Why are so many superhero’s drawn to New York?
courtesy New York Times
March 8, 2010, 6:05 PM
Why So Many Superheroes Are Drawn to New York
Courtesy of DC Comics
Cover of “New York World’s Fair Comics,” 1939-40. Slide Show
There’s a cool-sounding panel in Midtown Tuesday evening on New York City as character, inspiration and player in the universe of superhero comics. It’s called “New York, the Super-City.” We asked the moderator, Peter Gutiérrez, to pick a few images and say a few words.
Would there be superheroes without skyscrapers? For that matter, would superheroes as we know them even exist without New York?
The 20th-century big city, with its soaring spires, shadowy tunnels, huge crowds and towering suspension bridges, was a perfect incubator and backdrop for a new kind of archetypal adventurer who combined traits of the the warrior, demigod, frontiersman and rationalist crime fighter. What New Yorkers might take for granted, though, is the extent to which their particular hometown has been instrumental in creating the comic book superhero.
SUPERHEROES OF NEW YORK
A look back at the superheroes who have taken the city in a single bound.
Even beyond its physical architecture, New York City provided a perfect setting for superheroic exploits. As a financial center, its concentration of wealth could act as a powerful magnet for bigger-than-life criminals. As a global city, it was ripe for international intrigue. And as a fashion mecca and a famously tolerant place, it established a social environment in which saviors of humankind dressed in flamboyant homemade costumes could go about their business.
Yet New York’s central role in the superhero universe owes at least as much to its concentration of major comic book publishers. DC Comics and its forerunners, the publishers of Superman, were based here, which may help explain how New York insinuated itself into comics that ostensibly had a more generic “American” feel.
Gotham City, of course, was always a thinly veiled version of New York. So was Central City, stomping grounds of The Spirit, a non-superpowered but influential character created by a native Brooklynite, Will Eisner. Indeed, in their earliest appearances, both Batman (1939) and The Spirit (1940) were set in New York. Later, the locations were fictionalized to court a wider audience, but when the Caped Crusader or Denny Colt scrambled over rooftops or stalked shadowy alleyways, it was with a decidedly New York flair, romantic and hard-boiled at the same time.
In the Marvel comics of the ’60s, the city (and its environs) became a kind of nonstop action fest, with the Fantastic Four headquartered in Midtown, Spider-Man hailing from Queens, and Tony Stark (of Iron Man fame) launching missiles from Long Island.
Really, though, it’s those downtown canyons and dizzying heights that are inseparable from the concept of a superhero. In fact, one might claim that the superhero has altered the relationship to urban space itself — at least among comic book fans. After all, don’t skyscrapers now reside differently in our imaginations thanks to all those the awe-inspiring human figures that swing and leap from them without fear?
“New York, the Super-City”: panel discussion with Danny Fingeroth, Gene Kanenberg Jr., Frank Tieri, Billy Tucci and Peter Gutiérrez. Tuesday, 6:30 p.m., New York Center for Independent Publishing, 20 West 44th Street. Sponsored by GraphicNovelReporter.Com, New York Comic Con, and Midtown Comics. Tickets $15, $10 for members, $5 for students. For more information: contact@nycip.org or (212) 764-7021.
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