A City of Shining Stars (Back Matter) w/ Jeff Stormer

It’s time to dissect A City of Shining Stars by Aaron Lim, with our guest from this run, Jeff Stormer. For our Origin Story segment, we took the opportunity to interview Jeff about how he prepped for this game with a lifetime of watching, reading, and studying superhero stories.

Back Issues

Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross (1994). The influential, and optimistic, mini-series follows a non-powered photographer through his career in Silver Age Marvel New York, looking at super-people as they emerge and alter the city's history. (Not to be confused with The Marvels, a more recent comic about superheroes at war.)
Astro City by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson: a creator-owned, unified, multi-generational superhero story, as much about the city as about the heroes, and especially: “That Was Then” (2022), Family Album trade paperback (1997), Through Open Doors trade paperback (2014); stories about Jack-in-the-Box, a friendly neighborhood superhero with real-life family problems, or the Silver Agent, an era-spanning, time-traveling, tragic do-gooder (some of these stories collected in Shining Stars, 2014); the individual older stories and issues “Ellie’s Friends,” “What I Did on My Vacation,” and “The Sky’s the Limit.”
Welcome to Tranquility (2007) by Gail Simone and Neil Googe. Action, detection and history in a retirement community for superheroes, with plenty of throwbacks and flashbacks to the eras when these superheroes were in their primes.
History of the Marvel Universe (2020) by Mark Waid and Javier Rodriguez. It is what it says on the tin. And it’s good.
The Other History of the DC Universe (2021) by John Ridley and Giuseppe Camuncoli. In-universe DC history over the decades, through the eyes of characters of color, interwoven with real-life US events.
The DC Book of Pride (forthcoming in 2023) by Jadzia Axelrod. A reference work of LGBTQ+ characters from DC past and present.