Astro City: “The Nearness of You”
This review was commissioned by @Vinegrape
This will be my first comic book liveblog. I was requested to go into Astro City as blind as possible, which should be easy since I'd never heard of it. In fact, I only just learned that it's a superhero story anthology and that it was published through DC comics in the last ten minutes.
It has a pretty front cover, so that's nice. I think some of the authors' names ring a bell, but it's been a while since I read any comics, so the connections aren't coming to me. Let's start!
A man dances with a woman. Her name is Miranda. Her laugh is low and throaty, and her hair smells of apples and wildflowers. He dances with her almost every night. She is nearly always waiting for him. Every morning, she vanishes upon his awakening, and if he happens to wake up prematurely he can forget about sleep for the rest of the night.
Michael Tenicek has never met Miranda outside of his dreams. But she's so detailed and so consistent, that he feels like he knows her as well a any real person.
He happened to stir in his sleep tonight, and lost her. Knowing that he's not going to be able to sleep again before morning, he turns on the TV and starts watching the news.
Western comics have diversified into quite a few different general art styles over the past century, and this oil painting-like style is probably my favorite of them. This artist does a good job of it too, aside from some mildly questionable lighting.
Anyway, a group of superheroes caught a very ostentatiously named supervillain tonight. Go them, I suppose.
The next morning, as Tenicek leaves his home (presumably for work), he wonders to himself. The noises Miranda makes in her sleep. The way she likes her pizza. All these intimate, irrelevant details, that you could only know by living with someone. How does he know them all so well? How can a figment of his imagination have so much substance? Meanwhile, some birdmen wrangle a weird kite-man-thing carrying a (stolen?) green purse over the city streets, because that's just the kind of world that this is.
I think the giant face in the clouds is supposed to be Miranda, but it could just as easily be the Unclearable Cloudwoman observing the altercation. This is also where we get the title drop for this short story within the Astro City anthology. "The Nearness of You." Sounds sort of Black Mirror-ish, doesn't it?
Friends, employers, and prospective dates all grow weary of Tenicek constantly being distracted, distant, and sleep deprived (this is all told through a montage of panels, where we're hearing the scoldings from Tenicek's POV. Non-diagetic narration remains at a minimum!). Tenicek used to enjoy his dreams of Miranda, back when he only had them once or twice a month. But then they started multiplying, and now they're consuming his life.
One of the strangest thing is that while Miranda is literally the woman of his dreams, she's not figuratively the woman of his dreams. She's not his ideal physically. Nor does she have the personality he'd want in an ideal partner. She's realistically imperfect and flawed. The kind of person who he might have fallen in love with despite her not being exactly his type. And not all of the dreams are JUST dancing with her, as it turns out. We see her washing dishes, seeing movies, all sorts of mundane domestic activities. She's a normal girlfriend or wife, only not real.
He's tried interviewing his family, his college friends, his elementary school friends, people from every phase of his life, in attempts to find out if he's dreaming of a real person who he forgot the circumstances of meeting. Nothing. He was prescribed pills, and they helped temporarily, but eventually Miranda started bleeding through into his dreams again.
Just as he's thinking of unilaterally increasing his own dosage and accepting whatever side effects that may cause, he hears a strange noise in his bedroom, and a shadowy demon in a mask and hangman's noose appears.
...actually, not a demon at all. Or at least, if he is a demon, he's a demon who also happens to be a public figure. Tenicek recognizes this a the Hanged Man, a mystical superhero who spends most of his time in a place called Shadow Hill. From the sound of things, the Hanged Man is the sort of cape who everyone knows about, but whose deeds mostly concern esoteric threats and explorations that most people can't perceive or understand much of. Doctor Strange, basically. Communicating telepathically (I'm beginning to suspect that the "Hanged Man" is an astral projection, and that the hero's human body does indeed stay at Shadow Hill most of the time), the Hanged Man tells Tenicek that he goes where he is needed, and that he is needed here. The forces troubling the dreams of Michaeel Tenicek, he claims, are also troubling reality itself.
To explain what he means, the Hanged Man then lays a finger on Tenicek's forehead, and grants him a vision.
In 1943, a supervillain called Timekeeper used a time-stop technology to rob a bank. The robbery was foiled by a patriotic, baseball-themed hero called All American, and his protege Slugger, who had gotten their hands on a copy of Timekeeper's invention. While Timekeeper inevitably escaped prison, none of his following schemes were successful either; every year, there were more heroes running around with ever greater powers, and so there was always someone on hand to stop him. Eventually, Timekeeper got bitter enough that he decided to invent full-on time travel so that he could go back and stop the heroes from ever coming into being.
...
Man, this Silver Age wackiness in a semi-realistic oil panting style is really a trip.
...
To go back and change the timeline, he needed to fight a god or two. But he managed.
A group of heroes from up and down the timeline who had the power to do so joined in extratemporal battle against Timestopper. They were, are, and will be victorious, as evidenced by the heroes still existing and/or reality not breaking down as a consequence of Timestopper's folly. However, there were still some changes in the timeline that couldn't be repaired, owing largely to the deletion of certain heroes who fell in the battle and were deleted from time. Due to one of these changes, Miranda Tenicek's grandparents were prevented from meeting, and Miranda and her close relatives were erased from existence.
A few, rare individuals have the innate supernatural power to cling to things they have lost even across timelines. Michael Tenicek is one such individual, and his memories of his deleted wife are causing stress on reality. If they continue, he could end up tearing a space/time rift with his mere thoughts, and that would be very bad. So, the Hanged Man has come to sever Michael's link to the lost timeline in which he was married, protecting reality and restoring Michael's sanity.
However, Michael is unwilling.
It's hard to tell if the Hanged Man is irritated or frustrated by this or not, through that mask (if it even is a mask) that he's wearing. However, he acquiesces. He will allow Michael Tenicek to keep his memories of the life he should be living with Miranda. He will wipe his memories of this visit and conversation, but he will leave the knowledge of who Miranda was and what happened to her, in order to give Michael some peace of mind.
Well. I guess the space/time rifts that this runs the risk of causing aren't serious enough trouble for the Hanged Man to cross that moral boundary. Or else, Michael's understanding of the situation makes the space/time stress less severe, somehow. Whether he's wise to do this or not, of course, I'd need more information to judge.
Before the Hanged Man vanishes and takes the memories of his visit with him, Michael asks him how many other cases like him choose to keep rather than abandon their ghostly memories. Through the burlap of the Hanged Man's mask, Michael can see just the faint hint of a smile, as the hero says "Everyone remembers."
Michael returns to his life, not knowing HOW he knows who Miranda is, but knowing it nonetheless, and accepting it. End.
I don't know how representative "The Nearness of You" is of Astro City as a whole, but if it is then I'll definitely be reading more of it.
I think this is something you could call a "gritty reconstruction." It plays all the conventions and genre assumptions of Silver Age superheroics straight while trying to think through the human consequences of a world full of such events. What makes it a rare reconstruction rather than one of the many (many, many, many...) deconstructions is that it's still committed to the ideals behind the superhero. No Rorschachs or Punishers here. Reality ensues, but in a way that stays true to the original premise.
Something else that this story at least comes close to avoiding is the authoritarian messaging that superhero media has struggled with since pretty much the beginning. It's not just that the Hanged Man chooses not to force Tenicek to give up his memories for a greater good that mere mortals like him are not capable of understanding. It's also that rather than a sharp distinction between PC superheroes and villains who have weight and agency and NPC civilians (close friends and families of the capes notwithstanding) who exist to prop up their stories, this is a world with a gradient of specialness. Tenicek doesn't have the sort of powers that you need to put on a mask and fight/commit crime, but he has something, and its implied that a significant percentage of the population might also have something. The existence of that middle ground, and the fact that the members of said middle ground look and act like normal people, changes the whole tone. It doesn't just make sure that the superheroes stay human; more importantly, it makes sure that the civilians stay human.
I also find the Hanged Man an interesting character, and hope there are more stories that feature him. Partly because (if my theory about him is correct) he's similar to an astral projection based hero I made up back in middle school, but moreso because I'm curious about the symbolism of the "hanged man." The Tarot card, with the symbolism of novel perspectives? Odin hanging himself from the World Tree, power gained from sacrifice of the self to the self? So many possibilities!
So yeah, nice story, and quite well drawn and framed. I give it a strong recommendation.
