Category: Spectre
Last article published: 31 August 2021
This is the 22nd post under this label
When John Byrne took over Wonder Woman's book in 1995 and resettled her in Gateway City, I thought for sure he had invented the place. After all, James Robinson had had some success with Opal City the year before, and DC might have wanted further expansion of its fictional cities. And of all the major DC heroes, Wonder Woman was one that didn't have a contextualizing city, relegated to extant Washington D.C. So he gave her one, ostensibly DC's version of San Francisco, with a similar bridge (the "gateway"), and ostensibly "the largest collection of Greek artifacts" this side of, well, Greece! It's not a bad fit for the Amazon ambassador, a living gateway to peace and love.
But reading older comic, you sometimes stumble on the truth... and maybe why Byrne references the "witching hour" in his opening caption. It used to be the SPECTRE's home. Mayfair's Atlas of the DC Universe may not have included it, but Gateway City is really an invention of Gardner Fox who made it Jim Corrigan's abode when he resurrected him in Showcase #60 (1966), Gateway City named in the very next issue. And before you start thinking it could be an entirely different city lost to some Crisis or other, here's that trademark bridge:
And here it is again in the Spectre's own book (issue 3's Neal Adams cover, 1968), written by Mike Friedrich. It's what made me realize my mistake.
Those cities really do look similar. As the SPECTRE's contextualizing city, Gateway evokes the Realm of the Just Dead, Corrigan as the ghost at the gates of the afterlife. And the mystical shenanigans that therefore happened there serve as a fine precursor for Wonder Woman's own myth-inspired stories.
I wonder why it didn't stick though. Just forgotten between iterations? By his stint in Adventure Comics, Jim Corrigan was a New York City cop (he had served Cliffland NJ, just across Manhattan, in the Golden Age stories) and never looked back.
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