Weather Week: Apex City

Weather Week at the Absorbascon wraps us with the weather in Apex City, hometown of the wacky Martian Martian.

Well, really, what can I say about the weather in Apex City that I haven't already said before?


It's always summer in Apex City because, as we know, Apex City is Florida.  But that doesn't mean it doesn't have seasons; they look roughly like this:

Weather Week; Wet, Wetter, Wettest

At first I thought "Weather Week" here at the Absorbascon might come to a splashing halt with Aquaman.  Aside from his brief stationings in New Venice and Sub Diego, Aquaman doesn't have a fictionpolis proper whose weather we can describe.  I'm not counting Atlantis, of course, whose only 'seasons' would be Wet, Wetter, Wettest, and *glub!*.  

But then I remembered that Aquaman's real domain isn't the ocean; as Geoff Johns has emphasized, it's the interface of the ocean with the world above.  The real excitement in Aquaman stories comes from incursions from the oceanscape upon the surface world (e.g., the current Atlantean War) and vice versa (e.g., Black Manta).  


In the monotony of the underwater world, Aquaman wouldn't experience seasons.  Or much else, really, since the only people down there to protect are the Atlanteans, and they're a bunch of jerks, Aquaman's annoying country cousins from the wrong side of the watertracks.  

Aquaman must be ecstatic every time he's called to duty in the world above the sea, where people actually need and appreciate his help.  Those times, and his land-based homelife with Mera, provide both the seasons and the seasoning to Aquaman's life.  I imagine it as looking something like this....

Weather Week: Central City

You know, when you're comparing things in the realm of comic books, it can be very difficult to determine what's "most unrealistic."  Flying, invulnerability, heat vision; yes, those are rather inconsistent with our understandings of physics and biology.  But that idea that one of the world's richest and handsomest men would spend his nights dressed as a bat and beating up muggers in alley is psychologically unrealistic.  It all depends on your point of comparison.

Since this is Weather Week at the Absorbascon, our point of comparison is meteorology.   Weather-wise, Batman's Gotham City and Green Lantern's Coast City seem quite realistic given their generally understood locations.  Superman's Metropolis is much less realistic, thanks to a pretty substantial winter-deficit.

But unquestionably the prize for Most Unrealistic Weather goes to Flash's Central City.

Of course; it's always Central City, isn't it?  While Gotham and Metropolis are certainly odd in tone (Gargolyes! Bizarre transformations!), they seem functionally, structurally normal (for east coast cities).  But the incomprehensible geography of midwestern metro-nightmare-plex Central City is legendary; the impossibly tall buildings that are always impossibly far away on the horizon leaving nothing but gigantic empty plazas, mile-wide sidewalks, and uncrossably broad streets.  While Gotham City and Metropolis are normal cities dressed up in dramatic and odd costumes, Central City is completely otherworldly,  defying all the principles of space-time, architecture, and urban design.

And meteorology.  For quite some time, Central City has been consistently portrayed as a midwestern city.... WITH AN ALMOST TOTAL ABSENCE OF FALL OR WINTER.  It is always spring or summer in Central City.

It's one thing for Coast City to have no fall or winter; it's on the California Coast, so that's not unusual. But Central City is in the midwest, where there's winter; lots of it, in fact.  That Central City should be sprawling is at least consistent with what the midwest is like; that it should have no winter is completely unrealistic.

There is a reason, of course;  as always, reality bends itself to accommodate the Flash.  Central City has ridiculous geography for only one reason: it makes a better stage for displays of superspeed. Comics are a still-frame medium; there is no sense of 'time' other than the one we bring to it.  In a temporal medium (like a movie), you would show superspeed by reducing the time it takes for Flash to do something.  In comics, however, that's hard to convey, so the easiest way to 'shrink time' is
to  e x p a n d  s p a c e ; hence, the bizarrely expansive geography of Central City.

Similarly, that's why Central City (a midwestern city which should by all rights have BIG winters) has no winter.  Because in comics, the thing most synonymous with winter is SNOW.  And what's the main problem with snow?  IT SLOWS YOU DOWN.  Yep; you can't run in snow.  Snow would be a major problem in a Flash comic; so, Central City has no snow and the closest thing Central City has to Fall and Winter are the occasion attacks by Weather Wizard and Captain Cold.

Weather Week: Worlds of Wonder

Oh, Wonder Woman.  You are so ... different.  I'm not talking about her gender.  In many ways, that is the LEAST of it. 

Batman (and the host of similar nonsuperhuman vigilantes) has his roots in pulp ficition and detective stories.  Superman (and the host of similar superpowered adventures) has his roots in science fiction.  Wonder Woman (and not too many characters that aren't directly related to her in the DCU) has her roots in ancient mythology.

Batman and Superman fight crime and supervillains.  Wonder Woman fights monsters, foreign dictators, and lesbian hippy slave rings. 

Even though one is the city mouse and one is the country mouse, Batman and Superman both live in big east-coast-style cities.  Wonder Woman lives in...um...?

In this series, we've been looking at the season in the cities of the various big heroes in the DCU.  It is was easy with Batman and Superman; we know where they live.  But, unlike those two, Wonder Woman doesn't have one fictionopolis with which she is consistently associated.  So figuring out the seasonal patterns in the place Wonder Woman lives is impossible.  

Instead, then, we meditate on the fact that "Where Wonder Woman Lives"... IS her seasonal pattern.  And a very complicated one it is, too. Whereas the seasons in Gotham City and Metropolis are easily represented by four rectangular panels of appropriate sizes, the kaleidoscope of Wonder Woman's every-shifting location is more like a crazy-quilt.  Honestly, sometimes I wonder whether she's secretly chasing Carmen Sandiego. 

1. On Paradise Island
2. In London
3. In Shamrock Land
4. In Gateway City
5. On Mars
6. In Boston
7. At Eveland, the Antarctic Eden
8. In Washington DC
9. Hating I Ching
10. In space
11. On some Mystic/Mythical plane
12. In Occupied Europe
13. In Skartaris
14. In Monaco
15. Working at Taco Whiz
16. On Saturn
17. In New York City
18. In a white pantsuit
19. On Mount Olympus
20. At Holliday College
21. In Southeast Asia
22. On Venus

Weather Week: Metropolis

In this series, we're examining the weather in the DCU's fictionopolises (starting yesterday with Gotham City).

When I first had this idea, I thought, "I can just go through every single story set in each city to which I have access, mark down the apparent season based on visual clues, tabulate, and look for patterns!'

Then I thought, "Sh'yeah, as if!  That's a job for my fleet of post-docs."

Then I realized, "Oh, wait; I don't have a fleet of post-docs."

So, my 'analysis' of the seasonal ratios in the various DCU cities is cobbled together purely from my own recollections of stories I've read. Now, that is a fairly large sample, but perhaps my own impressions of the weather in those stories is distorted.  After all, unless the weather is part of the plot, the creators don't usually bother with making it any particular season at all.  Unless they're John Byrne. 

A lot of artists take the easy way out and have the same characters wear pretty much the same thing all the time.  For example, in the pre-Crisis DCU, Clark Kent was famous for wearing the same blue suit/red striped tie combo every day for about, oh, 40 years. 

"And I'm not coming back until YOU stop wearing those stupid public underpants and get yourself a proper mandarin collar on your shirt!"

Some of those habits stem from the origins of comic books as a medium for children thanks to The Golden Rule of Color Conservation.  It states that whenever convenient, characters should wear the same colors in their civilian identities as they wear in their superhero identities; it makes them easier for the readers to identify.  Golden Age Dick Grayson did this a lot, and Clark Kent's habit of wearing a blue suit and red tie comes from the fact that Superman wears a blue outfit with red accents, too.

Bruce Wayne: easy-going guy, good sense of humor, fun date. 

Even when the color carries no semiotic signifigance, it's just easier for artists to draw the same character the same way all the time.  Bruce Wayne wore the heck out of that nasty brown suit yellow shirt combo in Batman The Animated Series, until he swapped it out for the black suit red tie look when his eyebrows got all frowny. 

Bruce Wayne: Uptight, dour, control-freak. With tiny, tiny feet.

John Byrne is not one of those lazy artists; he's the opposite, in fact.  Sure all his people look the same, with their giant lipless frog mouths brimming with explanations of how their powers work.  But their clothes!  John Byrne believes that no one ever wears the same outfit twice.  In John Byrne's DCU, the clothes donation bins are full to bursting all the time.

Therefore, John Byrne makes the seasons change in his stories not because it is relevant to the plot, but so he can draw different clothing.  He'd have been happy as a pig in slop if he'd been working back in the day on Katy Keene.

In fact, without John Byrne, I'm not sure Metropolis would have even seen winter. The only time I can remember seeing winter in Superman’s city was when John Byrne was writing it. He really bit down hard on the idea that, "okay, sure, Metropolis is an expy for Chicago," where it's cold and windy a lot. 

Wherever Metropolis is, it’s seldom been imagined as being in the south or somewhere winterless; yet winter is almost never seen (except for, of course, an occasional Christmas story, because it’s ALWAYS snowing in Christmas stories). 

As a result, I visualize Metropolis's seasons as something like this:

Spring is definitely the season where Jimmy undergoes amazing transformations;

In Summer, Superman can often be seen loosening fire hydrants so that, say, poor hot children can play in them, endangering thousands of lives if a fire breaks outin one of their homes.

In Fall, Superman remembes he owns a superpowerful dog and take him for a romp.

In Winter, Lois Lane runs around in ridiculous runaway winterwear and Superman answers his mail at the Metropolis post office. 

Weather Week: Gotham City

I’ve had weather and the seasons on my mind lately, for several reasons.  One, I live in Washington DC, where the weather is always on everyone’s mind.  The District is at the confluence of all the weather patterns that happen on the east coast (cold air from the north, warm air from the south, and whatever ridiculousness blows in from the west) and therefore has nearly randomized weather that changes very rapidly.  The most impressive thing about this phenomenon is not the meteor-illogical aspect, but the social one. Despite the fact that in the 25 years I lived in the District the weather has always been like this, Washingtonians are always surprised by the weather (regardless of what it is) and vaguely huffy that Mother Nature  has dared to inconvenience the center of federal  power.  “How can we be having snow/rain/drought/heat wave/cold snap/fog/cicadas… in the DISTRICT?!”  Of course, in their defense, here those things can all happen in the same week. 

Still, you’d think most people would eventually get used to it.  When we finally colonize Mars or Venus, I just assume the bulk of the colonists will come from the DC-metro area because we’re the only people accustomed to that kind of weather.

Two, I’ve recently purchased the Seasons expansion for EA Games' digital human ant-farm, the Sims 3, which adds weather to the Sims' previously unseasonal existence. While it doesn’t affect actual gameplay very much other than adding more ‘stuff’ Sims like to do (skating, making igloos, bonfires, seasonal holidays) it makes the game much prettier, more realistic, and helps add variety (Because Snowflake Day is not like Spooky Day at all!).

As a result, I’ve really started to notice and contemplate the weather in DC comics, specifically, the seasonal calendars of its major fictionopolises. 

Gotham City, which you kind of expect to be extreme in some respect (because Gotham City is extreme in most respects, is actually rather normal, weather-wise. By 'normal' I mean it seems to have the four seasons characteristic of mid-atlantic seabord cities.

It is quiet easy to picture Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter in Gotham City, because we have seen them. They all get play in Gotham City stories and fairly evenly.  Particularly compared to other fictionopolises where certain seasons are simply unheard of.  Not only can you easily picture Batman & Robin running around Gotham City in all four seasons, you can do the same for most of their major villains, too, because you have probably seen them doing it. 

Oh, there are certainly some preferences.  I can’t recall lots of Penguin stories that seemed to be set in summer or Riddler stories set in winter.  But on the whole the Gothamites are a year-round bunch.

I've tried to visual the seasons in each of the major fictionopolises. Here's what I came up with for Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter in Gotham City.

Yep.  Nice evenly distributed seasons, with terrible danger in each.  Welcome to Gotham City.

What's the weather look like in Metropolis?  Tune in tomorrow to find out!