New York superhero tour is geared to geeks among us
BY JOCELYN NOVECK July 30, 2011 7:18PM
Drawings by original artists for various comic strips, comic books and cartoons are on the walls at the Overlook, a bar and restaurant at 225 East 44th Street in New York. | Tina Fineberg~AP
IF YOU GO
SUPERHERO TOUR OF NEW YORK: Offered Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets, $24.99 (children under 12 free). Expect to walk between 90 minutes and two hours. Note: Not every locale listed on the website is visited on every tour; thecelebrityplanet.com.
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Updated: November 5, 2011 5:19PM
NEW YORK — “I don’t get the whole Harry Potter thing,” a young boy says to our tour guide as we trudge down a Manhattan street, the pavement glistening in the beastly mid-July sun.
“I don’t, either,” says our guide, empathetically.
Potter, Shmotter. The boy wizard, pop-culture hero though he may be, has no place on the Superhero Tour of New York. No, this two-hour walk is about traditional comic superheroes: Spider-Man, Batman, Captain America, the Green Lantern, Superman. Fans come to honor them and the geeky guys who created them.
Indeed, geeks are very welcome on this outing, run by the Celebrity Planet company and usually hosted by Paul Lepelletier, a former comic cartoonist, now an advertising art director. He’s come dressed for our tour in a belly-hugging shirt splattered with cartoon Popeyes and a Superman baseball cap from Metropolis, Ill. (The hometown of Superman, duh.)
“Geek is my secret identity,” Lepelletier quips.
Our tour begins, fittingly, at Jim Hanley’s Universe, a comic book store just across from the Empire State Building. I’ve brought along my 8- and 10-year-old kids, but truth be told, the tour is not perfect for that age group. When kids of that age think superheroes, they want something truly visual.
No, this is a tour for people who love nothing more than to stand by a nondescript building and learn that the Batman creator once worked there. Or to stand on the street corner where Peter Parker, in the “Spider-Man” movie, was dropped off by his Uncle Ben, who was about to get killed.
Occasionally, fans turn up in full costume — or get engaged.
“We had two men, tourists from New Zealand, who got engaged in front of the famous globe in the Daily Planet building,” Lepelletier recalls.
Dino and Gina Plakas are here with their three kids, from Plainview, N.Y. All five are wearing some kind of comic book reference — a T-shirt, or, in Gina’s case, a green shirt in honor of the Green Lantern.
Early on the tour, we stop for a look from afar at the Flatiron Building. Where, Lepelletier asks, have we seen this? My son pipes up immediately: “It’s the Daily Bugle in ‘Spider-Man’!” “Yup,” the guide says approvingly.
Soon, though, he loses the smaller kids with a long reference to William Randolph Hearst and his decision to put comics in the papers as a way of getting parents to buy them. The older ones, though, pay rapt attention.
He takes us next to a Park Avenue building where Will Eisner, the comic entrepreneur and artist who created “The Spirit,” once had his studios. “I had the honor of being Eisner’s assistant,” says Lepelletier, now in his 50s.
Also in that building worked a certain Bob Kane, who comic fans will know created Batman (first, he tried a “bird man” — that didn’t fly). We also hear how “Batman” the TV show, with its “Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel” cliffhanger, saved the then-faltering Batman franchise from oblivion.
Farther up Park Avenue, we see the home of Kirk Alyn, the first actor to play Superman, in the 1948 film. It’s just across from the home of Lenore Lemmon, one-time fiancee to the more famous Superman of the 1950s TV show, George Reeves.
At 417 Fifth Ave., we spy a former home of Marvel Comics. We also get some history involving World War II and the use of imagery like Captain America. The kids are distracted until we approach the main branch of the New York Public Library. At which point my son, revived, yells out: “Hey, it’s the Ghostbusters museum!”
Lepelletier notes that, yes, the Ghostbusters were here. And on the corner of 40th and Fifth is where Peter Parker’s uncle was felled.
The tour usually ends at the Overlook bar, where art by prominent cartoonists graces the walls. Alas, the bar is closed on this day.
Dino, a comic illustrator, seems almost misty as he tries to sum up what comics mean to him.
“They’re today’s mythology,” he says thoughtfully. “Batman? He’s Zeus.”
As for our host, he marvels that this is his “job.”
“It’s like my friend — the original Batgirl, Yvonne Craig — said to me,” he muses. “They actually pay you to talk about comics for two hours?”
AP
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