Morrison's Cinderella City

I believe Grant Morrison said at some point surrounding the dawn of his Seven Soldiers saga over at DC that his aim would be to carve out a new corner for himself in the DC Universe. I've been following the series closely from the beginning, and Manhattan Guardian has been one of my favorites thus far. According to the New York Times from yesterday, however, I am sure have not yet fully appreciated what kind of research went in to this book and the Cinderella City that the hero inhabits.

Much of the Cinderella City looks like the New York of today: grimy subway stations, soaring buildings, busy street scenes. But Grant Morrison, the Scottish writer who created the Manhattan Guardian as part of the larger Seven Soldiers series, also laced it with architectural marvels that were proposed but never actually constructed.

So basically the imagined skyline of the book is actually a collage of axed architectural dreams from yesteryear. "Just which dreams?" you ask?

The first issue of Seven Soldiers, published last February, features a broad Manhattan skyline that includes a hotel that the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí designed for New York nearly a century ago. Not far away is the so-called Rolls-Royce Building (its facade resembles a grill) that the Austrian architect Hans Hollein unsuccessfully proposed as the new headquarters for Chase Manhattan Bank in the late 1950's. And snaking around the two buildings is the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, the elevated highway long championed by New York City's powerful urban planner Robert Moses.

And according to Morrison, there's more to come.