New York Is Comics Country

Some of the most iconic moments in comic book history would be unimaginable without their New York setting. From the tragic death of Spider-man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy on the Brooklyn Bridge to the quiet battles of faith fought by the Bronx residents of Dropsie Avenue in Will Eisner's A Contract with God, New York City has inspired cartoonists for decades.

The two titans of the comics publishing world, Marvel and DC, both have their offices in New York. And as the popularity of the graphic novel category continues to grow, even traditional New York publishing houses like Random House and Simon & Schuster are increasingly becoming part of the comics publishing scene. Plus, countless comics writers and artists make their home in the five boroughs.

Thus, it's been something of an embarrassment to the local comics community that New York City, the heart of comicdom, has for years been without a national comics convention befitting the city's special status.

Indeed, the sometimes surreal business and promotional goings-on at the annual Comic-con International in San Diego, Calif.—the BookExpo America of the comics industry—have attained legendary status. And while other shows around the country have grown to become unique pop culture expos, the comics community has been looking for a show that will put New York back on the map of national comics conventions.

That moment is now at hand. The first annual New York Comic-con rolls into town February 24—26 at the Javits Center. With nearly 200 exhibitors and more than 30 special guests from around the country, including such superstars as Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane and Joe Quesada, this will be the biggest comics extravaganza the Big Apple has ever seen.

"It always struck me as strange or funny that New York is the comic book capital of North America but there's never a huge show there," says Lee. "Given the amount of respect and publicity the mainstream has given comics, this could very well be a coming out party for the industry in the publishing capital of the the world."

And local cartoonists couldn't be happier. "I think it's always been almost depressing that that we're the mecca of comics but we haven't been represented," says Ivan Brandon, writer of NYC Mech, a comic series set in an imaginary New York City that is inhabited entirely by robots.

Frank Miller, creator of Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, has a famous quote about New York and the comics: "Metropolis is New York in the daytime; Gotham City is New York at night." There's a good reason for the similarity. As recounted in Gerard Jones's book of essays Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic), the early history of comics is bound up almost entirely in the publishing companies of 1930s New York. (Novelist and admitted comics nut Michael Chabon re-created this colorful and seminal era in his novel Kavalier & Clay as well.)

With both of the major comics companies—National (which later became DC Comics) and Timely (later to become Marvel Comics)—headquartered in "Gotham," the vast majority of comics artists and writers lived nearby, and they couldn't resist making their hometown an important part of comics mythology. Batman, in an obvious example, patrols the dark streets of Gotham City, an obvious re-creation of New York's grim urban landscape. Superman's Metropolis and Central City, the setting for Will Eisner's The Spirit, both show off the telltale steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan. Or, as veteran comics editor Jim Salicrup notes, singling out one of Marvel's classic super-heroes, "When the Atlantean prince Sub-Mariner decided to invade America, he invaded New York."

When Marvel introduced its now well-known pantheon of hip super-heroes in the '60s, creators Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby added lots of local color. The Fantastic Four were headquartered in the Baxter Building, a sleek midtown tower that had all the usual problems—garbage strikes and mouthy doormen—of a real Manhattan skyscraper. The FF's Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, had a stereotypical tough-guy New York accent and he was plagued by the Yancy Street Gang, a band of lowlifes from the Lower East Side, where both Grimm and his creator, the great Jack Kirby, grew up. Marvel's occult super-hero expert Dr. Strange was also downtown, living in a groovy section of Greenwich Village.

More recently, Ex Machina, an acclaimed new superhero series written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Tony Harris, offers a thought-provoking story about New York City's first superhero mayor, Mitchell Hundred, in an imaginative post-9/11 depiction of the ultimate comic book city.

And, of course, in an ever-increasing number of Hollywood films based on comics, New York landmarks have made a fine showing. The historic Daily News building on E. 42nd Street served as Metropolis's famed Daily Planet building in the first Superman movie. In the Spider-Man movies, Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker attends "Empire College," played admirably by Columbia University, and the historic Flatiron Building stands in ably for the Daily Bugle building.

The late Will Eisner showed many sides of New York in his work, starting with the romantic film-noir metropolis of the Spirit series. And in his later, pioneering graphic novels set on the fictional Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx, he went even deeper into portraying the ordinary lives of immigrant tenement dwellers.

These days, alternative cartoonists have flocked to Brooklyn, and a thriving community of comics artists has emerged, with such artists as Jessica Abel, Matt Madden, Tom Hart, Nick Bertozzi and Dean Haspiel leading the way. Hart's Unmarketable, Haspiel's Opposable Thumbs and Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers all follow the lives of regular New Yorkers, which is exactly what all of these artists have become.

But while the New York Comic-con will bring a national comics convention back to Gotham, the city wasn't always devoid of big-time comics shows. In 1967 Phil Seuling, a former high school teacher who revolutionized both the comics distribution and the comics collectibles businesses, organized the Comic Art Convention, one of the first major comics shows anywhere in the US. Seuling continued to put on shows until his death in 1984, bringing in notable Silver Age comics artists and watching as boxes of back issues began changing hands. Although not as glitzy as today's comics fests, these shows provided an invaluable opportunity for then-aspiring cartoonists to mingle with Marvel and DC's lineup of comics masters.

After Seuling's death, promoters continued to put on comics shows in this vein. But by the mid-1990s, these shows were victimized by all the factors—few venues, high rental fees, union charges and fire marshal problems—that can make organizing any kind of large-scale event in New York City economically unfeasible. Since then, the MoCCA festival, a small annual show for alternative comics held each summer at the Puck Building, has been a bright spot, growing quickly from a one-day fair into a weekend comics festival. But at a time when comics and graphic novels are growing in popularity, New York City, hasn't had a national convention until now.

The New York Comic-con, organized by Reed Exhibitions, a sister company of this magazine, is the most ambitious attempt to return New York City to the national comics convention spotlight in a long time. And the local comics community can't wait to show off their city to visiting VIPs.

"It's not hard to talk people into coming into New York City," says Brandon, who adds that the local comics community is rooting for the show. "It could be a really huge thing for the industry and for our community. I'd like to see it succeed so that people who don't come will say, 'Wow, I missed out this year.' "