Superheroes and San Francisco

As an avid comic book reader, I've always found it particularly interesting when comic book characters are placed in locations that exist in our own reality. If you read (or watch) Marvel, this shouldn't be too shocking to see, as a lot of their characters appear in New York City. It's even more interesting to me when characters are written in these reality-based locations when the universe they come from contains their own fictional big cities. The best example of this is DC comics, who are famous for creating their own locations like Gotham City, Bludhaven, Metropolis, and Coast City, among many other fictional locations. The character Nightwing from DC thus had an interesting run when located in both Bludhaven and Gotham, but then had several stories which took place in New York City and Chicago. When these characters have fictional locations that they originate from, it becomes intriguing as to why the writers of these characters then place them in real life locations.

Being a famous big city, San Francisco is not immune to this. Characters from both Marvel and DC have had adventures in the Golden City, some of whom consider it to be their home. Marvel's Daredevil (in the comics) has been located in San Francisco for a while now, while DC has made it the home of both the Teen Titans (again, in the comics, not the TV show) and of their character Zatanna. Zatanna is so prevalently placed in San Francisco, that I'm actually doing my Final on how her comics portray the city in relation to what we've discussed in our readings in this class.

Probably the most famous version of San Francisco that we've seen in comic book related media is from Disney's Big Hero Six. Based off of the Marvel comic of the same name, Disney took the Tokyo based characters and story and merged it with San Francisco, thus providing us with the one and only San Fransokyo.

What intrigues me about this is that in the comics, the team is supposed to represent a more diverse group of characters by having them all originate and operate out of Japan, with characters like Sunfire and Silver Samurai being two of their initial team members. To promote the film in a way to likely branch out to a wider audience, Disney dropped the Marvel tag (despite these being Marvel characters), merged Tokyo with San Francisco, and chose characters from the comic book team's roster that could be manipulated to appear, in my opinion, more American-ized. The comics have no connection to San Francisco, so for Disney to merge the city with Tokyo can to me only be done in order to draw the attention of American viewers. I don't think this causes any discussion about the politics behind the city or dives into its history at all, but simply provides an interesting visual that overall says very little about what we know about San Francisco.

Any other comic book readers out there? What do you think about companies like DC and Marvel using cities like San Francisco as locations for their characters to act out their adventures? Is there a way for the companies to shed light on the harsher realities that these cities carry, or do they simply portray a static, fetish view of the cities as a way to market their comics/related media to a wider audience?