Geography of DC Comics: America

This post is the bastard child of many of my loves... history, geography, comics, sports, and perhaps some other things which I don't even realize. Read at your own risk.

The past couple of weeks I've been roaming the internet, trying to find information on the geography of DC Comics cities. Most of the information I've found has been on Gotham City and Metropolis, which have truly taken on a life of their own, morphed and evolved as more and more writers have molded them. Of course, that is the main problem, so many people have written about them for decades and it's gotten pretty convoluted.

I've always felt that there was a strange dichotomy between the two cities, one light and one dark... one grimy and real, the other a shining white utopia. Certainly this is simplistic, but it is the impression that I always got.

But where are they?

Gotham is on the east coast, that much is for sure, but the same can't be said for Metropolis. While Metropolis fits on the east coast for a variety of reasons (not the least of which being that it's supposed to be near Gotham), it is also supposed to be close to Smallville (at least according to the TV show, which I haven't actually seen), which is in Kansas. That might better place Metropolis in southern Illinois or somewhere along those lines. A couple of maps I found even have Metropolis where New York City should be, which is odd considering that NYC is in the DC Universe and Metropolis doesn't really fit there geographically. But, I don't like putting Metropolis in the Midwest, just because it would seem too far from Gotham. So I'm just going to put them both on the east coast. There is no perfect place for them, as you can see if you visit the various links in the article, but I like the idea of the cities being on either side of Delaware Bay the best, Gotham in New Jersey and Metropolis in Delaware. Sure that gives us the problem of increasing Delaware's population over tenfold and both of these huge cities probably being too close to Philadelphia, but I like the idea of the cities being so close, yet separated by a fairly large body of water.

The other big question, is what actual city do they correspond to? If I had to choose, I would have to say Gotham City is definitely New York City, the name even comes from the nickname given to NYC by Washington Irving. But, Metropolis is New York, too. I think that each of them, in their own ways, fits that city more than any other, but I'm not going to get into that big argument, because it doesn't really matter. If you want, you can read all about it in the various links strewn through the post. In the end, they are almost real, at least in the conceptions in people's minds.

While Gotham and Metropolis get all the limelight, there are actually many other fictional cities in the US, though I don't really know how large these others are. I'm assuming fairly big if they have their own superheroes, which leads to the obvious problem of large cities being oddly close together. This is explained away by the DC Universe earth being larger than ours. Which is kind of cool actually. There a bunch of cities (Coast City, Fawcett City, Gateway City) which I had never heard of before starting this. DC Atlas, the DC Comics Database and Wikipedia are all good places to find more information.