New York City: Pretty much the center of superhuman activity in the Marvel Comics universe.
My question is, how many superheroes currently patrol the city, and what parts of the city do they usually hang around? Daredevil mostly works in “Hell’s Kitchen,” but I don’t know if the other heroes—Spider-Man, for instance—usually limit themselves so much to particular sections of the city.
Can anyone shed some light on the subject for me?
This might help some.
Isn’t the Fantastic Four’s headquarters in Manhattan somewhere?
The Baxter Building.
That’s a really cool site.
That’s sort of an odd question though becaue it’s not like the heroes have beats that they don’t want to upset the jurisdiction of others. Otherwise, the X-Men would be laughed at for making the suburbs safe for racial tolerance.
And anyway, they seem to ignore the fact that everyone lives in the same city nowadays. Huge, catastrophic events will happen in the city in one book (X-Men) with nary a mention anywhere else.
Unless there’s been a retcon (highly likely given the long time since I’ve read comics), the Baxter Building was destroyed and the new headquarters is 4 Freedoms Plaza.
My information’s probably just out of date.
Some heroes stick to a neighborhood, most don’t. There was an issue of Daredevil about a year ago where Reed Richards, Peter Parker, Luke Cage and Dr. Strange pulled an intervention on Matt Murdock. He told them they should put a claim on their own neighborhoods the way he does his; they didn’t much like the idea.
Luke Cage and the Falcon used to patrol Harlem. D-Man guards “Zero Town,” a hobo enclave in the subway tunnels. Night Nurse runs a clinic for wounded superheroes on the waterfront. Spider-Man considers the whole city his responsibility, but sticks to midtown and Chelsea.
Four Freedoms Plaza was also later destroyed. The FF lived in a pier by the harbor for a while–Reeed installed a 4th dimsional doodad that created an infinite amount of space there–and a new Baxter Building was built by Reed’s old mentor, Noah Baxter, and teleported into place.
In Astonishing X-Men #7, the Fantastic Four get a little annoyed at the X-Men for battling a monster on the FF’s turf.
Cyclops: “Big monster came out of the ground. Thought we’d send it back.”
Thing: “We do big monsters! Big monsters in Manhattan! That’s our signature piece!”
So I guess we at least know something about the Fantastic Four’s jurisdiction. 
X-Men just wanted a little positive publicity.
(Also, hello to Kaitlyn. 
I like your name!)
I’d think Spider-Man needs to stick to Manhattan, mostly.
Kinda hard to do the whole building to building web swinging thing from two story brownstones, wouldn’t you think?
Although they don’t live in the BB anymore…
… If you read 4…
…but not if you read The Fantastic Four…
It’s so confusing.
Yeah, Waid and the hack who writes 4 completely ignore what the other is doing. I prefer to think of 4 as being out of continuity.
I never liked an issue of FF until I picked up the first 4 arc. I was quite impressd that they made such a change to the characters and really threw them into a conundrum that couldn’t be reversed easily (even if it was an authorial fiat accompli) After those first four issues…whoah boy did it go downhill fast.
All I know is that if I developed superpowers and decided to become a villain, the first thing I’d do would be to move to Philadelphia.
It went downhill after the first four issues? It lost me after two, and I managed to make it all the way through the Chris Claremont run without giving up.
Like I said, I thought it was a good reimagining and I never got into it with the whimsical fantasy aping of Kirby/Lee (or at least that’s how I took 'em). Of course, if you like the more goofy ones, I can certainly see why you wouldn’t like that series.
There is absolutely no reason to have the two of them though. Drop 4, I say.