The fictional cities of the DC Universe are as iconic as the heroes who inhabit them, and few are as legendary as Superman’s beloved home of Metropolis. While the City of Tomorrow’s exact location is usually kept vague, DC’s Watchmen crossover series, Doomsday Clock, gives comic book readers a surprisingly specific address to the Man of Steel’s place of employment—and that address is in New York State.
The golden-hued, Art Deco mega city had previously been placed in New York in earlier stories, but DC also contradicted this detail several times by also claiming Metropolis was located in Delaware as well as Kansas. With each continuity reboot, Superman’s zip code would occasionally change locations too.
But as Bleeding Cool recently pointed out, Doomsday Clock #8 gave Metropolis an exact location in DC’s current Rebirth continuity. In a callback to the finale of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, where the masked vigilante Rorschach sent his journal to the ultra-conservative publication the New Frontiersman, Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane received a package of her own from the new Rorschach. The address on the package? Metropolis, New York 10025.
The zip code suggests that Metropolis exists somewhere near Manhattan, which makes sense considering the Daily Planet is apparently located off-Broadway. With New York real estate costs skyrocketing over the last decade, it’s no wonder why Superman’s boss Perry White is so stressed all the time. Having your big, flashy building with its expensive spinning globe located in a part of town where the cost of living is more than double the US average must be tough considering most print publications in America have been struggling to stay afloat. Keeping The Daily Planet running has to be a Herculean task, to put it mildly.
It is no secret that Metropolis was heavily influenced by New York. Superman’s home was meant to be an idealized version of the Big Apple at it’s best, while Batman’s home of Gotham was meant to be a dark and gritty version of the New York at its worst. The 2016 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice depicted Metropolis and Gotham as sibling cities separated by a body of water, but in previous comic book stories, Gotham is usually depicted as being located in New Jersey whenever its location is specifically addressed. That would still put the two fictional cities close to each other but in different states.
It is worth noting that DC previously created a US map of all their major fictional cities, but with their continuity being as wibbly-wobbly as it is, some of the data has been outdated for several crises by this point. While Metropolis may not be a real place, its impact on American pop-culture is relevant nonetheless.
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Source: Bleeding Cool
