Since there aren't any X-books this week - in fact, there's barely anything at all - I suppose I could have just taken the week off.  But dammit, there's always something out there with a tenuous relation to the X-Men.  So, with that in mind, here are three books either starting or ending this week, with extremely loose X-connections.

Astro City: Local Heroes is drawn by Brent Anderson, who drew the archetypal Claremont X-Men story, God Loves, Man Kills.  As for writer Kurt Busiek, he wrote the 1994 miniseries Spider-Man/X-Factor: Shadowgames.  It's a little remembered book, and he'd probably prefer it to stay that way.

Because of Busiek's health problems, Astro City has been plagued by delays over the years.  At the moment, it's operating in a "series of miniseries" format, and this week's issue concludes the Local Heroes set.  The approach has differed slightly with this series.  The heroes have played less of a focal role, becoming more of a background element in stories about the civilians who happen to live in a superhero universe.

That's been particularly the case in this two-parter, which involves a lawyer securing an acquittal for his client by invoking a superhero-universe version of "reasonable doubt."  After all, in a world where everyone comes back from the dead, body doubles abound, and mind control is a demonstrable fact, there's always a reasonable doubt.

The story is set back in 1974.  Busiek's point is that, although the argument is broadly valid, it has the effect of undermining the viability of the entire legal system.  In that way it ties into the general crisis of faith in the political and governmental system from that period, which Busiek goes on to tie in to the rising popularity of vigilante characters at that period.  Of course, if you want to be picky about it, almost all superheroes are vigilantes, because they're not legally sanctioned.  But the 1970s saw characters like the Punisher take off, where the aim was not merely to capture criminals and hand them over the authorities, but to bypass the authorities altogether.

In fact, variations of the "it was my hitherto unknown identical twin" defence have been tried from time to time.  The practical answer is that juries needn't bother themselves with this junk unless there's actually some evidence to suggest it might really be true.  You can't have a functioning legal system based on the idea that the prosecution needs to systematically rebut every theoretical explanation that might give rise to a reasonable doubt - we'd be there all year.  But Busiek doesn't fall into this trap - it's an argument that wins over a gullible jury once, and the loophole is promptly closed.

More questionable is lawyer Vince Oleck's own crisis of faith.  Oleck starts off with a somewhat rose-tinted view of the law, which suggests he wasn't paying all that much attention during jurisprudence class.  The law is only ever capable of providing an approximation to justice, not least because it has numerous other factors to take into account as well.  For example, there's inherently a degree of inflexibility in the law because you can't have a democracy without rules, and rules can never account for everything.  I don't know many lawyers who share Oleck's glorious faith in the law.  Plenty of us think that, at least in principle, it's the best option available - but largely because the alternatives are even more likely to get it wrong.

Nonetheless, Busiek is right in saying that a large part of the point of the exercise is to maintain public faith in the system.  As with so many things, the actual content of the decision is arguably less important than the perception that it has been reached in an acceptable manner.

The story falters when it tries to tie all of this into vigilante superhero Blue Knight, who seems to be there primarily to tie all of this back into the superhero mythology of the series.  Still, it's an interesting story - despite starting off with a questionably naive faith in the system, it has some interesting observations on the wider purposes of the law.

Rating: B+

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