It Looked Unfamiliar: Don’t Quit Your Day Job

This series has been highlighting real buildings (and other structures) that end up as backgrounds in comics. Sometimes the artists draw their own instead of copying. With buildings, that’s usually fine; today’s excerpts – from a 1990s Catwoman comic – are not so great. We first see the bridge where the action takes place in this frame: And that’s a doozy. My first thought is that this was based on some vague memory of the Brooklyn Bridge, because there are only two large urban suspension bridges with masonry towers in the US – Brooklyn and Cincinnati – and Cincinnati has a single round arch in each tower, while Brooklyn has paired gothic arches. Seeing the full profile a few pages later confirms that this is a full suspension bridge with full-span steel arches below the deck. That design does not leap with forethought and grace. Rather, it’s redundant in that you have all the issues of constructing a suspension bridge and all the issues of constructing an arch bridge, and it won’t…