Marvel Comics is ditching the city. Like so many other native New Yorkers in the entertainment industry, it’s headed west, chasing the movies to Burbank, California, just outside of Los Angeles—not to what Laugh-In would call the city’s beautiful downtown, but to join Marvel Studios at Disney’s 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’ve 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’t 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 ’80s, remains nearby, in Westchester, no doubt not far from Professor Xavier’s 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.
At the peak of the American comics industry, the so-called Golden Age of the ’30s and ’40s, every major publisher was based in New York City. DC started there in 1934 as National; Marvel in ’39 as Timely; Archie in ’39 as MLJ. Dell Comics, the largest company in the business until the ’60s, was based there, as was Fawcett—whose Captain Marvel was the best-selling superhero comic of the 1940s—and Richie Rich and Casper publisher Harvey Comics. Basically every notable American comic book company was all NYC, Baby! until the independent boom of the ’80s. 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.
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 ’39, going with “Atlas” for much of the ’50s, 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’s superhero boom of the early ’60s 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’s 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’s Fifth Avenue mansion before moving into their own skyscraper. New York—and Manhattan, primarily—was the default setting for almost every major Marvel Comics character, defining both the way the comics looked and how the characters acted.
Beyond the page, Marvel always went out of its way to play up its city connection. Stan Lee’s “Bullpen Bulletins” columns of the ’60s crafted a heavily fictionalized version of Marvel’s staff as a bunch of fun-loving, big city freewheelers, with artists and writers popping into its midtown high-rise headquarters as often—and as unexpectedly—as sitcom neighbors. Lee adopted the official New York state motto, “Excelsior!”, 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.
Now Marvel will be in Burbank. It’ll never be Burbank the way it was NYC, and the jury’s out on how much you can be NYC if you aren’t actually in NYC. It’s been a long time since a mass of Marvel’s artists or writers lived in the city, but its editors kept that connection going up through now. And now they’re off to California, to join the movie and TV departments whose shadows they’ve long worked under. This isn’t a lament, but simply recognition of the passing of this once-great relationship—the divorce of New York City and Marvel Comics, and thus the comics industry as a whole. Don’t expect a Springsteen song about this—something 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—but it’s still worth noting. New York City will always have Spider-Man, but it won’t make any more money off the people who create his stories. At least they’ll always have Da Knicks.
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