Prologue
The famous choral of Martin Luther states “A Mighty fortress is our God” but in the world of comic books is it so? The fantasies of the picture pages do of course deal with the problems of our cultural space that are rooted in the Christian tradition - temptation, sin, repentance, redemption - but a comic book city is no shelter for a lone wanderer, it is a new threat. While in the medieval sanctums in England from the 4th to 17th century there was a Law of Shelter, pursuant to which a sanctum built on holy land provided shelter to wanderers from robbers and to robbers shelter from the law, then in the world of comic books the cities offer shelter to neither the good or evil. In a city everyone has to stand up for themselves. The city is a callous inevitability, where the emergency light never goes off and the prevailing instinct of a more vigilant mind is - to get away from here, far away.
In a classical comic book story line the role of a city is that of a grey cardinal (to lay it on with the religious parallels). Usually the fight between good and evil takes the centre stage in the story. People are reduced to an anonymous mass, a herd of sheep, which would be unable to achieve anything without the help of the hero. In comic books people often lack their own will, they act on instincts without any capacity to shape their destiny. Ordinary people surface the grey mass only if they are ‘love interests’ or ‘donors’. A ‘love interest’ is the fair lady of the super hero, a ‘donor’ as characterized by Vladimir Propp in the myth-archetypes description is a character who intervenes on the hero's path, giving him necessary advice during times of difficulty or a magical object that enables the story to reach the envisaged ending. In the hierarchy of characters the city is ever-present, standing tall and threatening above the story lines. The role of the city is to emphasise and sharpen the intense atmosphere, to create a mysterious ambience. The comic book city is not a place with regulated crossroads and window-shopping, but a maze of shadowy alleyways that are occupied by characters from the edges of imagination.
All is Made by Man
If we take a look at the portrayal of real cities in comic books, then in most cases it is the more grotesque part of any city depicted. The most popular cities for the comic books to build a firework of poetic liberties on the familiar grounds seem to be London and New York. Due to such comic books as ‘From Hell’, ‘Constantine’, ‘Sandman’, ‘Albion’ or ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ London has become the contemporary foreshadowing of apocalypse, a place where everyone lives together alone. The Japanese comic books depict Tokyo as a doomed mega city that is in a constant fight over each square inch of its land with the elements, sea and tsunamis. Faced with forces of nature Tokyo citizens seek help from technological advances, setting up a classical semiotic opposition of nature and culture. Due to irresponsible actions the nature has become man's enemy rather than companion. As the ecosystems collapse, people seek help from technological advances, but in the Japanese stories the robots, cyberspace and artificial intelligence often prove to be smarter forces than man and seem to have a plan of their own how to shape the future of the world.
The architecture of the comic book cities is usually reminiscent of an Orson Welles style futuristic and cold place with distorted perspectives, where pursuant to the context and tone of the comic book a touch of Gothic, Art Deco or Art Nouveau elements are added. The effect created is the co-existence of two worlds - the minimalism of glass towers and grotesque details from old architecture such as rainwater pipes with gargoyles and ornamented cornices. Based on a real world, the comic book city is a handiwork of a talented architect's evil twin, still a man, but quite a different one.
Size Matters (Where Nothing Else Remains)
The bases for a classical comic book city could be the three mega cities in ‘Judge Dredd’ - Mega City One, Mega City Two and Mega City Three. After a nuclear catastrophe the entire America has turned into a desert with just three large centres remaining, immense city-states, where street crime and corruption flourish and everyday life is in complete anarchy. The largest is Mega-City One, which covers the entire East coast of the USA and is home to 800 million people. It is the huge mass of people squeezed onto such a small area that turns Mega-City One into Gomorrah. People live in high apartment blocks, under constant attack from crimes of every description. Mutants that have been created by the poisonous wasteland areas surrounding the city also live illegally inside the city in different forms. Mega-City One is divided into districts, each of which is the size of a 21st century mega-city (London, New York or Tokyo). The districts are often at war with one another. Next is Mega-City Two, which is on the West Coast and Mega-City Three, which collocates Texas and the Southern States and later assumes the name Texas City. These three Mega-Cities are the absolute height of classic urbanization paranoia. Everything that one could hate about cities is concentrated into these places. In these comic books cities have become a separate organism, in which fights are fought constantly depicting all shades of hoodlum individuality. The city is a dangerous inevitability that has to be accepted since there simply is nothing better.
Two Sides of a Silver Dollar
The most famous city of the comic book world is Gotham City, the stomping ground of Bruce Wayne, who in his spare time flies around in a batsuit and is otherwise known as the Batman. Gotham City is modelled on New York; many places on the city map coincide, e.g. Manhattan. Gotham City is often depicted as an exaggerated distorted mirror of New York. The main problem of Gotham City is corruption, which has reached all institutions, the police being the most prone to bribery. In the Batman comic books the focus of the stories is where the bad guys tilt the governing power towards their interests illegally by manipulating the people. Characters include the Joker, Penguin and Harvey Dent AKA Two Face. To some extent Metropolis, the hometown to the Superman stories is linked with Gotham City. Sometimes the two have been depicted on two coasts of the same bay, sometimes even as neighbouring cities. The two can be compared with a sentence said with some humour that Metropolis is New York by day and Gotham City is New York by night. However, Metropolis is actually based on Chicago.
Bottom of the Basin
One comic book, where the city is undisputedly the main character is Frank Miller's series of dark stories, ‘Sin City’. The city is actually called Basin City and does not draw its inspiration from any specific city, but is a mix of the Southern and Central States and the East and West Coast. Here the winters are heavy with snow and the summers unbearably hot. There are palm trees in Sin City, but the city is surrounded by tar craters, dinosaur bones, deserts and mountains. Real life Americana subtly becomes a dreamlike fiction. The nickname ‘Sin City’ is of course due to the high level of depravity and corruption of its citizens and Frank Miller has not been modest with the morbid details in describing the dark deeds that take place here. Sin City is ruled by the Roark dynasty, who have turned the whole town into their private church. A church, that demands a regular and ruthless human sacrifice to the altar of greed, power and moral decay.
One of the quinetessential depictions of a “comic book city” originates actually from the world of movies. Alex Provas's film “Dark City” (2000) nails the murky atmosphere with extraordinary precision, turning a modern urban landscape into a creepy location, where nothing can be trusted. To drive a point home, he has houses changing place and walls shifting every night, so that the citizens cannot trust even the things that seem solid. In Dark City, you can literally trust nothing. The moving walls of the city at night and the disseminating faceless vampires form a good portrayal of the general atmosphere of paranoiac uncertainty in which the people of the comic book cities have to dwell.
Epilogue
Martin Luther might have argued, that the people do not need the institution of church to talk to god. That there is no necessity for a governing body, that keeps the mortals on a distance from the divine and vice versa.
It seems that the comics world needs that institution, and the role of the church is claimed by the city, that acts as a source of of redemption and downfall at the same time. The city a acts as an intermediary between the masses and their heroes, advocating their communication, but being constantly driven by a guilt of failure, shaking under its own terrible weight of depravity. The city is desperately craving for forgiveness, but deep inside hates the only one, who can give it to him - the hero - and plots its destruction.
A good comic book hero, on the other hand, is a dual character, a saviour and an antichrist rolled in one, its sole purpose usually, to think about it, not saving the people, but saving the city from complete annihilation. It seems that in the world of uber-men, “good” and “evil” are just four-letter words, that belong in a children's textbook in their naive simplicity. A hero is up against the villain, who wants to rule the world, the people, who are blinded often by media, superstition, or just plain stupidity, and the city, who cannot stand a moral guardian. All that belongs to him, when he is alone, are his thoughts in the darkness.
“A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing. Our helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing” Martin Luther
Tristan Priimägi
sep 14 '09
1 contribution
Tristan Priimägi studied Semiotics in the Tartu University. He graduated with a BA in 2001, specializing in film semiotics. Since then has been working for different advertising agencies and been a driving force in several cultural projects like the graphic design webzine "Beta" and the "Plink Plonk" music festival. In addition to that, he has been a regular contributor to all the bigger press publications, newspapers and magazines, writing about film, music and pop culture in general, helped with translation and promotion work for Estonian films and film events and been a member of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival selection committee for several years. Plans for 2010 include organizing DocPoint Tallinn - an Estonian branch of the renowned Helsinki documentary festival DocPoint.
published • September 14th '09
jan 19 '10 19:44
toom
Nice article!
jan 10 '10 20:18
Nikko
City as Church, love it. Thanks
dec 25 '09 17:04
Martin`s friend
cool