Alan Lee's Mackenzie August is a compelling character whose attempts to grapple with the realities of his life as a private investigator make for very interesting reading. He's quippy (in a good way; Lee is actually funny and writes funny dialogue well) and his self-examination has a religious dimension that a fellow in my profession finds particularly intriguing. His description of how the woman in his life, Veronica "Ronnie" Summers, is trying to figure out her real self after a horrid upbringing and young adulthood is also well-done and reflects a care not always taken with female characters in tough-guy detective novels. While all of those features can be found in the fifth novel of the August series, Only the Details, they don't matter a lick because the story which contains them is so very, very stupid.
One of the less compelling features of the August books is their conception and handling of organized crime, which seems to owe more to comic books and bad Mario Puzo ripoffs than the more realistic world inhabited by the flawed characters on our side of the good guy line. Mack wouldn't be the first private eye to arrive at an uneasy and semi-respectful truce with the folks on the wrong side of that line, but all of the commandments, codes and a upright "honor among thieves" tropes Lee uses stretch credulity until it snaps in half. And unfortunately for Only the Details, its entire plot turns on a cooperative venture among different bodies of organized criminals to stage one of the most hackneyed clichés of '80s low-budget action movies, the faux-gladiator tournament in which our hero must fight to the death in order to survive.
The combination alone would wreck the book, but Mack comments more than once to his captors about the stupidity of their whole concept -- a lesson Lee should probably have taken to heart and scrapped the plot in favor of one that wouldn't have made Michael Dudikoff say, "Who writes this stuff?" Mack also lectures them extensively on why their ideas are so wrong in big and sometimes repetitive dialogue chunks that are only barely lightened by Lee's witty dialogue.
It's a rare series that doesn't have at least one dead mackerel slapped down on the nice white linen tablecloth and left there to stink the place up. Details is the fifth of seven Mackenzie August books (as of this review in August 2020) and it's the first one to really tank this badly. By steering away from his John Wick-ish concept of organized crime and from recycled American Ninja movie plots, Lee will probably produce better work as the series continues.
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Before his illness, Busiek completed Confessions, held by a number of Astro City fans as one of the top story arcs in the series. It focused on one of the city's nighttime vigilantes, the Confessor, and unspooled his secrets as public opinion soured on super-heroes amid several crises and a secretly mounting alien invasion. The conflicted central character, the widely-ranged slices of life in Astro City and the realistic way that ordinary folks tried to grapple with a world of heroes and villains with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men (and women) carried all of the strengths of Busiek, cover artist Alex Ross and series artist Brent Anderson, and very few of their weaknesses.
Long illness-related delays and a rotating series of publishers made subsequent story arcs shine less brightly, or at least quite a bit more unfocused and harder to follow. When Busiek at full strength reignited the series at DC's Vertigo imprint, he once again started showing why even a mediocre Astro City stood significantly taller than some other creator's best efforts. And while the tail end of the Vertigo period had some serious clunkers, its 2014 Victory arc, focusing on the the Greco-influenced Wonder Woman analog Winged Victory and a threat to both her work and her hero status, challenges the earlier Confessions for the title of Astro City's best overall arc.
Winged Victory's foes are going on low-level crime sprees, getting caught and hinting that they actually work for the hero herself. Former residents of her shelters, run as both recovery and education schools for women and girls victimized by abuse and other crimes, are claiming that she is a fraud. Astro City's Superman-analog, Samaritan, is also Winged Victory's lover and offers to help her as she needs. She declines -- partly because she believes she teaches the women who look to her by her example and she needs to continue to demonstrate her independence, and partly because she has no idea how the attack is being mounted or who's behind it. The Confessor, Astro City's version of Batman, appears on the scene with evidence of an electronic trail that may hold the answers. But even if he tracks the culprit down, will the damage to Winged Victory's reputation and work be too great to repair? And will her willingness to let men help her fight the threat cut her off from the source of her power?
Busiek doesn't let the limitations of dialogue and exposition forced on the comic format by the need for artwork keep him from writing characters and a story that goes deeply into their motivations and thoughts. Victory's previously unknown origin sheds a lot of light on the foundation for her non-heroic work and Busiek shows how her concern for its continuation keeps her from falling back on the old super-hero standby tactic "Just Start Punching." He establishes a great relationship between the three leads and spends time making sure some potentially cardboard characters do more than just show up. By the end of the story, all of our three main characters have grown in different ways as they've seen how choices they have made in their lives until now might actually have offered their opponents avenues of attack.
Anderson is as reliable as ever in conveying emotion as well as action and feeding the comic junkie's need for cool art. Ross's covers are, as almost always, superb and are subtle twists on iconic scenes between the three mainstream comic heroes on which Samaritan, Winged Victory and the Confessor are modeled.
One appealing part of the Astro City project was how it was not only told great super-hero stories with great characters but how it also commented on the comic medium and its history. If Busiek ever manages to do that as well as he did in the Victory arc alongside Anderson, Ross and colorist Alex Sinclair, he'll have another fine feather in his cap.
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