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Today, we take a look at an amusing aspect of Marvel’s Manhattan, which somehow has MULTIPLE hidden cities underneath the streets!
In Drawing Crazy Patterns, I spotlight at least five scenes/moments from within comic book stories that fit under a specific theme (basically, stuff that happens frequently in comics). Note that these lists are inherently not exhaustive. They are a list of five examples (occasionally I’ll be nice and toss in a sixth). So no instance is “missing” if it is not listed. It’s just not one of the five examples that I chose.
Reader Alex L. wrote in to ask about something he noticed, which is that it sure seems like Marvel’s version of Manhattan has a whole lot of hidden cities underneath it and I looked at it and he’s totally right. It is pretty hilarious, so let’s take a look at the collection of hidden underground cities that I guess are all on top of one another?
THE ALLEY
This one is a bit tricky, but I think that it ultimately does count. In Uncanny X-Men #169 (by Chris Claremont, Paul Smith and Bob Wiacek), former X-Man Warren Worthington the third (Angel) was kidnapped by the secretive group of mutants known as the Morlocks. Named after the underground people of the future in H.G. Wells’ classic novel, The Time Machine, just like the characters in the novel, the Morlocks typically were frightening in appearance and could not easily interact with humanity like, say, Jean Grey, Bobby Drake or, well, Warren Worthington III. So they went underground to giant tunnels below Manhattan.
The issue is that when we first see “The Alley,” it isn’t quite clear whether it’s big enough to be considered an underground CITY…
However, it is made a lot clearer in Uncanny X-Men #190 (by Claremont, John Romita Jr. and Dan Green) that the Alley actually reached across the river into New Jersey…
Three issues later, in Uncanny X-Men #193 (by Claremont, Romita Jr. and Green), we learn that the Alley actually extends all the way up to the X-Mansion, so it is HUGE…
And yes, it is technically still a series of tunnels, but come on, when you’re THAT big, I think it’s fair enough to call it a city.
ZERO TOWN
During the period where Steve Rogers was going by the name “The Captain” while John Walker was Captain America, Steve began hanging out with a couple of newer heroes, including D-Man, an earnest former professional wrestler who gained super strength from the Power Broker and just wanted to do good with his abilities. Sadly, D-Man was almost killed right before Steve returned as Captain America (Cap thought that he actually had died, but in reality, he had survived, but had suffered some major brain trauma). Cap took him in and tried to rehabilitate him despite D-Man losing the ability to speak.
Well, in Captain America #410 (by Mark Gruenwald, Rik Levins and Danny Bulanadai), D-Man stumbles upon Zero Town, a city of homeless people in the cavern below the lake in Central Park…
Their evil leader tortures him and eventually, something snaps and D-Man could talk again. He defeated the evil leader of Zero Town in Captain America #418 (by Grunewald, Levins and Bulanadi)…
and then decided to remain in Zero Town as their champion.
MONSTER METROPOLIS
One of the more unusual storylines of the last 15 years occurred in the Punisher’s comic book, where the Punisher was killed by Wolverine’s son, Daken, on the orders of Norman Osborn. Shockingly, that was not the end, as the Legion of Monsters re-animated the Punisher as a Frankenstein’s Monster type. The now monstrous Frank Castle (Frankencastle became his new nickname) found himself living in Monster Metropolis, an underground city below the streets of Manhattan, as seen in Punisher #12 (by Rick Remender, Tony Moore and Dan Brown)…
The various monsters of the world united in this city to gain protection from the outside world…
UNDER YORK
In the short-lived 2019 Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man series (was it meant to be a maxiseries?), Tom Taylor, Juann Cabal, Nolan Woodard and Travis Lanham introduced a new older character known as The Rumor, who works with Spider-Man to find a woman who had gone missing from the place where The Rumor had come from.
She decides to take Spidey with her back home…
and it is quite the trip…
they soon find themselves waaaaaaay below Manhattan, where the Rumor reveal the shocking truth…
of UNDER YORK!
Apparently this subterranean city had a direct connection to New York City for many years until Under York became basically xenophobic in the 1940s and their society has stagnated in the decades since then as a fascist “Mayor” took control. Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four ultimately freed the town at the end of the series. Let’s just call it a 14-issue maxiseries, okay?
NEW MANHATTAN
Most recently, in the excellent Thing miniseries by Walter Mosley, Tom Reilly, Jordie Bellaire and Joe Sabino, the Thing met a mysterious woman that he fell for hard (this was set in the past, well before the Thing was married to Alicia Masters) but when he was trying to follow up on her he instead discovered that thee was a city in the cavern below the lake in Central Park (yes, the same place Zero Town was set, as well)…
It was filled with all sorts of outcasts living underground, which is pretty much the general idea in all of these, right? That they’re outcasts who were driven underground…
So I totally get the idea of all of these, but it is still funny to see how many comic books use the same basic idea, even if individually they were all fine stories.
Thanks for the suggestion, Alex! If anyone else has suggestions for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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