First things first, I’m not a comic book fan - everything I know about them comes from TV and movie adaptations! But to the question(s)…
It seems to me there are a number of analogs for New York City in the DC uinverse - Batman has Gotham, Superman has Metropolis, Arrow (in the TV show, which is all I know) had Starling City. So my question is five fold:
i. Exactly how many analogs for NYC are there?
ii. Does the real NYC also exist in the universe?
iii. Where do all these analogs sit on a map?
iv. Are there other real life cities which have multiple analogs in the universe?
v. Does the Marvel universe do the same thing, or tend to use the real cities as settings?
One of the most famous quotes about the towns is from Frank Miller - ““Metropolis is New York by day; Gotham City is New York by night”.
It’s pretty clear in the comics that Gotham is geographically located about where New York is, with Bludhaven (before it was destroyed) as a neighbouring city in New Jersey. For all that Metropolis sometimes feels like New York, there’s no clear geographical setting for it, and indeed there’s been several different possibilities mentioned at various times.
Star City - Green Arrow’s former home before he went to Seattle is usually either in northern California or the Pacific Northwest, and the Flash’s home cities of Keystone and Central are located in Kansas and Missouri respectively, either side of the Missouri river. Superman’s childhood home of Smallville is also in Kansas.
There’s also Midway City in Michigan, and Coast City, which sometimes represents LA and at other times somewhere else in southern California.
Not sure why Star City was renamed Starling for the TV show, but in the comics it has nothing to do with NYC. The only one that unambiguously does is Gotham.
Here’s a wiki about New York City in the DCU. Some of the heroes who have operated out of NYC are Nightwing (Dick Grayson), Wonder Woman, and two Green Lanterns, Kyle Rayner, and John Stewart. The Teen Titans and Justice Society of America also operate out of New York and LexCorp has an office in New York.
Most of the Marvel Comics heroes seem to operate out of New York City. I’m not aware of any fictional cities in the Marvel Universe. Marvel seems to favor actual real-world locations.
No, it’s explicitly placed in southern New Jersey - a character’s driver’s licence is shown in Gotham Central, giving the state as New Jersey, and a Birds of Prey arc gives its location as 100 miles from NYC (which Joker was going to nuke, while he was in Gotham, outside of the damage radius), putting it about 20 miles south of Atlantic City. (Ignoring the GC licence, the BoP arc leaves only two locations, given that Gotham is a coastal city, and not on an ocean island - Southern New Jersey or south-eastern Rhode Island.)
I remember an issue of Detective Comics 30 or 40 years ago (God, I’m old!) in which the narration box at the start of the story said, “Gotham and New York are twin cities, like Minneapolis and St. Paul.” The art showed parts of both cities with a river between them. That would put GC in northern NJ.
I’m pretty sure that for the first 20-30 years, Metropolis and Gotham City’s locations were never defined, although every kid understood that they were New York. It’s hard to understand how huge NYC loomed in American culture, and how much its image of the “big city” utterly defined what a big city was through the first half of the 20th century.
It’s not until Marvel came along, with Stan’s mania for doing things opposite to DC, that it became a concern. Marvel’s characters lived in real neighborhoods in the real NYC and met real names from the contemporary world. And it only took a couple of years for Stan to realize that if all his flood of characters lived in the same real city, they would bump into each other on a regular basis, so guest appearances became the norm. Nobody was going to pretend that the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man didn’t both live in the same real NYC. With Stan writing virtually the entire production by himself through the 60s, he could coordinate everything in his head and that led to Marvel’s introduction of continuity.
DC had to respond, so they eventually started to place their imaginary cities on the real map of the U.S. Which is obviously impossible when you have two separate versions of NYC to account for. Doing so leads to problems which leads to retcons which leads to problems. Frank Miller was closest, but I think that today it’s more like Metropolis is New York in the future and Gotham City is New York in the past. They exist not in states, but in states of mind.
They STILL haven’t specifically nailed down Metropolis (though the comics are consistent with it being in Delaware, about 100 miles from Gotham, which is where the Mayfaire Games DCU RPG atlas put it…they’re also fairly consistent with it being just about anywhere else coastal in the north-east).
Opal City is like the Simpsons’ Springfield - deliberately nowhere specific with contradictory geography.
Smallville was generally assumed to be within shouting distance of Metropolis until Crisis, and still is in the Smallville universe (though that keeps Smallville in Kansas and moves Metropolis inland).
There’s a pre-Crisis story (one of the Silver Age Marvel crossovers, IIRC) where all the major cities in the DCU were explicitly mentioned as clustered on the East Coast of the US and Superman, upon jumping accidentally to another universe, was shocked at the real world cities overlapping where he knew the fictional cities belonged - Boston running into where Star City was supposed to be is the one I remember most clearly, since Star City has since been moved to the West Coast and modeled on Seattle. [Edit - I THINK it was Gotham that New York was overrunning.]
(I THINK the earliest canon reference to Gotham being in Jersey was in Legion of Superheroes just a little post-Crisis [Edit - no, wait, just saw Cayuga’s post…that’s probably earlier] - the Batcave was found by archaeologists in the ‘Jersey sector of Metropolis’ - Metropolis having grown to cover most of the US North East and part of Canada by the 30th century, swallowing up Gotham, New York, Boston, Toronto, etc.)
Doom Patrol, Grant Morrison era, put Gotham in Rhode Island of all places. My best guess is that the DCU New York has seven boroughs spread across three states, with Gotham in New Jersey and Metropolis in Connecticut.
Regarding both Metropolis and Gotham standing in for NYC, of course DC also has an actual NYC, which is where Kyle Rayner lived during his stint as Green Lantern.
Also, I think at least sometimes they’ve said one or the other represents Chicago, not NYC, but I don’t recall which (if it was even consistent).
EDIT:Oh, also, back during Marvel vs DC, they revealed that Earth DC is actually slightly larger than Earth Marvel, due to all these extra places. Granted Marvel’s got it’s own fictional places (Wakanda, Latveria) but DC sure seems to have a lot more.
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