Superhero Lairs

Filed Under Comics

If I’ve learned one thing from watching movies like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” or “The Punisher” or “Darkman,” it’s that I need to get out more. If I’ve learned anything else from those movies, it’s that there are hundreds of square miles of real estate beneath every major city where a superhero can live rent-free and still enjoy creature comforts like electricity, running water and cable TV. Claustrophobic superheroes, meanwhile, can hole up in one of the many abandoned warehouses on skid row and still not have to worry about utility bills piling up.

It makes me wonder why I shell out so much every month for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, when I could be living like a king in a subway station that’s no longer in use or some boarded-up soap factory. The mind reels. But I digress.

A superhero’s lair says a lot about him. If you’re the Green Arrow, it says you wish you were Batman so very much. Yes, G.A. has about the least imaginative hideout of any super-type, the Arrowcave. Need I say more? At any rate, most superheroes like to bring their work home with them. So they usually retreat to an undisclosed location — often subterranean — to brood, to experiment, to watch “Stargate Universe” undisturbed. They also use this lair to store spare costumes, weapons, mementos and the like. It’s kind of romantic in a “Phantom of the Opera” sort of way.

Probably the most well known hideout is, of course, the Batcave. Batman has the best superhero feng shui in all of comics. His HQ is heavily inspired by not one, but two Phantoms — the aforementioned operatic one as well as the guy in the purple suit from the radio serials who hung out in a place called the Skull Cave. The Batcave also draws inspiration from Zorro’s cavernous Lair of the Fox. Batty, however, has state-of-the-art tech in his base of operations, not to mention the Batmobile, the late Robin’s costume encased in glass, and a giant dinosaur for some reason. I’m still unclear why he keeps a dinosaur in the Batcave. It’s not a real dinosaur but a full-scale model of one. I guess it’s to suggest that Batman is still an 8-year-old at heart.

Superman’s Fortress of Solitude is also worth mentioning. It’s way the hell out in the middle of Antarctica in the comics and the Arctic Circle in the films. Wherever it is, it ain’t someplace that gets a lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses. And that’s sort of the point, as you may have guessed from its nomenclature. The Fortress is less of a crime lab than the Batcave and more like a living tribute to Superman’s home world, Krypton. Here, Superman goes by his Kryptonian name, Kal-El, while chatting up his dead parents via holographic images. Even Superman gets sick to death of helpless human folk always wanting him to solve dopey problems they should figure out on their own. As such, the Fortress is where he can get away from us.

The Batcave and the Fortress of Solitude are highly-sophisticated hideaways.But what about superheroes on a budget? Where can they sneak off to when they’re not busting heads? Well, characters like the Ninja Turtles, as you may already know, live in the sewer beneath New York City. It seems like a fairly icky place to spend one’s free time, but they’ve cleaned it up rather nicely. Their homestead is more like your parents’ basement than a vermin-infested network of tunnels filled with human excrement and dead goldfish.

Darkman has lived both above- and below-ground during his storied and mostly direct-to-video career as a superhero. He first chose a condemned warehouse in a sketchy part of town to set up shop, rebuilding his lab and befriending a feral cat. But he had to blow up that particular domicile — and maybe the cat as well — when the baddies discovered it. And so, he went underground, relocating to a section of subway track that had long since been forgotten about by city planners, maintenance workers, etc.

The Punisher is a character who seems to think even a superhero can never go home again. The most nomadic of costumed vigilantes, he’s lived all over the place — the sewers, the slums, the subway system. Wherever he’s located, it’s not particularly homey. Punny’s lair is mostly a weapons cache and where he performs DIY surgery, patching himself back together after a hard day’s work.

Spider-Man doesn’t have a spider-hole or anyplace like that. He simply operates out of his apartment, which has been problematic when he’s had a roommate or unexpected guests. When he began his superhero career, he was 15 and still living with his doting Aunt May, creating all sorts of issues with keeping his dual-identity a secret. A character as cash-strapped as Spider-Man would probably find squatting in some building that’s fallen into disrepair an easier way to make ends meet. But the whole Spider-Man mythos has been more about the burden of superheroing rather than the badassery.

A superhero’s chief concern, apart from keeping the villains from knowing who he is behind the mask, is making damn sure no one finds out the address to his lair. Ever the romantic, he’ll usually bring his love interest back to his place and try to impress her with all his cool superhero shit and home theater, but this can create blowback if the villains decide to put a tail on her. She’ll invariably lead them straight back to his hideout. Then he’s got to level the place and start afresh somewhere else. Moving sucks. Sifting through the rubble of your bombed-out HQ, looking for anything salvageable, must be even worse.

Superheroes may not generally have the most cozy lairs or lairs that are located in the nicer parts of town. Yet their man-caves aren’t necessarily designed for hosting dinner parties. A lair is basically an externalization of the superhero’s psyche, a window into what type of person he is beneath the spandex.

-Brad Lohan

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