Stan Lee’s fiction in real NewYork
Stan Lee, the mastermind of comics who plotted countless splats, yeeows and kabooms, created a four-colour universe of crime fighters in tights that looked like New York, because it was. Somehow, it seemed grittier than the landscapes on which other superheroes flew and fought. But above all, it was real.
His Fantastic Four knew their way around the Lower East Side — Lee, who died on Monday, once said the very name of the fictional Yancy Street gang, the neighbourhood nuisances who tormented the character known as the Thing, was a play on the actual Delancey Street, which runs from the Bowery to the Williamsburg Bridge.
Dr Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum had a real address in Greenwich Village: 177A Bleecker Street. A couple of Lee’s colleagues from Marvel Comics had lived there. (The “A” has long since disappeared.)
The Avengers Mansion was a Beaux-Arts palace because Lee had Henry Clay Frick’s BeauxArts palace on the Upper East Side in mind. Fans know it as 890 Fifth Avenue. The Frick Collection, the museum that now occupies the place, uses the address of the front door, 1 East 70th Street.
And Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, was a seminal character because he was a teenager from Ingram Street in Queens, a real place, with real problems—“a high-school student, kind of geeky, who has allergies,” said Debra Schmidt Bach, who was a co-curator of the 2015 exhibition “Superheroes in Gotham” at the New-York Historical Society.
That, and some self-doubt, made the SpiderMan stories “relatable”, recalled Gary Cergol, who grew up reading the Spider-Man comics in Corona and Flushing and is now a graphic artist for the television drama Elementary.
“You knew you couldn’t be Superman,” he said. “But you could be a kid from Queens who becomes a superhero.”
Bach said the Parker character “gave you a sense that the human alter ego could be you”.
So he wasn’t just a superhero, he was a local superhero. He might zoom between the skyscrapers of Manhattan, saving the day in actionpacked faceoffs, but fans never forgot where he was from. “I read it and I said, ‘He’s Queens tough. Overcome anything you need to overcome,’” said Melinda R Katz, who represented Forest Hills on the City Council and in the State Assembly before she was elected Queens borough president.
Tying Marvel’s stable of pulp-fiction heroes to a real place — New York — served a counterbalance to the sometimes gravity-challenged action and the improbability of the stories, and that was just what Lee wanted.
“So many other characters lived in cities like Gotham City and Metropolis,” he said in a 2004 television documentary, “but I suspect the readers knew those cities were just made up.” Gotham City and Metropolis were the fictional homes of Batman and Superman, who were marquee heroes of Marvel’s rival, DC Comics.
By contrast, Marvel presented a realistic cityscape, at least from a distance. Sorry, fans, there is no Baxter Building — fan sites place the Fantastic Four’s headquarters on 42nd Street near Madison Avenue. Even now, well into the 21st century, it seems safe to say there is no office building in Manhattan with a rooftop rocketlaunching pad.
“When Stan Lee embarked on including New York as a character in our books, he said, ‘I want it to be real New York. I want it to be the local bridges, the local subways, the streets,’” John Romita Sr, a Marvel Comics artist, recalled in the 2004 documentary. “It was a natural for us since the people who worked at Marvel lived in New York.”
The artists drew what they were familiar with, which made the Marvel universe authentic-looking, down to the water towers atop many of the buildings. Gerry Gladston, an owner of Midtown Comics in Manhattan, said that people who do not live in New York come in regularly and ask what the water towers are, and Bach, at the historical society, keeps a list of Marvel locations handy.
There is Park Avenue. “Often when SpiderMan swings over the city, he’s swinging over Park Avenue,” she said.
Also on the list: The Museum of Natural History, the Statue of Liberty, Bloomingdale’s, Grand Central Terminal and the East River. As for the Fantastic Four’s foes in the Yancy Street gang — “The Thing fights alongside the Yancy Streeters in the most unlikely tale of all!” the cover of an early Fantastic Four issue promised — Lee explained the play on Delancey Street by saying, “It just to me had the right sound, the Yancy Street gang.”
The New York universe hooked readers. “I was dazzled by the idea of New York City,” said Peter Sanderson, who grew up in Milton, Massachusetts, and went on to write The Marvel Comics Guide to New York City.