It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Architecture!

From The New York Times

For some comic book fans, the fictional cities of Metropolis and Gotham, home to Superman and Batman, feel as real as New York, the inspiration for both towns. Now there is another city to add to their dreamscape: the Cinderella City, the setting for the comic book series Manhattan Guardian, the latest issue of which arrives on Sept. 7. As the title of the series indicates, Cinderella City is unmistakably New York, but it is a New York that is at once more true to life and more fantastical than that of any other comic book tribute. Much of the Cinderella City looks like the New York of today: grimy subway stations, soaring buildings, busy street scenes.

But Grant Morrison, the Scottish writer who created the Manhattan Guardian as part of the larger Seven Soldiers series, also laced it with architectural marvels that were proposed but never actually constructed.

The first issue of Seven Soldiers, published last February, features a broad Manhattan skyline that includes a hotel that the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí designed for New York nearly a century ago. Not far away is the so-called Rolls-Royce Building (its facade resembles a grill) that the Austrian architect Hans Hollein unsuccessfully proposed as the new headquarters for Chase Manhattan Bank in the late 1950's. And snaking around the two buildings is the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, the elevated highway long championed by New York City's powerful urban planner Robert Moses.

All of these buildings, Mr. Morrison said, will reappear in other issues of the Seven Soldiers series, as will other unrealized architectural marvels. The opening panel of Manhattan Guardian's third issue, for example, featured Frank Lloyd Wright's domed futuristic complex Ellis Island Key, which the architect designed shortly before he died. Mr. Morrison, who lives in Glasgow, said by embellishing on the existing New York he was tapping into his favorite comic book power: the ability to create alternative realities. "Things as they are have never really been enough for me," he said.

It was the urge to reimagine the world around him that led Mr. Morrison to conceive the series. He had just finished four years writing the X-Men when DC Comics approached him about masterminding the relaunching of Superman - about as prestigious a gig as there is in the comic-book world. But Mr. Morrison was wary. "There are limits as to what you can do with characters that have already been established," he explained.

Ultimately, he agreed to write story lines for the most famous superhero in history on the condition he could also produce 30 books about long-forgotten DC Comics characters, allowing him full creative license to concoct narratives and a new city in which to stage them. Mr. Morrison said he was attracted by the fun of curating a personal version of New York, as well as the novelty of bringing DC Comics characters into the city previously dominated by its rival, Marvel. (Peter Parker was living in Queens when he was bitten there by a radioactive spider). One of the reasons Mr. Morrison decided to name his town the Cinderella City was to differentiate it from Gotham and Metropolis, which he deems "ugly stepsisters."

One of the first new characters that Mr. Morrison introduced was the Manhattan Guardian, New York's first eponymous superhero. The original Guardian appeared in the 1940's; the protagonist was a beat cop who allied himself with tough local kids to punish evildoers. The title of the book reminded Morrison of the British newspaper, which, in turn, gave him the idea of a tabloid's hiring a superhero. But the publication, he quickly determined, couldn't be based on his side of the Atlantic. "A superhero with a British tabloid would promote bingo with Page 3 girls," he said. So Mr. Morrison created The Manhattan Guardian, a tabloid that employs Jake Jordan, a veteran of the New York Police Department, to protect New York from nefarious characters.

The decision to line this particular New York with monuments that didn't make it past the drawing board sprang from a conversation with Paul Laffoley, a Boston-based architect. Mr. Laffoley entered the 9/11 memorial design committee with a proposal to revive the American hotel that Gaudí is said to have contemplated creating in 1908. Mr. Morrison had been an enthusiast of Gaudí since he picked up a Taschen art book of the Spaniard's work 19 years ago, and he was taken with descriptions of the proposed building, which would have stood almost as high as the Eiffel Tower, with an observatory in the shape of a sea urchin at the top.

Mr. Laffoley's proposal for ground zero did not make the cut, of course, but Mr. Morrison decided to erect the building in the pages of his comic book. It dovetailed nicely with the broader theme for his city: "I want it to be a more exalted New York, where things that were dreamed of were finally brought into reality."

After that, Mr. Morrison waded through academic texts to find other never-built masterpieces. His standards were high. "I chose only the things that looked most bizarre and beautiful," he explains. "I wanted them to be like a Gaudí building. He managed to create things that looked utterly improbable and fantastical, by sheer force of will." The Midtown expressway made the cut: Mr. Morrison liked how the elevated highway burrowed through buildings, reminding him of a monorail that he had ridden in Sydney that whizzed through department stores. And the concept of a building resembling a Rolls-Royce grill was intriguing.

"It's the kind of thing that would become a tourist haunt, or a terrorist target," he said. "All of the buildings I've included are. They would have been icons of the city."

After immersing yourself in Mr. Morrison's version of New York, it's a little hard to see the city in quite the same way. Perhaps in real life, even these extraordinary designs would have come to feel familiar, but on the page they are a striking reminder of how much one structure can matter. Whether or not you think the mid-Manhattan expressway made sense as urban planning, the image of a road bursting through a building is not one you'll soon forget.

To make the fantasy city feel real, the artist Cameron Stewart realized Mr. Morrison's story lines using as much visual data as possible. During a four-day trip to New York last fall, Mr. Stewart, who lives in Toronto, spent hours in the subway, snapping photos of benches, pipes and rush-hour passengers. "It's the details that make it complete," he explained. "Most readers won't catch all of them, but if they weren't there, it wouldn't feel like a real world."

Under Mr. Morrison's guidance, Mr. Stewart also added a few flourishes of his own. The Manhattan Guardian's principal nemeses, for example, are pirates who hijack New York subway trains; they wear credit card earrings and cellphone belts, a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the bounty they would have collected from 21st-century victims. And in the panel in which the Cinderella City is named Mr. Stewart sent "Pumpkin cabs" - in orange instead of the traditional yellow - zooming by on the street.

In a sense, the Guardian is a valentine to a city that both Mr. Morrison and Mr. Stewart call their favorite in the world. But neither man has plans to move here. Mr. Stewart said he had toyed with the idea during his October visit, but the outcome of the presidential election a month later prompted him to shelve the plan. Mr. Morrison, meanwhile, is wary of the constant stimuli. "I'd be too high voltage," he said. "I'd never get anything done." He is putting in 13-hour days, not only redesigning Manhattan, but also working on Superman, whose 67-year-old insignia he has already changed. "A lot of mad ideas come into my head," he says with a chuckle. "I'm lucky people will pay me for them."

By ALEXANDRA STARR

Published: July 31, 2005

That's So New York