sync & correction by f1nc0 ~ Addic7ed.com ~
New York City is the heart and soul of comic books.
That's where these guys that drew it grew up.
That's where they created these characters.
Instead of having them live in a fictional place,
I plunked 'em right down in New York City.
Whatever happens in New York
is going to affect comic books whether you want it to or not.
What is the comic book industry supposed to do
when you have a serious moral and political challenge in New York City?
9/11 changed New York City and comic books forever.
_
New York City is this city of heroes.
When you look at a comic book, you open it up,
I don't care... if it's The Avengers, Peter Parker,
you're... you're in New York City,
and to understand the centrality of this city to superheroes,
you've gotta go back to the beginning.
New York has always been synonymous
with being a place where dreams come true.
It was the gateway to America.
It's just a place where everybody has to cohabitate and figure it out.
New York, New York is so nice, they named it twice.
It's the Earth, you know,
sort of crammed onto this one little island.
New York has always been that,
and it was especially that in the 20th century,
when comic books were becoming a part of popular culture.
New York was geographically central to comic books.
The American comic book was born in New York
by creators that had their roots in the ghettoes of New York.
I was born on Essex Street,
New York's Lower East Side.
I lived in the Bronx, in New York.
I was a poor kid, very poor,
and a tough neighborhood, too, I lived in.
You have all these writers and artists
in this city in and amongst the turmoil of the great wars
and the Great Depression,
and dreaming up these larger-than-life figures
who come in and make it right.
What Action Comics with Superman did
is it used this low format as a vehicle
to tell a story that ignited the popular imagination.
Presenting America's number-one comic strip character...
Yes, it's Superman.
American superheroes are... are really kind of a wish fulfillment,
but they're also a way of facing our fears.
They... they are the kind of instrument, the vehicle that
we'd like to step into so that we can be bulletproof.
Siegel and Shuster, you know, created Superman that way,
so that it could be this metaphor for us kind of
holding up a shield against these attacking forces.
All your core characters are found in New York.
Metropolis is a glyph for New York.
To Batman, Gotham City is also a glyph for New York.
The scale, the buildings,
they were all part of the dream of New York
that existed around the world.
By the 1960s, the big Marvel heroes come out.
Stan Lee collaborated with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko
to create, you know, Spider-Man,
the Avengers,
the Fantastic Four,
Daredevil,
Doctor Strange...
Instead of having them live in a fictional place,
like Metropolis or Gotham City,
I plunked 'em right down in New York City...
Because I knew New York City,
I could write about New York City,
and I figured, why not let 'em live in a real place?
Marvel Comics made New York City
the center of this moral drama,
and they've made it the home of the imagination
of a whole generation of young people.
I grew up in the Bronx, originally,
and I would read comic books all the time,
and I could imagine as a kid, you know,
Spider-Man swinging from building to building,
and I remember as a child looking up, saying,
"Wow, if I could only do that."
It brought it that much more... real.
I remember the first time that I went to New York City.
I was maybe 12 or 13, and we went to the Statue of Liberty.
I remember thinking, "Oh, I think I read an issue of, um, Marvel Team-Up
with Spider-Man and somebody that took place here."
My whole orientation to New York at the time
was absolutely via Marvel Comics.
In the late '60s, Marvel Comics were the ones that,
it seemed like, were more tackling the upheaval and changes
that were going on.
You've got civil strife in New York City,
and so everything's changing,
and because everything was changing in life,
everything was changing in art.
Comics were becoming more socially relevant
and more interesting.
The X-Men, a metaphor for civil rights.
These were normal people, flawed human beings,
people who, in various ways,
had dealt with prejudices and bigotry
and intolerance of whatever kind.
Comic books talked about the real world,
which is what Denny O'Neil and I were very conscious of
when we did the Green Lantern, Green Arrow series.
That comic book talked about my neighborhood up in the Bronx
and dealing with drug problems.
It talked about overpopulation.
Comics were getting more sophisticated, more marketed to adults.
In the '80s, you had the Punisher, but you also had Watchmen.
Those were really, really challenging stories.
They were stories about changing the status quo
and necessary fascism and all those kind of things.
We can't believe in these super Boy Scouts anymore.
We don't know anybody in real life who behaves like that,
and the readers don't believe in them, so we've just tried to make them
a little bit more like real 20th-century human beings.
And then Frank Miller made a massive difference
with The Dark Knight,
and his Daredevil work was brilliant.
Frank brought a level of realism that was really unprecedented.
Watchmen, Dark Knight, Daredevil
were based out of New York.
They infused political topics, you know, gang violence.
You could feel the city.
You could feel the grit of the place in every panel.
By 2000 and 2001,
comics had a mature enough base of storytellers in New York
to be able to speak to the unique concerns of the 21st century.
We just had a plane just crash into an upper floor
of the World Trade Center.
Then you had 9/11,
and the diet of heroism changes worldwide
because of what happened to those artists in New York.
Comic books are a kind of monolith to New York City,
the same way the Twin Towers were.
You look at them, and they're kind of this gleaming ideal
of American ingenuity, culture, art.
The Twin Towers were about as iconic a...
a New York landmark as there is.
I can remember when they were being built,
the newspapers talking about how they were hideous,
how they shouldn't be built, how it would "ruin the skyline."
And then, when they were completed,
people finally realized, "Wow, they are majestic."
Superheroes are operatic, larger-than-life ideas.
The Twin Towers represented
this symbol of American triumphalism,
and that is reflected in the comic books and the popular culture.
And then you had 9/11, after which everything changes.
The unimaginable happens,
and it happens right in the beating heart of America, New York City,
which is the heart and soul of comic books.
It's difficult to find the words
to describe the feeling in New York City today.
New York City is in shock,
one of its most famous landmarks destroyed,
thousands dead, and America is under siege.
What the hell is going on? What happened?
It was a day like any other day.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
I was home on 27th Street.
We could see what was going on
from the point of view of the clouds of smoke.
I feel a sense of tragedy that, you know, men do this to other men.
Watching the TV and seeing the plume of smoke,
and then opening the window and seeing the plume of smoke...
It was nothing I've ever experienced before.
My parents were visiting, and...
and my father and I had planned to walk around and explore Wall Street,
and, uh, I ended up sleepin' in a little later to...
to catch a slightly later train, and when I did come downstairs,
uh... my folks were in front of the TV, watchin' CNN,
and we watched the whole thing unfold,
and I... I went out my backyard,
climbed up to the top of the hill,
and, uh, you know, even from there, could see the smoke rising.
Our lives changed. Everybody's lives changed.
So many lives were lost.
The Marvel and DC offices were both in New York,
and so all of our friends, the people that we cared about,
people that we were in the industry with,
we wanted to make sure that everybody was okay,
and everybody was not okay.
Some people dealt with their grief really differently.
The... the dust from 9/11
is on the... the... the tables and the platforms in those buildings
when it's time to go back in there and make the next issue.
My mom worked in the World Trade Center
when I... when I was a young kid, you know.
I used to visit the Twin Towers all the time,
and so for me, they were personal.
How do I represent what has happened...
in a way that's not just for entertainment?
Comics responded to 9/11 immediately.
Marvel was probably the first on the scene.
Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas...
Joe was the editor-in-chief, Bill was the publisher...
were the first to go, "We're New Yorkers.
This is our town, this thing happened here.
We've gotta talk to our people,"
and so they created a pinup anthology called "Heroes,"
which gathered all of the best talent
that was able to turn in a great piece of art in a week,
and they created "A Moment of Silence,"
which was a comic book narrative that spoke to the concerns of 9/11.
They immediately went on The Today Show.
They immediately went out into the world
and started saying, "We've got something to say.
We've got what you want to hear."
What is the thing that Marvel Comics is trying to do
- that is important here? - Well, again, we...
we strive to tell stories of the heroic ideal,
and I think what we saw after 9/11
was that the heroic ideal was living amongst us,
and it walks amongst us every day,
and we... we always take it for granted
until we actually need these people.
The 20 years leading up to 9/11
was about a quest for legitimacy in the comic book industry.
We wanted to be seen as important
as any other form of popular culture,
but they weren't afforded that respect.
They were regarded as low value.
They were regarded as this thing that was lesser.
This stigma really became neutral,
it really went away, after 9/11,
and it went away because comics were the first on the scene
to respond in an intelligent way people could relate to.
Whenever you're going through
those big changes in a civilization, uh, people need stories.
People reach for stories.
The superhero genre gives you a great opportunity
to process all of that.
Jan Michael Straczynski
wrote a Spider-Man comic where Spider-Man's at 9/11,
and he expresses all those feelings, in December of 2001.
Spider-Man down at ground zero, it's the sense of...
I mean, even me, as an FBI agent... Your soul is ruined.
You are internally destroyed.
"With all my great power, with all what I have,
with all what I was given, it still happened,"
and that is hard to accept. It's hard to live with.
I remember, like, one of the most striking panels
was Doctor Doom rolling a tear.
You know how many times
we've seen Doctor Doom take on New York?
Even Doctor Doom was like, "Whoa."
It set up a lot of really interesting things, the way that they portrayed the heroes,
because the superheroes, they were actually drew smaller.
The heroes are often in the background,
where you see the... the firefighters and the other rescue workers
in the front in that particular issue.
We've done heroes for years and years, but they were...
they were not real, compared to, you know, the police, and firemen,
and paramedics that came in and actually, you know, helped people.
It's something that the companies really wanted to get across.
These fictional ideas, they couldn't stop the atrocity from happening,
but they can help frame the way that we cope with the atrocity.
They can help frame the way that we deal with
the world that had changed.
These characters had sudden resonance.
I think that comics, after 9/11, were just beginning.
I think the superhero worlds were really just beginning.
You need these superhuman beings
to sort of fight out, in an exaggerated way,
the challenges of the time.
After 9/11,
New York City was kind of an incredible place to be.
Everyone was kind of coming together
in this way that I'd never experienced, you know, before or since.
I saw just a lot of people just together, bein' friends,
a big change in the way people acted and talked then.
You just got a warm welcome from everybody you saw.
We suddenly started plastering American flags
in our apartment windows,
and adding American flags to our comic books.
That was a time when patriotism
became much more important in America.
The first Spider-Man movie with Tobey Maguire
had been filmed, had been written, before 9/11 happened,
but the movie opened with an American flag.
It closed with an American flag, which was really, really a big thing after 9/11.
People just... I think they felt that when they went and saw it,
and I think that's one of the reasons why it became as popular as it did.
That patriotism, and, specifically, New Yorkers
comin' together and, "I love New York," uh, kind of vibe
was a very important part of the film...
to show the bad guys that, you know, they can't keep us down.
They can, you know, they can maybe knock us down,
but New York is going to get right back up.
The advertising campaign for Spider-Man
was built around the Twin Towers, and there was a teaser trailer,
and Spider-Man, uh, basically saves the day
by spinning a web between the Twin Towers.
It was a great campaign, a great way of kind of, you know, saying,
saying, "Hey, here's this hero that you've been waiting for all these years,
going to be on the big screen in New York City,
and what could be more iconic for New York?"
But at the same time, those images became these kind of triggers
for just really complicated emotional reactions for people,
so they pulled that entire campaign.
I remember havin' a conversation with Sam about...
He was talkin' to the marketing people, and sayin', you know,
"Maybe we just leave it."
But the decision was made to deal with the reality in the aftermath.
You could see something about that movie was kind of taking hold.
With Spider-Man, he's a guy who's kind of a metaphor for the Everyman.
It was a man personally going out there, fighting for New York,
and taking matters in his own hands, and you have epic evil battles.
They're superheroes, and they're winning,
and so it's something that all of us...
It was probably the most gratifying thing
that could come along at that moment.
After we had all felt so powerless,
the world was just ripe for that kind of storytelling.
God bless you, Spider-Man. Bless you.
In a weird way, it was Spider-Man that reminded Americans
that after 9/11, they needed superheroes.
We wanted a savior we could believe in.
We wanted a hero we could believe in,
that would swoop in and save New York,
because saving New York was about saving our idea of the United States.
When Marvel recognized that they had the opportunity to tell stories
set in this ambiguous new "war on terror" environment,
they took the idea of superheroes
and set the stakes in a way that people would understand.
Captain America, especially, was a way to inspire people
to cope with the changes that were happening in the country at the time.
Marvel wanted Captain America
to represent something that we really needed.
Captain America was a symbol of America.
He was a New Yorker fighting the Germans,
you know, during World War II,
at a time when our country was at stake.
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created him a little before the war,
but as a rallying cry to get America to fight fascism.
Captain America punched Hitler
a year before the U.S. entered World War II.
Suddenly, Captain America is
resurrected in a much more complicated environment.
We're in a new world.
It wasn't like, you know,
"Captain America versus the Red Skull" type of a conflict.
It was just this... madness.
There's such anger, and we'd better blast the hell out of somebody.
Everybody's ready to flatten someone.
The House of Representatives
has spoken clearly to the world.
The gathering threat of Iraq must be confronted.
Suddenly, we're going to invade Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11.
People started questioning their government to the point of protest.
It was a massive rally up and down First Avenue.
Fights broke out, eight cops were injured,
some 50 protesters arrested.
In New York, you have Americans
choosing sides and becoming very partisan,
and that's just going to affect comic books immediately,
because all our offices were in New York,
and all our editors were in New York.
Marvel has a New York office, and so they're there in it,
and you want to say something. Writers force Cap
to question the choices his government was making,
because the writers could not continue
to write this character as a proud patriot
when New York was going through such a violent and terrible upheaval.
Captain America is America, you know?
He's the embodi... He's the super-soldier.
He's the leader of armies, and then now he's opposed to the war.
I was surprised that comic books stepped up,
because the Dixie Chicks said something wrong about Bush,
and their album sales dropped.
Lead singer Natalie Maines said
she was ashamed President Bush was a Texan.
Some protestors used a tractor to smash the group's CDs...
Suddenly, things were a lot more blurry,
and the black-and-white ideologies of heroism
that defined superheroes before 9/11 didn't really apply.
When America becomes polarized
and America no longer has a center,
you're either on the left or the right.
Who does Cap side with?
That question, just as it tore apart American society,
and New York in particular, tears apart the comic book universes.
At this hour, American and coalition forces
are in the early stages of military operations
to disarm Iraq, to free its people,
and to defend the world from grave danger.
After 9/11, the United States goes from being unfairly victimized
and therefore the object of great affection
to itself seeming to be a threat.
The invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo,
and the Patriot Act, which became a big overreach in terms of
what the government gave itself the permission to do,
and that has its reverberations in New York,
and in the comic book world.
In 2004, Marvel started taking all their characters
into one storyline every year and creating a big event in New York where
they would have to face a threat that was large enough
for the entire Marvel universe to have to deal with together,
and Mark Millar, a phenomenal writer, had the genius idea to say,
"Okay, what if this big threat is really the heroes themselves?"
It was unlike anything anybody had ever done.
I've found everything I've done
relates to whatever is happening in the world at that time,
and Civil War was a response
to the very polarized America that I saw when I traveled to New York.
Every two or three months, I used to be in New York,
and I would see a country that didn't seem very at ease with itself.
People just seemed to be having
these massive polarized arguments, and, for me,
that ended up working its way into a superhero story.
Mayhem in Manhattan... Over 1,100 arrested
as anti-Bush protesters clash with police.
Get back! Get outta here!
Comic book artists and authors
were able to use this visual medium
to debate what was being debated
in... in the political sphere at the time.
Civil War began with
a tragedy in Stamford, Connecticut, where the actions
of a team of inexperienced young superheroes
resulted in the death of several hundred people,
including about 60 schoolchildren.
It was obviously an analogue to what happened in 9/11,
so the U.S. government passed the Superhero Registration Act,
which required that all superpowered beings register their identities
with the government, become trained by the government.
In the Marvel "Civil War" context, the government says,
"Listen, you guys are gonna have to register
and do all these things and follow all these rules."
Is that securing freedom, or is that the end of freedom?
This is a question that the Patriot Act raises.
It's a question that the entire war on terror raises.
That question, just as it tore apart New York City,
tears apart the Marvel universe.
It's that profound a question in the minds of the artists and society,
that you literally have a civil war,
not between villains and heroes,
but a war among the heroes,
because the answers are no longer obvious.
"Civil War" was a case where there were people
who had different ideological beliefs that led them into conflict.
They... they thought they were right,
and it was leading to all-out war.
It pitted Captain America and Iron Man against each other.
Captain America's viewpoint was the idea of "I fought for these freedoms.
I fought the Nazis for this, and we're just going to
voluntarily hand them over? No, I'm not gonna do that,"
whereas Iron Man's position was
"We should trust in the government to best manage this."
Iron Man represented the Republicans
because Tony Stark is really a guy who has, like,
loads and loads of money, and he makes munitions,
and Captain America represented the Democrats...
But Spider-Man's us.
He was Everyman, trying to work out "What do I do?"
He was a moderate guy in the middle, living in New York City,
trying to work out what was happening.
I was a New Yorker at the time of 9/11,
so I was, um... traumatized and worried.
I was behind the Iraq war, the Patriot Act.
The same thing happens with Spider-Man in the "Civil War" comic books.
Spider-Man stands for New York, and he sides with Iron Man,
but when he sees that Iron Man, in enforcing this law,
is taking superheroes and putting them in other-dimensional prisons,
spying on them, killing them, Spider-Man starts to really wonder
about the enforcement of this law, and he defects.
Yes, national security is really important, but so are civil liberties,
and that's not a little wussy thing
to be concerned about. It's not treasonous.
Spider-Man sort of gave me the courage to see that.
I think one of the really interesting things about "Civil War"
is that it really doesn't come to a conclusion
about which side was better...
And it ends with the death of Captain America,
which was a hugely publicized event.
Today, comic book fans snapped up
and dove into the pages that mark the end of Captain America.
It begs the question about Captain America's death. Why now?
When Captain America was shot,
it was, to me, the iconic moment of "Civil War."
It felt like that loss of innocence that the nation went through on 9/11,
embodied in a character that embodied America.
It was a statement about how hope was beginning to fade,
that we were shooting ourselves in the foot,
that American patriotism and ideals,
the very embodiment of sort of September the 12th,
where people came together in New York City,
had just been shot through the heart.
Civil War became a huge comic storyline
because it was... it was of its time.
It was the biggest thing that's ever happened to superheroes.
It's no coincidence
that Marvel's Civil War is the phenomenon that it is.
This is a story fundamentally about this existential fear of terror.
This has to do with these external threats,
and what we are willing to do as citizens to cope with them.
Having the story set in New York
helped people wrap their arms around
how they can be change agents in their own life.
Whether it's 9/11 or the Patriot Act,
I think that's all fair game in comic books,
and all sort of ripe material
for comic book filmmakers like Chris Nolan to draw from.
Before 9/11, New York was this kind of city of dreams
that people from all over the world were going to,
but after 9/11, it was a city that wasn't quite so wondrous anymore.
It was March 6, 2008,
and the military recruiting center in Times Square was the target.
In Times Square today, the FBI put up a billboard asking for tips.
Similar postings are going up
in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.
When we were working on a story for The Dark Knight,
Chris and I talked a lot about New York,
because everyone always substituted Gotham for New York.
The version of New York that was in The Dark Knight trilogy
is kind of being, if things just kept that downward spiral,
what would New York become?
This is the week the world actually gets to see The Dark Knight,
one of the most highly anticipated pictures of 2008.
The film's a follow-up to director Christopher Nolan's
Batman Begins, which I admired,
but The Dark Knight paints a dizzying portrait
of Gotham City nearing total anarchy.
There have been many different interpretations of Batman.
Tim Burton's Batman, wonderful movie,
but there's a choice made to set it in a time and place.
You had the Jack Nicholson Joker, larger than life.
There was the campiness of Batman...
We felt that the Burton Batman,
as wonderful as they were, they were kind of out of lockstep
with where the public psyche was at the time,
especially in and around New York City.
We were reading secondary terrorist attacks
in New York City, and saying,
"Okay, how can we take a page from reality
and bring it into this fictionalized world?"
It's not enough to have a super-villain rob a big bank.
If we're going to delve into this,
then the villains need to become truly villainous,
and the way that you become villainous is that you terrorize people.
9/11 changed the perspective
and the attitude towards the material.
When you think about that event,
and you think about how massive that was for...
for everyone, Americans and people around the world alike,
it's not something that you just take out of your thinking.
In The Dark Knight, you are presented the Joker,
who is a different Joker than we've ever seen before.
All you care about is money.
This town deserves a better class of criminal.
Heath Ledger's Joker, he really embodied a terrorist
that nihilistically wanted to destroy New York City
because he hates what it represents,
and there's a certain feeling that that's what happened in 9/11.
Terrorism, it's rooted in a philosophy,
a particular interpretation of religion
that seems extremely, uh... alien to us.
Terrorists had a... a mission, if you will,
to fulfill with organized, if you will, mayhem
here in New York City the same way the Joker did as well.
When we were reconceiving of the Joker,
we talked about the kind of tactics that the insurgents were using,
the way that they would, you know, kidnap people
and execute them, and... and terrorize.
How do you deal with terrorism?
In some ways, the hero becomes the anti-hero
who's willing to throw away his or her own moral code,
get down to the level of the villain, in order to prevail.
Well, that is 180 degrees from the lesson of...
lessons of comic books for 30 years.
A strong part of, you know, Chris's theme in those movies
was the... the blurring of the lines between good and evil,
um, and, uh, Batman takes this, uh, step
into a... a darker, uh, ethical and moral world.
That was a moment in which you had the first revelations
about the warrantless wiretapping that they were doing,
and it was something that I was fascinated by.
You've turned every cell phone in Gotham into a microphone.
- I've got to find this man, Lucius. - At what cost?
The story of what he's willing to do
to stop something terrible from happening,
for me, takes on much more dimension.
It's got much more grit to it, because he's willing to go a little too far.
One of the questions that we were constantly trying
to subtly posit to the audience is, you know,
are the methods he's employing actually making things better?
We were trying to draw those kinds of analogies
into the superhero world.
We have this duality in our personalities,
and we have the dark side and light side,
and sometimes we think we need to go to the dark side
to solve the problems and the issues.
Harvey Dent has a line in The Dark Knight, which is...
You either die a hero,
or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
The longer the... the fight goes on,
the more likely that something in your soul
gets a little compromised,
and you find yourself on the other side of it.
We wanted to take the film to the nightmarish version
of what if the villain's plot,
which is always foiled in every comic book movie,
what if it wasn't?
Right? What happens in the fallout from that event?
Every event since the attacks
has shaped the way that comic books work,
the way that characters interact with each other,
the issues they're concerned about.
9/11 changed New York City like we've never seen before.
9/11 didn't just change facts, 9/11 changed fiction.
You have this sense that New York is the natural place
for these superhero films to play out,
because comic books kind of grew up with the city,
and they feel inextricably linked to one another.
As New York has matured,
superhero storytelling has matured in an interesting way,
and that is fueling the movies of today.
These characters aren't just kind of bland, basic,
you know, paper-thin people. They've become so much
more sophisticated, and that's, you know, one of the reasons
why they're just so successful at the box office.
The Avengers, they absolutely crushed domestic
box office records. Over $200 million in ticket sales.
We see in The Avengers movie that heroes can also be
not necessarily villains, but they can be the source of destruction,
and even as they're trying to protect New York City,
there can be this enormous collateral damage,
and instead of just coming back in the next episode
having forgotten that, or starting over,
these movies are dealing with the complexity of that kind of reaction.
They really try to treat destruction
not as something fun to draw and something to read,
but something that causes real pain, and because of that,
the superheroes are more thoughtful, they're more upset,
they fail more often...
and they're still talking about the battle of New York in several sequels.
We're looking for realism in fiction?
Even though you're using it as an escape from the real world,
you still kind of want to be connected.
9/11 and... the event and things that happened
after that in New York just kind of made it almost impossible
to not want to connect in that way.
New York was always synonymous with comic books,
and so it's not surprising to me that, to this day,
New York continues to be synonymous with Batman,
the Avengers,
Spider-Man,
and the Daredevil TV show.
...he told me you were the man this city needs.
I think you're also the man this city created.
When we were writing Daredevil,
we were channeling the New York of the early '80s, late '70s,
when Frank Miller was doing the stories.
You felt like you were doing something new,
but that you could root in their history.
New York City is its own character in comics,
because it represents the United States of America
in a very material way. It represents so many things.
It represents hope, and that's what comics represent.
One World Trade Center will officially open to the public today,
bringing back a view that has not been seen
since the attacks on the Twin Towers years ago.
The operators say they wanted it to be a place of hope and courage.
It's a beautiful thing, man, and even post-September 11th,
comics found a way to address the worst thing that ever happened,
and do it with their characters, do it with respect,
honor New York, mark the moment,
and allow us all to kind of pick up and move on after that.
When you look around now
in New York City, the superhero is everywhere...
In the same way that in Rome,
the Roman gods were everywhere,
and the Roman gods were everywhere doing the things
that gods do to teach lessons for people,
to teach lessons for mortals,
and, increasingly, the superhero has been playing that role,
and they certainly did after 9/11.
It's a forum that deals with high philosophy, virtue.
What is virtue? What is good?
Who is good? What is my duty?
What is right and what is wrong?
It's something that helps bring us together
as New Yorkers, and as Americans,
and as a bunch of people with our inner nine-year-olds
still alive and well.
New York is this city of heroes. It's also a city of dreamers.
That connectivity to the city, and the place where
all of this was dreamt up is still very, very important.
I think it'd be a shame if that... if that ever went away.
We all are on this little island together,
and we're in it together and we're fighting together,
and we're coexisting together.
I really believe that this is a place
where, you know, heroes are born.
By setting the superhero universe in New York,
comics had enlarged the idea of the city from what was already
a very large idea in the human consciousness.
The city was no longer
just the place that you went to prove yourself.
The city created all kinds of aspiration.
The city was a city of heroes.
Really, that's the only place a superhero can effectively belong.
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