Yet, Busiek, Anderson, and Ross fill the city with other characters that don’t have any clear analogues, characters who exist only to celebrate the superhero comic genre. Chief among these is Jack-in-the-Box, a clown-based superhero who fights crime through merciless quips and goofy gadgets. Busiek may have reused a rejected Spider-Man pitch for Astro City #3, the issue that first debuts the character, But Jack-in-the-Box has a strangeness that makes him entirely his own. The same could be said of the living Barbie doll Beautie or the evil mastermind the Conquistador.
Whether original creations or obvious riffs, these characters allow Astro City to do what it does best: playing with the tropes of superhero stories to find moments of pathos that Marvel and DC too often ignore.
Sympathy for the Supervillain
Nothing demonstrates this tendency better than the 1997 story “Show ‘Em All,” published in Astro City #10. “Show ‘Em All” focuses on Hiram Potterstone a.k.a. the Junkman. Once a talented engineer at a research firm, Hiram was pushed out of the company due to a mandatory retirement rule and his advanced age prevented him from getting employment anywhere. Because he couldn’t earn an honest living, Hiram used his talents for evil, taking on the persona of the Junkman and relocating to a local junkyard. There, he repurposed discarded appliances and electronics to become his gadgets.
By the time that the issue opens, Junkman had already tangled with Jack-in-the-Box and other Astro City heroes time and again. But this time, he’s prepared. This time, it will be different. What follows in those next pages is the perfect crime, with Junkman showing both ingenuity and patience as he takes millions from a local bank, right under the nose of Jack-in-the-Box and the other heroes. Undetected, Junkman slips away to a tropical island, where he can live out his last days in ease.
There’s just one problem: Hiram doesn’t want to go quietly. So when he overhears others gushing about the superheroes, Hiram can’t help but let some details slip about his perfect heist. The revelations don’t lead to his undoing. No one takes the information and gives it to the superheroes, so that Junkman can pay for his crimes. Instead, no one believes him. They laugh at Hiram, refusing to accept that a feeble old man like him could ever outsmart a superhero.
And so Junkman returns to Astro City and again starts committing crimes. But this time, he doesn’t do it in secret. Instead, he stages spectacular capers and draws the attention of superheroes, battling them out in the open. He even beats most of them, before finally losing to his arch-enemy Jack-in-the-Box. In the final pages of “Show ‘Em All,” Hiram sits in the courtroom and listens to the prosecutor outlines his crimes, smiling with satisfaction when the prosecutor gives him full credit for being a criminal mastermind.