It shouldn't surprise anyone who's read more than a few postings here that I'm a fairly major enthusiast of superhero comics. With that preamble, it shouldn't surprise anyone when I relate my pleasure at having met one of (if not the best) writer currently working in that field, Kurt Busiek at a signing today at my local comic shop, Beyond Comics.
Busiek is probably best known for the miniseries Marvels and the his popular runs on The Avengers and Superman. He's probably most acclaimed for what is arguably the best superhero comic of the past 20 years, Astro City, which he created and continues to revisit on an irregular basis. Each of those series is characterized by a keen sense of the characters' history and what makes them tick. This is especially impressive in Astro City where the history has been invented from the ground up and mostly conveyed just through small hints and brief snippets of dialogue.
Despite all that, Busiek is far less acclaimed than other writers who entered comics around the same time such as Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. I suspect a lot of this is because Busiek is very much a classicist in his approach to more or less iconic characters like the Justice League and the Avengers. Where Moore and Morrison (not to mention Frank Miller) tend to be a bit more focused on breaking the molds, Busiek wants to see how the mold can be given additional dimension.
That last trait was especially obvious on his 1998-2002 run on The Avengers. A friend of mine once observed that Busiek wrote The Avengers as if nothing had happened since the mid-80s. While this was true, it was no means a bad thing because despite the efforts of good writers like Roger Stern the team and its history had become something of a mess when Busiek took over, particularly after the Heroes Reborn debacle. Busiek set about making things right, writing some great stories in the process. Sadly, with the exception of Geoff Johns, the writers that came after him set about undoing all of his work and making the team a mess again, especially the overrated Brian Michael Bendis whose Avengers Disassembled may be the most mean-spirited story in the history of mainstream superhero comics.
Thankfully, for people who love these characters and the values they embody, Busiek is still working. Though he doesn't have a book in DC's "new 52" he mentioned that he's working on a new project for DC as well as more Astro City. That combined with getting one of my favorite comics that he wrote (really, one of my favorite comics in general) is enough to make this comic fan happy.
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