Where is Gotham City in DC Comics’ Batman?

One of Stan Lee’s many innovations as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics was to set the publisher’s superhero stories in the real-world New York City. The greater sense of reality and interconnectedness within the comics helped create a sense of community among fans (which Lee purposefully cultivated). The efforts of creators and fans to apply superheroes to the “real world” can be traced back to Lee’s wonderful New York. Compare this to the older DC Comics heroes who had adventures in places like Gotham City and Star City. These characters were obviously people who couldn’t exist in our world, so they made a home for themselves. Writing superhero comics is like telling fairy tales.

Notice how Superman’s home, Metropolis, is named after a word that literally means “big city.” But then again, many comic fans really want to know where the fantastical city of Washington DC is located, even if it’s just for the sake of internal consistency. That’s especially true of the most famous Batman: Gotham City.

So the standard answer is that Gotham City is in New Jersey. (Maybe there’s a reason why The Penguin borrows so much from The Sopranos.) The Amazing World of DC Comics, Issue 14 (published in 1977) In , author Mark Gruenwald writes an encyclopedic history of the Justice League. In the character bio section, Gruenwald explicitly labels Gotham City as being in New Jersey. (Gruenwald states in this issue that Metropolis is in Delaware, which is also accepted as canon.) New Jersey makes a lot of sense as the location for Gotham. Not exactly New York, but close enough. Since then, Gotham is usually implicitly written to be in New Jersey, but not always.

In the Young Justice anime, a map of the east coast of the United States shows Gotham to be located in southern Connecticut, around the actual Bridgeport, Connecticut area.

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Like New Jersey, Connecticut is an East Coast state that borders New York, so it fits the profile that Gotham should have. Batman and his friends were born and raised in Connecticut. Being in the Nutmegger family clearly appealed to me. But that’s the point, right? Gotham City is supposed to be in the middle of nowhere, like Springfield in The Simpsons, so everyone can see their hometown there.

DC is resisting the assumption that Gotham City will replace New York City. The real-life New York City has also appeared in several DC Comics, so New York City and Gotham exist simultaneously in the DC Universe. But if there’s one real-life city that Gotham is an allegory for, it’s New York.

“Gotham” is a nickname for New York City coined by writer Washington Irving in the 1800s. When Batman debuted in 1939, DC Comics (then National Comics) was also based in New York, so Batman’s credited creators Bill Finger and Bob Kane also lived there. In fact, Detective Comics #33 (the first depiction of Batman’s oft-retold origin story) explicitly identifies his hometown as Manhattan. Batman relocated to the fictional Gotham City just one year after the publication of Batman #4 in 1940.

In author Jim Steranko’s History of Steranko Comics, Bill Finger says:

“Originally, I was going to call Gotham City ‘Civic City.’ Next we tried “Capital City” and then “Coast City”. Then I flipped through the phone book and saw the name Gotham Jewelers and said, “This is it, Gotham City.” Of course, Gotham is another name for New York. ”

Later Batman writers also based Gotham on New York. In the novel Batman: Nightfall, Dennis O’Neal argues that Batman’s urban aura reflects our collective fear that cities are filled with hidden evil. Explaining. He concludes that “Batman’s Gotham City is Manhattan beneath 14th Street at 11 minutes past midnight on the coldest November night.”

Frank Miller (writer of The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One) is often quoted as saying, “Metropolis is New York by day, and Gotham City is New York by night.” Miller talks about how he was robbed while living in New York, and it inspired both his Batman comics and the earlier Daredevil (a Marvel series that was literally set in New York). It was something that colored. “[Being robbed]made me as angry as[Batman]was, at least for a while,” Miller told CBR in 2016.

Gotham City may imitate East Coast metropolises, but the 1960s television series “Batman” brought it to the West. The show was filmed in the Los Angeles area of ​​Southern California.

Then director Tim Burton took Batman across the pond. The 1989 “Batman” movie was filmed on sets built at Pinewood Studios in England. The exterior of Wayne Manor was actually Knebworth House, a stately mansion in the Hertfordshire countryside. However, Burton’s sequel “Batman Returns” was filmed at Warner Bros. Studios in California. Director Joel Schumacher filmed part of Batman Forever in New York (the exterior of the new Wayne mansion is actually the Webb Naval Architectural Institute on Long Island, which was later featured in the 2014 TV series Gotham). However, much of Forever and its sequel Batman & Robin were still filmed on soundstages in California.

However, Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman was filmed in Detroit, with Michigan City representing both Gotham and Metropolis. In Snyder’s film, Gotham and Metropolis are depicted as twin cities separated by a bay, and, like the comics, are implicitly located in New Jersey and Delaware, respectively.

Christopher Nolan’s goal with his Batman movies was to ground the hero in the real world. That meant avoiding the great Gothic sets used by Burton and Schumacher. Instead, director Nolan shot the Dark Knight trilogy in real cities, reinforcing the reality and idea that this Batman could actually exist in the real world. Because we see Batman moving through it in every scene.

Batman Begins was filmed primarily throughout England, but Nolan also shot exterior shots of cities in New York and Chicago as well as London. Chicago then became the main filming location for “The Dark Knight.” Director Nolan spent part of his childhood in Chicago, and felt it was a perfect fit for his Gotham City. “I think the architecture of this city is really amazing and amazing. It gave us an incredible variety to use as a backdrop for the film.” “

The Dark Knight Rises moved from Chicago and was instead filmed in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, New York City, and Newark, New Jersey (with some exterior footage in London and Glasgow, Scotland). Richard Moskal, director of the Chicago Film Bureau at the time, told the Chicago Tribune in 2011 that he believed the filmmakers wanted to keep it “fresh” by not recycling Chicago in the third film. Ta. Still, Chicago remains synonymous with Gotham for many, as The Dark Knight is the most famous of Nolan’s Batman films. One person who acknowledged this relationship was the late Batman comic book artist Neal Adams, who said:

“Chicago is notorious for some kind of crime. Batman is in this corrupt city and he’s trying to turn it back into a better place. One of the things about Chicago is that Chicago has alleys. It’s a back alley (virtually non-existent in New York), that’s where Batman fights the bad guys.

Matt Reeves’ The Batman takes cues from Nolan, grounding the Dark Knight in reality and taking the truly unbalanced Batman (Robert Pattinson) one step further. Like “Batman Begins,” “The Batman” also flew and filmed in Gotham City, England. Specifically, “The Batman” was shot primarily in Liverpool, with additional filming from London, Glasgow, and Chicago. According to Batman production designer James Chinlund, the filmmakers chose Liverpool because its natural Gothic architecture reflected the history they wanted Gotham City to suggest. He says this is because, although it is an old and “declining” metropolis, it evokes a city that has gone through a period of rebirth.

The tower that Batman jumped off to in a wingsuit to escape the Gotham police? It’s actually Liverpool’s Royal Liver Building. Chinlund told the BBC:

“I started looking around the area and it slowly started to become clear how rich that world is and what a great city Liverpool is in terms of following stories. Incredible There was a boom period, but then there was a decline.”The age, the patina present on the building, and the obvious inclement weather…it all fit like a glove. ”

The spin-off TV series The Penguins was filmed in New York, but a driver’s license briefly shown in the show still shows Reeves’ Gotham as being in New Jersey. Cristin Milioti (Sofia Falcone) is a Jersey-born girl who, with Colin Farrell’s accent as Oz, makes Gotham no place other than the Garden State.