Marvel Comics is ditching the city. Like so many other native New Yorkers in the entertainment industry, it\u2019s headed west, chasing the movies to Burbank, California, just outside of Los Angeles\u2014not to what Laugh-In would call the city\u2019s beautiful downtown, but to join Marvel Studios at Disney\u2019s corporate headquarters. The move has long been expected, especially since chief rival DC Comics decamped to California in 2015. Disney execs have probably eyed the move for as long as they\u2019ve owned the company; Marvel will always be rooted in comic books, but movies, TV, and games long ago passed them in profitability and importance, and by consolidating the comparatively insignificant publishing wing with the rest of the company Disney won\u2019t have to pay exorbitant Manhattan real estate prices any more. This is a genuine end of an era, though, not just for this one company, but for the entire comics industry; New York City created the comic book and was once home to dozens of publishers, but now the industry has abandoned it completely. (Archie Comics, which split Manhattan in the \u201980s, remains nearby, in Westchester, no doubt not far from Professor Xavier\u2019s school.) Marvel was the last NYC comics publisher of note, and its departure ends almost a century of comic books being made in the city that birthed them.<\/p>\n
At the peak of the American comics industry, the so-called Golden Age of the \u201930s and \u201940s, every major publisher was based in New York City. DC started there in 1934 as National; Marvel in \u201939 as Timely; Archie in \u201939 as MLJ. Dell Comics, the largest company in the business until the \u201960s, was based there, as was Fawcett\u2014whose Captain Marvel was the best-selling superhero comic of the 1940s\u2014and Richie Rich and Casper publisher Harvey Comics. Basically every notable American comic book company was all NYC, Baby! until the independent boom of the \u201980s. And although very few of those companies actually set their comics in the city, a New York worldview pervaded the whole business, just as it did most of the publishing and media industries throughout the 20th century. No more.<\/p>\n
One company did set most of their comics explicitly in New York, though, and that one, of course, was Marvel. Timely had used a few names since launching in \u201939, going with \u201cAtlas\u201d for much of the \u201950s, but by 1961 had rebranded itself after the name of its very first publication, Marvel Comics. (It had sporadically used Marvel as its label name as early as 1944.) Marvel\u2019s superhero boom of the early \u201960s was driven in part by the slightly more realistic nature of its stories as compared to DC, and part of that was having all of its major characters living in and around the five boroughs. The Fantastic Four and Thor lived in Manhattan, Spider-Man commuted in from Queens, Daredevil was sweating it in Hell\u2019s Kitchen, Iron Man seemed to prefer Long Island for some reason, and Dr. Strange was getting freaky with all the heads down in the Village. Hell, the Avengers basically lived in Henry Frick\u2019s Fifth Avenue mansion before moving into their own skyscraper. New York\u2014and Manhattan, primarily\u2014was the default setting for almost every major Marvel Comics character, defining both the way the comics looked and how the characters acted.<\/p>\n
Beyond the page, Marvel always went out of its way to play up its city connection. Stan Lee\u2019s \u201cBullpen Bulletins\u201d columns of the \u201960s crafted a heavily fictionalized version of Marvel\u2019s staff as a bunch of fun-loving, big city freewheelers, with artists and writers popping into its midtown high-rise headquarters as often\u2014and as unexpectedly\u2014as sitcom neighbors. Lee adopted the official New York state motto, \u201cExcelsior!\u201d, as his own personal catchphrase. Marvel staffers regularly faced the employees of their Distinguished Competition at DC in softball games in Central Park, with photos and recaps often running in comics letter columns. Even more than DC, Marvel basically was New York City.<\/p>\n
Now Marvel will be in Burbank. It\u2019ll never be Burbank the way it was NYC, and the jury\u2019s out on how much you can be NYC if you aren\u2019t actually in NYC. It\u2019s been a long time since a mass of Marvel\u2019s artists or writers lived in the city, but its editors kept that connection going up through now. And now they\u2019re off to California, to join the movie and TV departments whose shadows they\u2019ve long worked under. This isn\u2019t a lament, but simply recognition of the passing of this once-great relationship\u2014the divorce of New York City and Marvel Comics, and thus the comics industry as a whole. Don\u2019t expect a Springsteen song about this\u2014something tells me New York will handle the loss of this industry way better than Bethlehem and Allentown weathered the loss of the steel industry, or North Carolina its textile mills\u2014but it\u2019s still worth noting. New York City will always have Spider-Man, but it won\u2019t make any more money off the people who create his stories. At least they\u2019ll always have Da Knicks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marvel Comics is ditching the city. Like so many other native New Yorkers in the entertainment industry, it\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[6133,2431,9,24,55,54,56,83167],"class_list":["post-298990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-disney","tag-marvel","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}