Guest Post By Gary Mullinax, ‘The Minister Of Culture’:
Does Superman fight for truth, justice and the American way from a home base by the Delaware River just south of Wilmington? Does he put on his red tights somewhere around the Delaware Memorial Bridge?
Amazingly enough, the answer might be yes. A new Superman movie has raised the issue again.
Never mind that Metropolis is said to be home to 11 million people, more than would easily fit into the entire state of Delaware. Never mind that Superman’s activity is followed by four television stations in Metropolis while there are no stations at all here.
Most people think Metropolis is a thinly veiled New York City with its chaotic streets and skyscraper buildings (which Superman can leap over in a single bound). Metropolis residents can buy diamonds at Spiffanys. Visitors can stay at the Halldorf hotel. The island that became Metropolis was sold to the white man by Native Americans.
But New York as a stand-in for Metropolis makes too much sense. So, enter Delaware.
A map in a 1978 comic located Metropolis somewhere around Delaware City. Gotham City, home of Batman, is right across the river in New Jersey. They are connected by a bridge. Many publications followed the map’s lead and Delaware became part of Superman lore, though not universally accepted.
Paul Kupperberg helped create the Delaware angle in “Atlas of the DC Universe,” but even he has admitted he didn’t have much evidence.”When it came time to drop a pin on the map for Metropolis, I looked through everything I’d accumulated and found one of the few concrete published references to the city’s location.”
James Gunn, director of the new “Superman,” has told reporters that Metropolis is in Delaware. But there is scant evidence for that in his film besides a Delaware license plate on Lois Lane’s car. In fact, Metropolis looks exactly like Cleveland, because that’s where the movie was filmed. They could hardly have set it in Port Penn.
Cleveland has long been seen as a possible Metropolis. Superman’s co-creator, Jerry Siegel, grew up there and wrote the comic with Cleveland in mind. The very first Superman strips put the Man of Steel in Cleveland because the creators wanted to sell them to a Cleveland newspaper.
Or maybe it’s Toronto. Co-creator Joe Shuster, the artist, grew up in that city. He said the Metropolis skyline was based on Toronto’s.
The Daily Planet was based on the Toronto Star. Either place looks a lot more like Metropolis than Bowers Beach.
And there are votes for Chicago. Chicago has almost as many tall buildings as New York and it’s not far from Kansas. Smallville, Superman’s boyhood home, is in Kansas. His trip to Metropolis was said to have taken only a few hours. In fact, there is (very little) evidence that Metropolis is in Kansas itself, which is almost as weird being in Delaware.
There’s another map showing Smallville near Metropolis in Delaware, but it seems unreliable. The next town over from Smallville is Bigville.