Quote Originally Posted by Jim Kelly View Post
It's kind of obvious, but the reason DC and Marvel based their cities on New York was because that's where the publishers were located. And it happened that a lot of writers, artists and editors were from that area, in the period from about 1935 - 1965. While others that came to work for the companies--and most had to live in the area for employment--fell in love with New York and wanted to use it as a backdrop for their stories.

Even if versions of the citiy were later given fictitious names, the model was New York--for most comics in the 1940s. Gotham City started out as Manhattan in DETECTIVE COMICS. The Spirit was originally located in New York and New Jersey, but later that was changed to Central City. Captain Marvel surely is in New York City--not the much later invention of Fawcett City.

I personally liked how the DC writers and artists used New York but then put it through a blender and came out with these oddball versions of New York landmarks. Even in the 1960s, more fictitious versions of New York were being created. I recall that Ralph and Sue Dibny visited Empire City twice and this was clearly yet another fictional New York.

It did bother me, however, in the 1970s when New York itself featured more and more in the comics. Diana Prince lived in New York. Superman--in the Sand Superman Saga--has his final confrontation with the creature in Manhattan rather than in Metropolis. The Teen Titans moving to New York had me spitting teeth. With all the New York facsimiles, why was it necessary? The pretend versions gave the writers much more freedom. Were we really supposed to believe Titans Tower was in the East River where any New Yorker would see it?

I do think that fans care about the cities. It was a fascination of mine as a little kid--when I believed Gotham City and Metropolis really did exist, as after all the concept of the United States of America was rather mythological to this Canadian boy. But even when fans grow up they invest a lot of time on theories about the cities and where they are located. Bob Rozakis based his stories about the Calculator in DETECTIVE COMICS on a fan-made map of the DC cities--so the crime spree was supposed to travel across America from city to city (it turned out that there was an error in this map).

As for available real estate--I remember there was a map of the U.S. in one of the DC events (maybe it was Our Worlds At War) that made the States look much bigger and Canada much smaller--so that the 49th parallel was perhaps the 53rd parallel. Since Canada is hardly ever featured in the DC stories (even though the super-heroes must fly over it all the time), I theorized that the U.S. took over a lot of Canadian land in the DC history, giving room for all those extra cities. While Canadian cities that do show up in the DCU (only Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary with any frequency) are actually north of where they appear in reality, which accounts for why they're nothing like the real cities and why it's so cold and snowy most of the time in the DCU's version of Canada.
So what if anyone can see Titans Tower. It isn't like that thing was designed to be inconspicuous.