Astro City Vol 14 Reflections

"Astro City created by Busiek, Anderson & Ross."

Written by KURT BUSIEK Art by BRENT ANDERSON Cover by ALEX ROSS A new hardcover starring Astro City's most popular heroes, collecting ASTRO CITY: ASTRA #1-2, ASTRO CITY: SILVER AGENT #1-2 and ASTRO CITY: BEAUTIE #1. Astra Furst, a third-generation super hero of Astro City, is graduating from college. It's a time of friends and family, new opportunities, changing relationships - and danger! Featuring the First Family, the creatures of Monstro City, a new hero team and more on a graduation night nobody's ever going to forget! Also in this volume: at last, the full story of the Silver Agent's fateful journey through time is revealed - including his origin, his greatest battles and his ultimate fate. Plus, Beautie, the life-size super-powered fashion-doll member of Honor Guard, doesn't know who she is. Now, she's determined to get answers. On sale APRIL 13 - 208 pg, FC

"Originally published in single magazine form in Astro City 47-52"--Copyright page.

"Astro City created by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson & Alex Ross."

"Astro City created by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson & Alex Ross"

"Astro City created by Busiek, Anderson & Ross."

Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.

In this new ASTRO CITY collection, two of the city's greatest heroes face the fact that they're both aging.