Gotham City a "thinly-concealed New York City" and other DC Comics cities

[bienville]

@Quimby

I could be mistaken but I assumed the OP was speaking about metaphorical stand ins, not physical stand ins. At least that was how I answered the question.

OP here. Yep, Quimby’s got it. I figured if they really wanted a city to actually be New York City then they’d just make it New York City . . . which I’ve learned from this Thread that they actually do.

Although discussion of the evolution of the DC Universe and the “Official Word” from DC on such matters are both interesting and relevant to the Thread, I’m also looking for opinions from the comic book knowledgeable among us.

What real cities do you feel like these fictional cities most closely correspond.

Looking more for “No Wrong Answers” kinds of answers.

Based on the character and “feel” of the fictional cities as well as the commerce and industry of the fictional cities as well as geographical descriptors spell out in the various texts . . . what real life cities do you think best correspond?
If DC actually specifically places Gotham in New Jersey, then I am off-base with linking it to Chicago, base on a very major criterion for evaluation.

Discounting geography, I still would use my Chicago/Detroit comparisons from the OP: It seems like Chicago based on its prominence on the national landscape (no misplaced apostrophe this time), it seems like Detroit based on character.

But if it is for sure and canonically placed in New Jersey . . .
. . . maybe make one big city by combining all of Hudson County?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Quimby

I could be mistaken but I assumed the OP was speaking about metaphorical stand ins, not physical stand ins. At least that was how I answered the question.

Yes, that’s how I assumed it too. Which is exactly why saying that Shuster used the skylines of Toronto or Cleveland in his drawings is such a bad answer. I went through early issues looking for clues about the city in the comics since people kept making a big deal of that. But there simply aren’t any. The very early Superman existed in a nebulous non-world that didn’t correspond to anything. It was only with time that Metropolis became an obvious analog to New York, and Gotham City also became one. They were both the biggest and most important, full of stuff that villains-might-want and artists-could-use, cities in the country simultaneously.

DC has never canonically put their cities anywhere. John Byrne famously put Gotham City in Delaware and DC has spent a quarter century trying to erase that from people’s memories because of the embarrassment. Every retcon and every new set of editors and every remake wipes out the past and plays with the mythos. Flash ostentatiously lived in a blue-collar city for one recent incarnation. They said that over and over but I still don’t know what exactly that was supposed to mean. Coast City was obviously on the West Coast, but they thought so little of it that they destroyed the city entirely. True, they also destroyed Gotham City entirely once but they brought that back almost overnight when the arc was done.

Marvel treats New York like a semi-real place. DC treats its cities like Epcot. They are backdrops for whatever attitudes they want to project. I mean, Nighthawk went off to a place called Blüdhaven. Give me a metaphorical frickin’ break. And, you guessed it, they destroyed Blüdhaven too.

DC cities aren’t analogues of anything, and today they aren’t thinly-concealed anything. They’re painted backdrops. Which you can argue is what they should be. Marvel finally decided they had to deal with New York getting hammered by a zillion alien evil doers and they never really recovered from that. They now - occasionally, when they remember or it’s important to the plot - try to make the death and suffering real - and it just feels more fake than the superhero physics. At least DC can pretend it’s just a comic book city.

[Tom_Tildrum]

My recollection is that Byrne put Metropolis in Delaware, not Gotham.

I also recall vague allusions in the 70s (from E Nelson Bridwell, maybe) that Metropolis was meant to be Chicago. This makes sense as the idea of the big city where a Kansas farm boy would dream of going, more so than NYC. I don’t think this has ever been seriously articulated, though.

I always pictured Coast City as industrial, aerospace LA and Star City as West LA or maybe San Fran. GA would want to be someplace lively and counter-cultural, and Speedy found access to drugs.

The Atom lived in Ivy Town, which I suppose would have been Princeton or Ithaca.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Here’s something from the Wiki Metropolis page, which I should have checked earlier. (Told ya I was lazy.)

Location
Like many of DC’s other fictional cities, the location of Metropolis has varied greatly over the years. Metropolis is usually portrayed as a major city in the Midwest, or conversely, on the East Coast, and even the West Coast. Superman co-creator Joe Shuster was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and moved to Cleveland by age ten, where he met co-creator and Ohio native Jerry Siegel. Originally intending to sell the Superman strips to a Cleveland newspaper, they set the stories there as well, and when the strips were re-used for the comic books, they changed the location to Metropolis. (Action Comics #2, however, mistakenly portrays Clark Kent as a reporter for the Cleveland Evening News, although Metropolis’s look is based on Toronto, Ontario.)[2] The earliest specific reference to Metropolis located it in New York State: in Superman #2 (Fall 1939), Clark (Superman) Kent sent a telegram to George Taylor, the editor of the Daily Star (the antecedent to the Daily Planet), addressed to “Metropolis, N.Y.”[3]

In the 1940s Superman cartoons produced by Paramount Pictures and Fleischer Studios, Superman is said to live in New York rather than Metropolis in the seventh cartoon in the series, “Electric Earthquake”. A Native American mad scientist claims that his people are the rightful owners of Manhattan, thus placing these cartoons in New York City. In the fifth episode in the series, “The Bulleteers”, however, the city had already been identified as Metropolis, as the Bulleteers address in that cartoon the population of Superman’s city as “citizens of Metropolis”; and in the 13th episode “Destruction Inc.”, Metropolis is even seen spelled out twice on the Metropolis Munition Works, so it can be assumed that “Electric Earthquake” is an anomaly.

In a 1970s edition of “Ask the Answer Man”, a column that ran occasionally in DC publications, it was stated that Metropolis and Gotham City were adjacent to New York City, across the harbor from each other.[4] That same column stated that Star City (the home of Green Arrow) was in Connecticut, Flash’s Central City was in Ohio, and Hawkman’s Midway City was in Michigan.[4] An earlier issue of DC’s fanzine Amazing World of DC Comics, however, clearly stated that Metropolis was located in Delaware, while Gotham was placed in New Jersey.[5] The Atlas of the DC Universe role playing game supplement, published by Mayfair Games, also claims that Metropolis is in Delaware.[6]

A 1976 “imaginary” (i.e. out of canon) story describes the infant Kal-El arriving on Earth in that year, triggering a increase in cold war tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. In that story’s version of the year 2001, Metropolis is the name given to the new merging of the Northeast Corridor of cities ranging from Washington, D.C. through New York City to Boston, to form a megalopolis.[7]

In his 1978 work, The Great Superman Book, an encyclopedia of the first forty years of the Superman comics, author Michael Fleisher cites many, many examples which demonstrate that Metropolis equates with New York City. The most blatant of these might be the statement he cites from Action Comics #143 (April 1950), which states that the Statue of Liberty stands in “Metropolis Harbor”.[8] The Statue of Liberty, in fact, stands in New York Harbor.

The 1992 Death of Superman storyline depicts Doomsday on a path from Ohio through New York State towards Metropolis; and the 2005 comic Countdown to Infinite Crisis also places Metropolis in the state of New York. The mini-series JLA/Avengers depicts the area corresponding to Metropolis in the Marvel Universe as being along Interstate 95.[9]

Frank Miller has said that “Metropolis is New York in the daytime; Gotham City is New York at night.”[10] Gotham City is home to Batman, whose activities are more often nocturnal than those of Superman, who usually operates during the day. In terms of atmosphere, Batman writer and editor Dennis O’Neil has said that, figuratively, “Batman’s Gotham City is Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November.”[11] However, New York City does exist as a separate city from Metropolis and Gotham City within the DC Comics universe; the Justice Society of America, for example, is based in New York, as were the Teen Titans.

[edit] In relation to Gotham City
Metropolis is frequently depicted as being within driving distance of Gotham City, home of Batman. Like Metropolis, Gotham’s location has never been definitely established; however, it is usually treated as also being a major city. The distance between the two cities has varied greatly over the years, ranging from being hundreds of miles apart to Gotham and Metropolis being twin cities on opposite sides of Delaware Bay, with Gotham City in New Jersey and Metropolis in Delaware. In the Seven Soldiers of Victory series Klarion the Witch Boy, New York City is called the “Cinderella City”, referring to nearby Metropolis and Gotham as its “ugly stepsisters.” The film Superman Returns mentions Gotham City, as does Batman in an episode of the Justice League TV series. In Superman: The Animated Series, Clark Kent’s mother Martha Kent refers to Batman as “that nut in Gotham City.” Similarly, the Batman Forever movie mentions Metropolis, as Bruce Wayne tells Dick Grayson that the circus he and his family performed in has likely moved there. In Lois and Clark, when Lois finds out about Superman’s secret identity and yells at Clark about how he’s been hiding his secretly being Superman, he responds, “A little louder Lois — I don’t think they could hear you in Gotham City”.

[Kamino_Neko]

@Spoke

I don’t think they’ve ever pinned down Central City, have they?

Yes, they have, although, like Gotham, they’ve occasionally forgotten that - presuming you mean the Flash’s hometown, not the Spirit’s. Central and Keystone Cities are twin cities on either side of the Kansas/Missouri border. (Checking, Central’s the one in MO, Keystone’s in KA.)

See here.

Short form: Keystone was originally presented as though it were in Pennsylvania, Central somewhere in the midwest, usually Ohio. Post-Crisis, they were twinned, and in the 90s they were placed in KA and MO, where they’ve stayed, bar a couple mistaken refs, since.

Oh, and one note on Gotham-As-Chicago - a point against it, beyond DC’s finally setting it semi-permanently (if not particularly prominently) in Jersey - Gotham is fairly consistently shown as coastal (which is why the Birds of Prey reference can’t put it anywhere but Jersey or Rhode Island), and it’s pretty clearly on an ocean, not a lake.

[Chronos]

What makes it clearly an ocean, rather than a lake? Because the Great Lakes are big enough that for many (though not all) purposes, they can be considered almost-ocean.

[E-Sabbath]

Three-mile limit gambling boats. I recall seeing those a few times.