on costumed heroes, a hero’s mysterious secret . . . all of them the happy pulp elements of a thousand comics-by-the-yard.

Except that, here, as in the rest of Astro City, Kurt Busiek manages to take all of these elements and let them mean more than they literally mean.

(Again, I am not talking about allegory here. I’m talking story, and what makes some stories magic while others just sit there, lifeless and dull.)

Astro City: Confession is a coming-of-age story, in which a young man learns a lesson. (Robert A. Heinlein claimed in an essay in the 1940s, published in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s collection of SF writer essays Of Worlds Beyond, that there are only three stories, which we tell over and over again. He said he had thought there were only two, “Boy Meets Girl” and “The Little Tailor,” until L. Ron Hubbard pointed out to him that there was also “A Man Learns a Lesson.” And, Heinlein maintained, if you add in their opposites—someone fails to learn a lesson, two people don’t fall in love, and so on—you may have all the stories there are. But then, we can move beyond the literal.) It’s a growing-up story, set in the city in Kurt’s mind.

One of the things I like about Astro City is that Kurt Busiek lists all of his collaborators on the front cover. He knows how important each of them is to the final outcome. Each element does what it is meant to, and each of them gives of their best and a little more: Alex Ross’s covers ground each issue in a photoreal sort of hyper-reality; Brent Anderson’s pencils and Will Blyberg’s inks are perfectly crafted, always wisely at the service of the story, never obtrusive, always convincing. The coloring by Alex Sinclair and the Comicraft lettering by John Roshell are both slick, and, in the best sense of the word, inconspicuous.

Astro City, in the hands of Kurt Busiek and his collaborators, is art, and it is good art. It recognizes the strengths of the four-color heroes, and it creates something—a place, perhaps, or a medium, or just a tone of voice—in which good stories are told. There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean, and this is certainly true in Astro City.