The Bronx is Up, and The Battery's Down

So here I am in New York, brought east by a production of a play of mine, running in an off-off Broadway venue.

While here, I'm taking long walks around Manhattan, signing the odd Danger Boy book I find on a store shelf, and stopping in at the legendary Forbidden Planet comics store near Union Square, to, well, look at a bunch of comics all at once (when you review 'em, they sort of come in at an erratic pace, and you don't see that "array" in front of you).

Among those was the latest Batman -- number 686, for those of you keeping count -- by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert. Fairly terrific stuff where a number of rogues and survivors of the d. knight's life are gathered at a wake -- his -- and telling different stories, Rashomon-like, of how Bruce Wayne's inner self finally met his demise. There seems to be a twist to said demise -- isn't there always? -- coming up in the concluding chapter in Detective Comics, so stay tuned.

The story, as expected, was set among the shadows and alleys of "Gotham City," the real version of which I find myself in now. A few doors over, at Shakespeare & Co., I browsed through a behind-the-scenes coffee table book (well, demistasse size, perhaps) about the making of the Watchmen film, which is also set resolutely in New York. Even if it's an alternate universe NY.

I've been musing, since I've been here, about the effect of the Big Apple on the development of the comic book itself. A distinctly American artifact, the comic book, as we know it, was born here (the "here" I'm in now), even if its antecedents -- the comic strip -- can be traced originally to early 19th century Europe.

Once while reading up on the intersection of religious beliefs and environmental calamity -- it's easier to destroy what isn't considered sacred -- I came across a theory cited in an article that may have belonged originally to an anthropologist like Claude Levi-Strauss -- or was it Paul Shepard? In any case, the notion went, the reason that monotheisms were more easily hatched in the desert is that the space you see around you, the vast, austere horizons, "uncluttered" by much in the way of flora or fauna, give rise to the idea of "creation" -- everything around you -- being a single, tied-together entity.

In forested areas, it was easier to conceive of entire pantheons of gods, since the landscape around you was dense, multi-tiered -- full of rivers, trees of different sizes, animal life that didn't have to burrow for protection during daylight hours, etc. A multiplicity. So your cosmology begins to take this into account.

It's not a perfect theory -- there were forests once in Lebanon, after all, and some tribal peoples, like the Native Americans, were able to conceive of both -- an underlying "Great Spirit," tying everything together, and a local pantheon of demigods and tricksters -- but it's an interesting way to conceive of how physical space affects the way you invent stories about how things came to be.

How this ties in to comics, is this: I have a notion that the sheer verticalness of New York -- where the DC and Marvel "pantheons" were born -- affected the way the superhero comic was conceived, and even rendered on the page. Traditionally, initially, panels, as you know, were like, well, windows in skyscrapers -- running up and down the page.

This could be because that was the world surrounding the creators, the renderers of those pages, who were also using NY as the wellspring for their superhero adventures.

This is part of the semiotic impact of Watchmen, as creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons use a fairly strict vertical "skyscraper window" scheme for rendering most of the story: it feels like "older" (Golden Age) comics, the way it appears on the page.

Of the first two Ur-heros, Superman and Batman each represent a different aspect of New York-ness. "Gotham" would seem to be a mid-century reaction to lower Manhattan -- its alleys, jammed-together citizens, various ethnic tensions, and its Depression-era street crime. (Which begs the question of where Wayne Manor "really" is -- out on Long Island?)

Superman was always more uptown -- he's in "Metropolis" after all, working for the "Daily Planet," and his early stories generally reflect those uptown assumptions New York has always had about itself being, well, the center of the universe. Even aliens choose to reside here! (After "leaving the farm," as so many Big Apple arrivees -- set on fame n' fortune -- have done...)

Superman's woes tended to reflect more planet-wide, if not galactic, troubles -- especially in the post-Depression (uh, post the last one, anyway) post-war era, when "Metropolis" really was the financial center of the American empire: it's coal engine, as it were, fueling the consumer spending, the economy that could allow for such an extended military, etc. The problems were commensurate with the upper West (or East) side view of the world (never mind that Superman's original creators, stripped of their financial participation in the project by DC, for so many decades, could never afford to live there).

Superman was a New York man of the world. Batman is the New York of The Godfather movies, and the crime photographs of Weegee, where it's the corner up ahead that's trouble, never mind the next dimension over.

Those sensibilities changed and morphed as the world did, as New York did, as comics did. The 60s saw Peter Parker trying to hold a job here, but then again, wasn't the Baxter Building -- and the more galactically-scaled problems visited upon the Fantastic Four -- reflective of its Madison Avenue corner locale?

What if the first comics, and the first superheros, came out of a different place -- a different "space?" What if they'd been written and drawn -- conceived -- in places like Seattle or New Orleans or Billings, Mt., first? How would masked avengers relate to place, to the spaces around them, then?

If nothing else, perhaps it's a good idea for an "Elseworld."