Comics Could Benefit From Leaving Cities – And These Stories Prove It

Superheroes like Batman are defined by their relationships with places like Gotham City. However, when they step outside, that's when they shine.

DC Comics over their 80-year history. The classic superhero comic follows a city's hero who patrols the streets or skies of their respective setting. However, comics could use a break from urban settings.

Superhero comics have long been associated with stories set in cities, where writers have cultivated a great cast of supporting characters and a range of villains for their heroes. Settings like Gotham are important and their size, density, and dark, scary alleyways create an endless maze of possibilities for stories. However, after a certain point, the same grey-toned, concrete monoliths can start to feel stale, boring, and overly familiar. Stories that follow heroes out of their element, traveling to far-away locations to take on new threats, make for refreshing breaks from the monotony of cities. Settings like deserts, jungles, desolate islands, and icy tundras switch things up and keep things interesting for readers, creators, and the characters as well. Gotham, New York, and Metropolis have a lot to offer but so does the unpredictable nature of the great outdoors.

Adventure Demands New Locations

While superhero comics touch on a range of formulas and genres, at their core they're action and adventure stories. The size of a city like Gotham or New York allows for a certain amount of adventure when heroes battle their way through warehouses, government facilities, or the sewers beneath the streets. There's always a new nook or cranny that lets villains get the drop on the good guys. However, leaving cities on a semi-regular basis brings a lot to darker books like Batman and can make the story feel refreshed, more colorful and engaging. The change of scenery also gives everyone involved some breathing room, creating an intermission between big story arcs. This is a vital part of pacing in serial stories, and it helps things from feeling too chaotic.

Superheroes certainly benefit from having a city they can call home. Not only does this explain why all heroes don't flock to every crisis at once, it also gives readers a fair amount of consistency. Through a consistent setting, heroes have built up rich supporting casts of sidekicks, friends, and enemies that essentially make their city homes themselves a character. Just as fans can readily identify the dark, seedy nature of Gotham, they can also spot the bright optimism in Metropolis. These city settings have each become distinct in their own right, and fully abandoning them would be a mistake. However, when a hero becomes too tied down, they end up wasting an opportunity to meet the challenges that come from new places.

Changing settings also lets a creative team change a book's look substantially. Comics are, first and foremost, a visual medium, and the more dynamic the pages look, the more fulfilled readers, and artists, will be. Teams like the X-Men and Justice League have always benefited from the way adventure stories bring out the best art from talents like Howard Porter, Greg Capullo, Marc Silvestri, and Jim Lee. These artists are certainly talented enough to make just about anything look interesting, but changing their backgrounds from rectangular buildings to jungles, swamps, and mountains makes a difference. Giant-Sized X-Men #1 (Len Wein & Dave Cockrum) went through a rapid series of settings to illustrate the differences between the new members of the team. The whole point of the new line-up was that it was more diverse than the last, and taking readers on a tour of their homes illustrated these differences.

Different Settings Pose New Challenges

While heroes like Hulk, Swamp Thing and Wolverine have, by their nature, always been more nomadic, characters like Spider-Man are increasingly tied to familiar urban settings. Yet, the entire appeal of the monster comics in particular was the constant change of settings. In the case of Swamp Thing, his original series was an epic journey from Eastern Europe back to the swamp where he was created, passing through small towns, Gotham City, and the Scottish Highlands along the way. There was never a dull moment in these books, and every issue was a new opportunity for Len Wein to explore the world, exhibiting the full range of Bernie Wrightson's art. Much the same was true of Incredible Hulk, where the hero faced off with other monsters while he was on the run. It was here the Hulk first battled Wolverine, another hero who fits in with wild settings.

In the case of Spider-Man, who depends on the high skyline of cities to reach his full potential, he faces unique challenges when he's outside of NYC. Stories like Amazing Spider-Man #347 took the hero far away from home. Dragged to an empty island by Venom, Spidey lost the advantage that the city skyscape gave him. Venom understood that, on an uninhabited island with nothing taller than a palm tree, his brute strength gave him an advantage over the leaner, faster friendly neighborhood web-slinger. With no bystanders, the fight gave the two rivals the freedom to fully cut loose, making this one of Venom's best fights with Peter. In fact, the hero only escaped the symbiote's rage by faking his death.

Adventure has also defined some of Batman's best stories, both in Elseworlds and official continuity. His crossover with Tarzan pulled him away from Gotham City and landed him in the jungles of Africa, on a mission to save a lost city from plunder. A short story in the pages of Detective Comics saw Batman crash on an island, where he fought Deadshot until rescue could arrive. A crossover between Batman, Starman, and Hellboy took the three heroes away from the United States and deep into the jungles of South America, to prevent a Nazi occult plan coming to fruition. All of these stories simultaneously took their heroes out of the comforts of the city but showcased their ingenuity. The "fish out of water" trope has always been a surefire way to bring out a character's versatility and resourcefulness.

Indie Heroes Travel More Freely

To their credit, indie comics have almost always done a better job of exploring new, ever-changing locations than the heroes of Marvel and DC. Specifically, heroes like Hellboy and Spawn have never been limited by a specific setting. Anything from an ancient castle or a mountainside village to mundane suburbs or creepy forests can be the backdrop for these heroes' stories. However, they manage to maintain the idea of a place to call home, whether that's Hellboy's base at BPRD headquarters or Spawn's secret hideout. After all, in worlds where teleportation, starships, and magic exist, moving around the world is easy. Even popular cinematic franchises like the MCU, MonstersVerse, and spy franchises show how important international adventure can be for action franchises.

Indie comics usually aren't tied down by fitting in with a wider world's continuity, so they don't have a reason to keep their heroes in one area. In fact, running in place makes less sense in these smaller worlds, as it can strain suspension of disbelief when every crisis takes place on the same block. Characters like Spawn, Hellboy, Rocketeer, and even licensed characters like James Bond and Doc Savage are ultimately the sole heroes in their respective worlds. When an entire universe has so few protectors, there's more reason to send the few there are to new, dynamic locations. Some heroes are also defined through travel and adventure. Conan, Tarzan, John Carter, and Flash Gordon are appealing because they place their heroes in exciting and unfamiliar lands, where writers could build entire worlds from scratch.

Marvel and DC characters and teams like Tom Strong, Black Panther, the Terrifics, and the Suicide Squad have also done a good job of balancing out home bases with international travel. However, it's often easier to fall back on cities, where new heroes present new opportunities. A hero like Jace Fox as Batman showed promise as a freewheeling, world-traveling Dark Knight, but DC soon had him set up shop in New York. Instead of doing something new with the Batman mantle, they attempted to simply duplicate Bruce Wayne's world in a new setting. It should be noted that one of Superman's greatest modern story arcs, "The Warworld Saga," didn't just take him out of Metropolis but put him in the gladiator pits of Warworld. This story, better than most, proved how refreshing and engaging stories that explore new settings can be.

Cities Get Old

While the many iconic cities of superhero comics house a wide range of brilliant villains, they also fall prey to predictability and repetition. No hero should completely abandon their respective city, but the wider world, or even other worlds, are always worth exploring. Indeed, many heroes have come to rely on the advantages afforded to them by the dense, tall, and shadowy nature of these locations. These stories should be thought of in familiar terms. Just as readers enjoy vacations from their daily lives, heroes become more interesting when they change their formula.

Considering how many heroes like Batman, Spider-Man and Flash are defined as city heroes, there's always room to mix things up. When one of their comics is set outside a city, even the pages where the hero isn't doing much are still visually stunning. Whether it's Swamp Thing shambling through a blizzard or Batman perched in a tree in a jungle, the color and scenery add a lot that cities can't contribute. Comics are rooted in adventure and they should always embrace the unknown.