Astro City 2

The Scoop
by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
Sep 1995

- story within a story
- Elliott Mills, once a newspaper reporter, now an editor, flashes back to 1959 and tells a story from his very early days as a reporter
- Mills witnesses one crime broken up by the Silver Agent, but a senior reporter on the scene gets to be the one to report it
- a couple nights later Mills follows some mysterious cloaked men into a subway tunnel
- the cloaked men are worshippers of the shark god, Shirak the Devourer, who transforms them into sharkmen
- the Silver Agent shows up with the rest of the Honor Guard
- Mills witnesses a battle between the Honor Guard and the shark cult, after they are all transported to another dimension by the shark god
- Mills writes up the story for the newspaper but it gets sent back for rewrite multiple times because all he has is his own memory of the event; he doesn't know how to contact the Honor Guard and can't find any other witnesses to corroborate the facts; in the end the printed story is much sparser and less colorful than what actually happened

- loved the introduction of the Old Soldier (part Uncle Sam, part Captain America) and the reverent tone in which Mills described him
- Loved how some of his colleagues disputed his facts because it included the Bouncing Beatnik, who was more of a loner, and the Old Soldier, who hadn't been seen in 15 years and was thought to be dead
- teases some of the history of this world
- kind of like looking down an alleyway and seeing something intriguing but not clearly, I want more
- the scene in the subway reminded me of that scene from DC: The New Frontier with the cultists, Batman, Martian Manhunter
- kind of amused by the cliched way that Mills is shown typing out the story on a typewriter, it doesn't work that way for me