Astro City: Local Heroes #[nn]

This 2005 trade collection of *Astro City: Local Heroes* from DC showcases an Alex Ross cover that pulls together a sprawling assembly of Astro City's heroes — a caped figure soaring upward at the center, a star-emblemed stalwart in the foreground, a masked vigilante, a figure bearing a clock symbol, and several others cascading across a luminous, painterly composition that feels both intimate and epic. Ross's cover art renders each character with that distinctive photo-realistic warmth he brings to super-heroic figures, while enormous ghostly faces loom in the golden background, hinting at the human scale that Kurt Busiek's storytelling always keeps at heart. With Brent Anderson on interior art and Alex Sinclair's colors throughout, *Local Heroes* is a wonderful showcase of the Astro City universe's grounded, character-driven approach to the superhero genre.