Posted in: Comics, Image | Tagged: astro city, image comics

Astro City One Shot Celebrates Image Comics With Creator Self-Swipes

Published Fri, 17 Dec 2021 12:25:13 -0600

Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, Alex Ross, Alex Sinclair, and Comicraft bring back Astro City with a new one-shot scheduled from Image Comics in March 2022 with Astro City: That Was Then. And a host of Image creators welcome the series back to Image—where it all began—with a lineup of variant covers by Erik Larsen, Marcelo Costa, Leandro Fernández, Jamie McKelvie, Chip Zdarsky, and Rob Guillory, that reference their own best-known work for Image Comics.

Astro City One Shot Celebrates Image Comics With Creator Self-Swipes

These covers Astro City characters together with popular classic and current Image Comics series, including Savage Dragon and Samaritan, Radiant Black and the Confessor, The Old Guard and Cleopatra, Beautie in The Wicked + The Divine style, Quarrel and Crackerjack in a Sex Criminals homage, and Tony Chu and the First Family's Rex in a Chew-style trip to Beefy Bob's.

Astro City: That Was Then… features new and existing heroes and launches a mystery that will drive the forthcoming Astro City series. Who were the Jayhawks? How did they inspire five teen sidekicks looking for answers to hit the road in a rickety crime mobile in 1969? And how will this affect Astro City in the present? It all begins here. And don't miss the Astro City Metrobook, collecting the first three years of the acclaimed series!

Kurt Busiek's Astro City is a superhero anthology comic book series centered on a fictional American city of that name. Created and written by Kurt Busiek, the series is mostly illustrated by Brent Anderson, with character designs and painted covers by Alex Ross. The first volume was published from 1995 to 1996 by Image Comics. In 1996, a second volume was launched under the Homage Comics imprint of Image partner studio WildStorm, which was then acquired by DC Comics, where the series later transitioned to the WildStorm Signature Series imprint and continued until 2010. During this period it switched from a regular ongoing series to a sequence of periodic mini-series and special issues. A third, ongoing volume was launched under DC's Vertigo imprint in 2013 and concluded in 2018, reverting to occasional miniseries and original graphic novels. Counting all series, mini-series and special issues, over 100 issues have been published. The Astro City: That Was Then… one-shot will be available at comic book shops on Wednesday, the 30th of March.