If you follow our comics coverage, you know that we’ve been fans of writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson’s Astro City for quite a while. The long-running superhero comic often takes the perspective of the man on the street, exploring what it means to share a city with gods, heroes, monsters and villains on a personal level. And, after more than two decades in print, it’s finally coming to screens.
The series, which will have a pilot co-written by Busiek, comes from the production company behind American Gods, FremantleMedia North America, and from the sound of things will share the books’ focus on people just trying to get through the day, according to Deadline:
A mid-sized American city blessed with, and cursed by, the largest number of superheroes and supervillains in one place on Earth, Astro City is described as a unique brand of humanistic saga — part superhero epic, part intimate drama — in which the (mostly) good hearted, workaday residents of the eponymous locale come into daily contact with the worrisome, the weird and the wondrous.
Despite how that might sound, Astro City is one of the most accessible superhero comics out there. It tends to feature standalone stories that are loosely connected to one another and tend to hop genres, from romance to noir to comedy to drama. One of the best issues is simply the book’s counterparts to Superman and Wonder Woman going out on a date in their civilian identities, a date that then goes somewhat off the rails. More importantly, Astro City tends to put the human aspects of characters first, meaning it won’t necessarily have to rely on special effects. In other words, we should probably expect something more akin to a Peak TV drama than a CW superhero series, but we’ll see as it gets closer to production.
(via Deadline)