NYC Comics

“There’s this kinetic energy that, if you have a dream and ambition, and you want to make something, you come here. The minute your foot hits the ground it’s in this groove and you’re doing and meeting other people who are the same vibe. It’s so easy to make something here if you want it, and if you want to do the work for it.”

Chris Irving of Graphic NYC checks in with an excellent look at graphic novelist Christine Norrie. The interview covers many topics, including Christine's views on the city and romance:

“Is there such a thing as real romance?” Christine poses as she adjusts her maroon scarf. “Its just drama, 24/7. I feel like romance and love, which I’m all about, is also one of the beautiful and crushing things we do to each other. It can be so hurtful and painful, also wonderful and uplifting, except there are no rules, no formula, and so many, many variables. I know everybody goes about it differently, and there’s great love out there, but there’s also such great sorrow.”

(Norrie's "Cheat", from Oni Press)

Irving also has a piece in New York Magazine exploring some of the comic book landmarks of New York City. The article highlights locations with additional fictional histories (such as the George Washington Bridge, where the Green Goblin killed Spider-Man's girlfriend, Gwen Stacey), and also places of historical significance to the comic industry, which has roots deep in NYC (including DeWitt Clinton High School, alama mater of Will Eisner, Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Stan Lee, amongst others).

Also at NY Mag is a brief list of the top New York comics, as selected by some of New York's many comic writers and artists. The attempt to call the list a canon is charming in its pretension, but there are some great works included.

Warren Ellis' Crooked New York City

In his 2007 debut novel, Crooked Little Vein, veteran comic book scribe Warren Ellis spends a good deal of time looking at New Yorkers as a species in the zoo that is modern American subculture. The lead character, private detective and self-described "shit magnet" Michael McGill, is a New York transplant, living and working on the edge of a "pre-Rudy zone" in Alphabet City.

McGill approaches NYC as a challenge, which in some respects puts him at constant odds with elements of the city he now calls home. He lives in New York, but is perhaps more properly a Chicagoan. His outside perspective on New York is well represented by Ellis, himself a Brit. The story plunges him into an absurd to the point of brilliant mystery, where he must track down the "Secret Constitution" of the United States, which has been lost since the Nixon era.

Ellis' New York City is one where any fetish has a place (this is true of other cities as well in the book, especially and most disturbingly Los Angeles, but we're focusing on NYC here). Our shit magnet protagonist follows one of the early leads in his investigation to a private club that specializes in Godzilla bukkake. I don't want to ever know if there is a factual basis for that. I am quite happy to pretend it is purely a product of Ellis' demented mind.

McGill's traveling companion for this cross-country journey is a thesis student, and native New Yorker, named Trix. She's his tour guide into the strange, opening doors to worlds of polyamory, saline-injection fetishists and more. Through these sub-cultures the get closer and closer to the secret constitution. Their rapport bristles with an awkward sexual tension, but is also used to highlight the differences between Trix's New York, and the more mundane parts of the country. 

Travelling in Ohio, Trix is particularly astounded at the presence of American flags outside of people's homes (for the record, I have had a similar moment travelling in Ohio). Mike is dismissive of her surprise on account of her being a New Yorker. Mike's response shows how he still perceives NYC as an outsider:

"People in New York are either New Yorkers, or they're Spanish, or Italian, or Irish, or  whatever. Who the hell moves to Williamsburg and says, Hey, I'm an American? Hell, even after 9/11, if you wanted to tell someone they were being a good guy, people were saying, 'You're a hell of a New Yorker, buddy.'"

There is something to that. Something which New Yorkers take pride in and many others  (particularly in Middle America) scorn. We frequently see our city as the center of our world,  and have, as John Updike famously said, a “secret belief that people living anywhere else had to 

be, in some sense, kidding.” Something that separates us from Sarah Palin's 'pro-America parts of America.' The 'Main St vs Wall St' line which echoed throughout last year's presidential campaign which only seemed to further illustrate the ontological differences between NYC and the rest of the country.

What is it about this city that inspires us to act that way?

This question isn't the focus of Ellis' novel, so he doesn't set out to answer it on a  specifically local level. But it, among others, is posed, sometimes literally and sometimes between the lines. The tension between normal, straight, vanilla America and the crooked social preferences of New Yorkers is embodied by the tension between Mike and Trix. Geographic and social boundaries are both examined in their journey. The lines between normal and abnormal are drawn, crossed, erased and redrawn throughout the novel, as Ellis pokes at the absurdity beneath the puritan hang-ups that still linger in American society.

Crooked Little Vein is an excellent first foray into prose fiction for Ellis. A worthy successor to his Transmetroplitan, one of the finest comic series I've ever had the opportunity to read.

A Look at the Queensborough Bridge

Ephemeral New York checks in with a post about the Queensborough Bridge. They include one of my personal favorite quotes about the bridge. F. Scott Fitgerald wrote in the Great Gatsby that “the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time in its wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

I remember the first time I crossed the bridge years ago. Looking out along the East River around sunset, my eyes seized on the Ravenswood Power Plant, known to many as "Big Aliss". Its three striped smokestacks had been featured repeatedly in the movie "Conspiracy Theory", which I have a serious soft spot for. Having seen that movie rerun on TBS and TNT something like a billion times, the visual had an instant familiarity with me that most seem to reserve for icons like the Empire State Building.

In warmer weather, I like a nice walk over the bridge. The view is pretty spectacular, if constantly changing with the real estate development on Roosevelt Island and in Long Island City. On one day where a tunnel fire had caused massive delays on several Queens-bound trains, I opted to walk through pouring rain from my old office at Rockefeller Center to my apartment in Astoria. Aside from being waterlogged, it was a pretty nice walk. The Queensborough's pedestrian walkways aren't as appealing as those on the Brooklyn Bridge, which I think contributes to its role as the East River bridge of lesser regard. Hopefully that can be remedied in the future.

Grant Morrison's New York

Grant Morrison is one the top writers in comics today. His current DC Comics mega-event, Final Crisis, has been an impressive series so far. In it, he revisits some ideas that were present in a group of books he put out a few years ago called Seven Soldiers. That's led me to revisit his earlier work as well.

One of the Seven Soldiers books was The Manhattan Guardian, telling the story of Jake Jordan, a disgraced former police officer who becomes the eponymous hero, having fantastic adventures while in the employ of a local tabloid which documents them. But Morrison's New York City is very much a supporting character in the book, and it takes on some intriguing characteristics that diverge from the city outside our windows.

Since DC Comics already has Batman's Gotham City, and Superman's Metropolis, in many ways Manhattan's dark and light reflections respectively, New York City has seldom played a prominent role in DC stories, in stark contrast to Marvel Comics, where half of the world's heroes seem to live in the five boroughs. Morrison played it to the hilt, dubbing his New York "The Cinderella City" on account of its two ugly step-sisters. Playing on the mythic qualities of NYC, he also looked to architectural dream projects that never came to pass, adding a "what if" to the city.

Morrison's New York skyline includes the Hotel Attraction (designed by Antoni Gaudi), the Chase-Manhattan Bank Building (designed by Hans Hollein to resemble the grill of a Rolls Royce), and the Mid-Manhattan Expressway (proposed by Robert Moses). In the harbor sits The Ellis Island Key Project (conceived by Frank Lloyd Wright and seen above). 

When Morrison was intrviewed about the project in 2005, he told the Times, "I want it to be a more exalted New York, where things that were dreamed of were finally brought into reality."

The Cinderella City is a strong backdrop for Morrison's stories of transformation and mythology in both Seven Soldiers, and to a lesser extent, Final Crisis. Unlike the New York of Marvel Comics, which looks so much like our city that they felt the need for Spider-Man to comment on the fall of the WTC towers in 2001, Morrison's NYC is raw myth. This is a city of dreams and possibility. The journey of Jake Jordan from failure to hero could as easily have been the journey of anyone who comes to New York City for a better life. The essence and mythology of New York City, where anything is possible, is laid bare through it's people and architecture in the work of Grant Morrison. It reminds us of what might have been and what might yet be.