Monday, December 27, 2010

Welcome Back to Apex CIty!


I hate to gloat...

Okay. Who am I kidding?

I love to gloat.

And so now I shall.

DC has now acknowledged the existence of the Martian Manhunter's contextualizing city, Apex City, in an official publication, celebrating the company's 75 anniversary.

Oh, here... let me make that clearer for you:


I got this news from my good blog-buddy Diamondrock over at Title Undetermined.

I can only hope that this may serve as a step toward one day returning the Martian Manhunter to his Earthian hometown (a.k.a, America's Most Flammable City). I'm tired of poor J'onn being treated like some sadsack, homeless orphan. Reality check, or perhaps more accurately, continuity check: J'onn's been living on Earth longer than anyone else in the Justice League. He should be used to it by now. He deserves to start to treating it like his home.

During his original adventures in Apex City, he had a home, a context. Sure, Apex City was ridiculous, with its weekly meteors, ludicrous villains (like the Human Flame, Mr. Moth, the Human Squirrel, or gangsters who ride around in giant mechanical bears) and its host of strange businesses and buildings that seemed to have escaped from the panels of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. But the bizarreness of Apex City is what made it work: J'onn fit in perfectly. A Martian with a Crayola box full of powers like creating ice cream cones with his mind makes a weird kind of sense in Apex City.

That's the whole point of a contextualizing city: to give a hero a place where they fit in, where Hero and City make sense together. Batman in Gotham City makes sense. Batman in Central City would be... very odd. Central City's incomprehensible dimensions make no sense at all... except as a showcase for the Fastest Man Alive. Wonder Woman--who is a conflation of Americanism, psychosocial theories, insincere palaver about equal rights, Greco-Roman mythology, and flights of fancy--makes complete sense in Washington DC (which is a conflation of Americanism, psychosocial theories, insincere palaver about equal rights, Greco-Roman mythology, and flights of fancy).

Heroes without such a place suffer badly. That's why, in the modern era, St. Roch was created for the Hawks, and Opal City for Starman; that's why Green Lantern was given back Coast City and Green Arrow given back to Star City. The absence of a proper contextualizing city -- Apex City -- is one of the reasons that the Martian Manhunter has limped along as the Poor Cousin in the Justice League for decades, one of the things that's blocking him from bringing the same kind of iconic power to the table that his colleagues have had the chance to develop.

DC, now that we all know that Apex City is "real", please put it back on the map of current storylines. Once J'onn is done his duty in Brightest Day, do him, yourselves, and us a favor...

and bring J'onn home to..

13 comments:

Diabolu Frank said...

Which is why I tried to nip that in the bud as soon as I realized the mistake, and why the internet is an excellent source of conjecture and misinformation. Congratulations on creating the Professor Hugo Arnold of the '10s.

Scipio said...

Thanks, Frank!

Sleestak said...

Nice. Soon Gorilla Grodd will reveal that Apex City was in reality the massive, metropolitan sized Project Ape-X, his insidious long-term experiment in wide scale control of the human race.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations! I'd seen a couple Web sites that matter-of-factly stated that MM lived in Apex City, and I assumed that this almost-fact had spread much like a rumor: one or two people had Googled for "Martian Manhunter city", stumbled upon the words "Apex City", and took that as their answer. Repeat the process a few times and suddenly Apex City has enough Internet cred to be "the correct answer", maybe even enough to fool editorial over at DC. If that's what happened, it only proves how desperately MM needs his city.

Since you clearly have the ability to alter reality with your mind, might I trouble you for an ice cream cone?

Scipio said...

"Need more... atom combinations... for Anonymous's.. ice cream cone...!"

Brushwood said...

Sweet. It's important to hope some DC people reads this site! I look forward to it's "named" debut at the end of Brightest Day.

Gary said...

Synchronicity! The very day I read that entry in the copy I got for Christmas, I read this post on your blog!

SallyP said...

The idea that Apex City is indeed REAL, pleases me. Pleases me enormously. It SHOULD be real! With its meteor showers and bizarre architecture, it deserves to be J'onn's home.

The television version of Smallville must be located on the outskirts, since it too seems to have weekly meteor showers.

Jeff R. said...

I wonder what the origin of the "later retconned as Chicago" factoidoid that seems to have gotten into many of the Apex references out there was...

Scipio said...

Chicago?

Well, that's just SILLY.

LissBirds said...

Except that in the Silver Age he didn't "observe the culture" to create his identity like he did in DC: New Frontier. Doesn't DC have any editors left to check on these things? No wonder they couldn't get the city right.

Scipio said...

Actually, Liss, that's been part of J'onn's backstory since JLA: Year One.

LissBirds said...

I can't read the full entry becuase it won't embiggen, but that one line makes it seem as though they were talking about his Pre-Crisis history. Eh. At least J'onn got a nice writeup in a nice big DC75 book, so I should stop splitting hairs and just be happy. (But that would be too boring an existence.)