Astro City Vol 16 Broken Century

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

Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, and other creative writers, 1900-1960.

With contributions from Will Brooker, Jeffrey A. Brown, Scott Bukatman, John G. Cawelti, Peter Coogan, Jules Feiffer, Charles Hatfield, Henry Jenkins, Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Gerard Jones, Geoff Klock, Karin Kukkonen, Andy Medhurst, Adilifu Nama, Walter Ong, Lorrie Palmer, Richard Reynolds, Trina Robbins, Lillian Robinson, Roger B. Rollin, Gloria Steinem, Jennifer Stuller, Fredric Wertham, and Philip Wylie Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture. While superhero comics are a distinct and sometimes disdained branch of comics creation, they are integral to the development of the North American comic book and the history of the medium. For the past half-century, they have also been the one overwhelmingly dominant market genre. The sheer volume of superhero comics that have been published over the years is staggering. Major superhero universes constitute one of the most expansive storytelling canvases ever fashioned. Moreover, characters inhabiting these fictional universes are immensely influential, having achieved iconic recognition around the globe. Their images and adventures have shaped many other media, such as film, videogames, and even prose fiction. The primary aim of this reader is twofold: first, to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated commentary on superheroes, and second, to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical themes that are of interest to a great many readers both in the academy and beyond.