The Helicarrier beats everything on coolness factor.
For bad guys, the Hellfire Club and its various evil branches have quite a few locations and they’re all dang posh.
I like Hulk’s Cave just because it is so consistently overlooked.
Seconded.
Exotic location with sandy beaches, stunning modernist architecture and massive machines.
May also be rendered in cake.
No, they didn’t. It’s mentioned, I think, but the places they visit aren’t Wakanda (which isn’t on/near the coast, wouldn’t host anything as low-tech, poverty-caused and internationally-open as a Bangladeshi ship-breaking yard, and wouldn’t have South African policemen of all races responding to Hulk attacks).
And Castle Greyskull for me. That or the Ghostbusters base (assuming either of those counts - and if the Tracys do, so should they)
I have to admit, I have kind of a fondness for the 90s animated Kingpin’s HQ—the Chrysler Building. I’m pretty sure he had a Death Ray or something built inside the spire, at one point.
It’s probably cheating, though. But what can I say—sometimes you need a little more 'Deco in your world.
For superheroes, for an odd note, something that was striking, to me: Daredevil’s base/lair, in the 2003 (!) film.
“Grim and gritty” is overused and overhyped, but I think this one certainly captured a certain grisliness. This is no Batcave full of technological wonders, with a Butler and a sidekick, and it’s also a level above sneaking out of the house without waking Aunt May…but it’s very little else. Practically a bunker for a single, battered man to patch himself together and try to get some sleep, alone, in the dark. And do the same thing the next night, and the next, and the next…until maybe some night where he finally can’t even get out that door, or just never makes it back.
A “man without fear” who’s also “a man without hope.” Yeah, I’ll give that one a little nod. I think it’s earned it.
On the other extreme, I’ll go with The Justice League Watchtower, from “Young Justice.” This base, in Earth orbit, is carved out of an asteroid. One with an enormous, cathedral-windowed atrium, filled with trees and birds.
Wow. This is a hall of “gods.” It goes to show how you can have a space vessel project power and sophistication without looking like a Tron set, or the interior of the Nostromo. To paraphrase an old movie, “they have the resources and spacelift capacity to fly ornamental plants up to their battlestation!”
It’s probably the same reason, simple nostalgia aside, that I always liked the “Holiday Inn in Space” look of the Enterprise-D more than the utilitarian/“grungier” spacecraft of later Trek series’. There is a share of glory to be found when not trying to be the Millennium Falcon, strange as it may sound.
TOM STRONG, Alan Moore’s love letter to Doc Savage, had The Stronghold: our hero’s skyscraper base of operations – you’ll know it by the gleaming statue of the big guy, near the access point for the high-off-the-ground skyscraper-to-skyscraper cable-car trolley – complete with a robot butler tending to the implausible fleet of vehicles.
And don’t forget, Doc Savage had a Fortress of Solitude at the north pole long before Superman.
Well they’re not super heroes but they are the Real American Hero and I was a fan of The Pit from the G.I.Joe comics. The Pit was secretly located underneath the Chaplains Assistant School’s motor pool at Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island, New York and I thought the story where they incorporated the Joe HQ from the toyline to defend against a Cobra assault was pretty cool. The Pit was destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again then the Joes moved their base out to the Utah desert where it was bigger and meaner but lost some of its initial charm.
Taa 2.
Eliot R. Brown is great for drawings of this kind of thing.
I’m currently working through his body of work onthis blog, if anyone’s interested. Marvel stuff is coming soon.
There was also the locker room at Ferris Aircraft where Hal Jordan originally stored his power battery (protected by an invisibility screen) between recharges.
And before he became King of Atlantis, Aquaman (and Aqualad) had a base called the Aqua-cave.
They also had a cavern base in the 1960s, with an entrance hidden behind a billboard for the Batman TV show. I don’t remember what they called it: Titans’ Cave? Titan’s Lair? Just Titans HQ?
And in the '70s, their headquarters was in the basement of Gabriel’s Horn, a discotheque in Farmingdale NY (the town where Bob Rozakis, their writer at the time, lived).
You mean the Rock of Eternity.
There was also the wizard Shazam’s throne room in the old subway tunnel.
There was also the secondary Batcave in a subbasement of the Wayne Foundation building, which Batman used during the 1970s after Dick Grayson went off to college and Bruce Wayne moved into a penthouse apartment, and which became the headquarters of the Outsiders when Bruce moved back into Wayne Manor in the '80s.
And its mobile version, the Ho-Ho-Home-on-Wheels. (Honest!)
The Shadow Gallery from V For Vendetta, depeding on your definition of “heroic.”
Fortress Lad, of the Legion of Super-Heroes. And I love how the post-Zero Hour reboot incorporated a nod to that within a much more sensible headquarters building.
I liked the JLA’s geosynchronous satellite, because the writers got to say cool things like “Meanwhile, 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface…”.
“Lex-Corp HQ (Lex Luthor)” (From the OP)
As long as you have opened the door to including villain HQ/bases, we must remember to credit an unknown number of Luthor’s Lairs from the Silver (and Bronze?) Age, rather than post-Crisis.
In the Two-Part “The Outlawed Legion” a remnant of still-free Legionnaires stumble on one underground while evading the law. “It’s one of Luthor’s Lairs,” said one of the small band as they entered and took a look around, implying that the rascally super-rascal was wise enough to have established several, probably several simultaneously.
You have to admire a hideout that still has functioning food-producing machines, as well as presumably every basic human need accounted for-- ONE THOUSAND YEARS after establishment. (Or was it large stocks of preserved food?)
I also seem to recall THE Luthor’s Lair, perhaps the first as well as the grandest, from a story reprinted in whatever early Superman Annual that was an “all-Luthor issue.” It featured a gallery of villainous statues (not sure of particulars) and provided Luthor with a safe place to rest in legal exile. ETA: No doubt lead lining helped him hide from Superman.
Then there was a fairly early “Imaginary Story” in 3 parts showing Lexie conning Supie into thinking he had reformed, after coming up with a cure for all cancers. As part of the deception, he took the Big S into the sole Lair of the time of these stories and requested the statues of well-known criminals destroyed.
(A paperback novel in the wake of the late '70’s film pooh-poohed the idea that LL would hero-worship notorious marauders. Einstein was his hero, or at least the only one mentioned. He ridiculed the idea of having cutthroats as his heroes, saying he may as well have Superman himself as his hero. I highly recommend you read the book, it’s quite witty the way he puts it, and many places elsewhere.)
I seem to recall that he entered the Lair by pulling a level which was the finger of an old statue. The structure may have been above ground but it was considered old, abandoned property. (I may need my memory refreshed on some of this.)
Of course there was also a movie version, accessible by subway tunnels, and featuring a lavish swimming pool along with the very necessary evil control panels and monitors.
I’ll revive this semi-zombie thread to second Luthor’s lairs, I dug the one with the statue out front, an abandoned museum if I’m correct.
The legion clubhouse was also a favorite, and it seem to morph considerable over the years from a straight finned cylinder to one with a taper either smaller at the top or the bottom depending.
I’ve always wondered about Luthor. I mean, what are the odds that the world’s premier super-hero and the world’s preeminent evil scientist would have gone to high school together?
My theory is that Luthor, while always extraordinarily smart, was not the mega-genius he all know until exposure to that chemical solution that cost him his hair. So that in a weird way, Superman made Luthor.
“Hey, does this pole still work?”
It was Shaking The Hand Of Caesar that did the trick, IIRC.