My story takes place in the residential suburban area of a big city. I'm not sure if I should pull a DC and make up a city and say it's somewhere the real world or if I should use an actual city
The story does eventually move through the city's other districts, but for the most part it's around apartment complexes and the like
My first reaction is a fictional city, but if you live in a large city that you know intimately, it would be far more realistic (and probably easier) to describe the details of your city from your own perspective rather than make something up. I'm currently developing a fictional city for my own book and since I'm no engineer, describing it with any kind of realistic infrastructure has been quite the challenge.
Make up a city name, then use a real world setting with names like streets and neighborhoods changed. This is essentially what DC did with "Gotham City" (New York City) and "Metropolis" (Chicago, I always thought). Also, consider using a foreign city (Prague, Budapest, Paris, etc.), which might give your story a little mystique. Of course, it's so easy to happen across a reader who's been to one of those cities and cries B.S. on your description, naming it something else could help.
@DarkPen14: Is this for that story you are working on with Stormy Katzenberger in it? (That's the name stuck in my head since your last thread ) I see it in a wet, damp, forestry area like in or around Seattle.
If you want to go realistic, use an existing city. If you want to go a bit more fancy, make it up. In the story I write, I took the first approach, because I want the readers to feel that it could happen in the real world (despite including advanced technology, bio-engineering and even aliens).
I'd suggest that pick a real city for starters, say New York City, and research it for location ideas. Using a real place will give you more deatil for the scenery and even some ideas of the history of the places or how they connect with peoples lives. But once you've done that.... then add fictional elements. Rename them. Maybe Central Park has free roaming elephants for people to ride on. Or the Empire State Building is even taller. You can change their location relative to each other (if you want to draw a map). So then you can create a fictional city- but you have something you can go back to if you need an idea. If you start with a real place and work towards a fictional one, you can borrow from reality and include creative elements at the same time- so hopefully you get the best of both worlds.
Agreed. The presence of superheroes--whether they're street-level vigilantes or immensely powerful individuals--would alter the world in noticeable ways, so it makes sense that a location might not be exactly the same as it is in our world. Alternatively, the differences might be the reason for superheroes rather than a symptom of them. The last superhero story I wrote had a Great Depression-level economic collapse which leads to increased government corruption and a costumed crime fad, providing the main character with her core motivation. George RR Martin's Wild Cards series features a disastrous event which brings powers into the world. There are tons of possibilities here.
For me, the advantage of a fictional city or setting is it can be a pseudo stand-in for anywhere. Unless you know a certain city well, sometimes it can come across as a little bit of as "tourist guide to.." approach. That said, it's very much a double edged sword. If you write about a place you know, you can really pick out the interesting details
I agree but this requires some real thought. Some powers, a la Spider-Man, don't work unless there are tall buildings for him to web swing from and around. The other issue is the ability to hide your secret identity so the baddies don't come after you or your family. If your character is built like a Mr. Olympia bodybuilder, always shows up in your small town and you are the only person around who looks like he can juggle cars....how are you going to hide it?
Those are great questions. If the hero has an atypical physique which could cast suspicion on him/her, he/she might have a way to hide themselves through telegraphy, or, making themselves appear as a scrawny person to everyone else in the small town without actually changing form. Or, they might have the ability to change into a secondary form: kind of like a hero with two physical identities. I think the small town setting would provide some very interesting content as the hero works to evade detection from everyone who knows him/her.
I agree with the two previous posts, Funny glasses, hair gel and telephone boxes just don't cut it anymore. The idea of giving your hero an actual place to live sounds like a lot of fun. Suburban life is fertile ground. Plus,the pro's of using a real place is that the locals could take pride in having their very own hero so that's always cool. It would also let you sit in local cafe's as you work to take in the authentic vibe of the people and surroundings. Never underestimate the genius of the average man and women. I know an old man who turned his own garage in the middle of a quiet street into a space observatory. Where he pulled a level and the roof would slide open and a massive telescope would probe out into the sky and it would make proper steam punk clinks and clanks as the cogs turned and lifted the platform from the garage floor. It's very dark knight. I say go for it, it sounds like fun.
In the Astro City graphic novel series by Kurt Busiek, there is one graphic novel which looks at a superhero in a small town and the town conspires to protect him from all the well-meaning (and not so well meaning) people that search for him. I can't remember the name of that particular graphic novel though....
I'm pretty sure that both Metropolis and Gotham are based on New York. Quick google says that the two characters didn't formally cross over until 1952. In the Batman vs Superman movie Metropolis and Gotham are cities across the harbor from one another, kind of like LA and Oakland maybe? But in answer to the OP, I agree with the idea of taking an existing real-world city and renaming and remodeling it. With a real city to go from, you've got a lot of the heavy lifting done for you, but by renaming it you can adjust things as need be and not have to worry about the obsessives screaming when you miss a date for a building's cornerstone or something like that.
It may be different in the US but here in the UK, people who live in a place tend not to use the name of that place in day-to-day conversations. They'll say things like, 'I'm just going into town,' or 'The city-center was busy today.' If there is no doubt as to which town or city is being referred to, there's no need to name it.
It always occurred to me that superheroes don't need to look like bodybuilders, since their power is from other sources. Gal Gadot hardly looks like a Ms Olympia. I think their being drawn that way was always symbolic of strength, like it is in the Renaissance paintings and Greek sculptures of heroes.
Well, you could write (draw?) a story where the superhero is a near sighted, awkward and gangly boy who has started to develop powers that s/he doesn't understand... Oh....that's been done. Harry Potter. Superhero, Wizard, same thing. Seriously though, with mental powers an everyday weakling could take control of other people's bodies to do whatever. Like if s/he needed to check on the status of a criminal investigation, jump into the body of a detective and access the police database. Or jump into a criminal's body and steal his cash, hide it someplace that another person s/he takes over can recover and so on til he gets back to the superhero. If you want the character to be the same in everyday life and in superhero life, why not the ability to be in two places at once - super speed or teleportion or the ability to create copies of him/herself on demand? That's a built in reasonable doubt if s/he ever gets into trouble with the justice system.
