The “notion of an extraordinary man in an ordinary world” that Nolan has referred to in a previous section defines the relationship between Marvel’s superheroes and the city they protect. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the approach that Marvel Comics took in creating some of today’s well recognized superheroes such as Spider- Man, X-Men and Iron Man was to make these characters flawed just as any other normal human being, as well as to the changing social and political atmosphere. As a consequence, the (real) identities of these heroes occasionally suffer from personal problems, like poverty and alcoholism, and social problems, like segregation. The ‘extraordinary’ personalities of these men and women are balanced by the ‘ordinary’ problems they have and the ‘ordinary’ world they belong to. This made sense considering the Silver Age vision that these superheroes were created with: “a popular culture icon for a more modern, urban America, where the new frontiers lie in rapid, revolutionary scientific advances… an ordinary city dweller whom science endows with the abilities to make a difference in a city of millions”. Stan Lee adds to this decision with the following remark:
“It should be abundantly clear that I’ve always tried to make our characters as realistic as possible, given the fact that they were living in a world of fantasy. In fact, I tried to inject reality to that world itself…. These colourful superheroes… had to live somewhere, why not let them all live in the same city? That city would be New York, because that’s where I lived and it was the one place I felt I could write about with a fair sense of accuracy.”
With these opinions, almost all Marvel superheroes made NYC their homes. While some of them operate from the center, downtown Manhattan (such as the Fantastic Four), others are based in more peripheral areas of the city, such as Hell’s Kitchen (for Daredevil) and Queens neighborhood (for Spider-Man). Even those who do not
live in the city maintain a close distance to it, such as the X-Men, who are based in upstate New York.19
Jason Bainbridge defines two functions of NYC in Marvel comics: The first of these functions is to unite the Marvel universe. By the Marvel universe, he refers to the cross-over ground of the superheroes, the cinematic reflection of which has been mentioned in the previous chapter. Therefore, keeping all characters in the same premises allows them to interact when needed and to work on their own when not. The second function is to “suture” that universe to reality, “providing a material context for these iconic forms” (Bainbridge, 2010).
Referring to DC’s policy of assigning fictional cities to its superheroes, Bainbridge makes the following comment:
In each of these [DC’s] comics New York City was given ‘a fictional veneer [which] removed the fantastic series even further from reality.’ This meant that the comic book city remained largely archetypal, a backdrop that was endlessly adaptable to the demands of the narrative. It wasn’t until 1961 that the Marvel Comics brought New York City into the foreground, rolling out a collection of characters and titles that were set in New York rather than inhabiting fictional cities that were simply extensions of themselves.
By referring to the DC cities as ‘simply extensions’ of the superheroes, Bainbridge also acknowledges that the relation between the hero and the city is indeed organic and mutual, the examples of which has been given in the previous section. However, this claim should not mean that a similar type of interdependent relationship and self- identification do not exist in Marvel’s narratives. In a cross-over adventure, Spider- Man says the following: “You can’t say ‘I love New York’. Tourists can love New
19
While almost all Marvel superheroes live in NYC in comics, this has not been the case in film so far. The characters that predominantly live in NYC also in their films are Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and Daredevil, and therefore I will use only those in my arguments later in this chapter.
York. Me? Who grew up here? Who’s lived here my whole life, who’s crawled over every stone and swung off every cornice… I am New York. It’s in me, in my blood” (Straczynski, 2001).
Lastly, on the topic of fictive vs. real cities, Anthony Lioi (2010) offers the following analysis, relating the cities to the identities of the superheroes:
During the Golden Age of DC Comics, superheroes lived in places that suggested real cities but never named them directly. The disguise of the city mirrored the superhero’s own disguise, signaling the importance of keeping dual identities secret. The thrill of Marvel’s New York was the thrill of identity unmasked, but also of shared community: Marvel’s Silver Age heroes give the sense that they are just around the corner in Midtown. The collapse of the fictive and the real worlds parallels the thrill of pulling off the mask to discover someone you already know, of recognizing the hero as one New Yorker among others. (p. 152)