For years, I’ve been publishing individual panels of comic books with photographs of actual locations, partly to show how artists use reality to create fictional worlds, and partly to amuse myself and anyone else who might think it’s amusing.
The thing of it is that even when the artists are not copying a specific location – and in some cases, I believe they may have literally traced photographs – they are trying to capture the feel of a place, whether it’s Marvel’s New York (which is distinct from real-life New York) or DC’s Gotham City (which is, mostly, as New York as you get). Any place has a visual feel to it, some combination of the geography, local trees and other plants, and the built environment. It can be hard to out your finger on it, but it’s there: I swear that I can tell the difference between neighborhoods in Brooklyn and those in Queens that were built at the same time, but I can’t always tell why.
Anyway…
Ellen took this photo looking south from the scaffold around a church spire in the Bronx that I wrote about a few days ago:
You’ve got the church yard with its graves in the foreground. For the point I’m making, look at the mid-ground and background: New Law tenements, low-rise commercial building, some modern apartments, the elevated train, and the towers of midtown off in the distance…just like this photo:
Except the second one isn’t real. That’s Gotham City as seen in the movie Joker, which had a production design made to feel very much like New York circa 1980. Making the movie, which takes place in a fictitious city, look so much like a real place and time with a not-good reputation jump-starts the story.
Genius loci: it’s not just for travel agents.
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