Seattle is the home of Seahawks, Starbucks, Microsoft and Emerald City Comicon.
The Pacific Northwest metropolis is a visionary city of the future booming with technology yet haunted by the past with legends and secrets.
The Emerald City shines as inspiration for films, books and television series with a diverse culture. With superhuman athletes, creative artists and big brains as some of its most famous residents, of course you can imagine superheroes and villains calling Seattle home.
The gray, rainy days and nights help color a spooky vibe perfect for comic book stories.
As we count down to Emerald City Comicon, here are three very different comic book heroes who call Seattle home:
Green Arrow
In DC Comics Oliver Queen is a Seattle billionaire who suits up as masked vigilante Green Arrow armed with a bow and arrow hunting bad guys. The crime fighting, social justice warrior takes on the powerful elite who prey on the weak. The Emerald Archer takes aim at drugs, mobsters and human traffickers.
The Arrow television series is set in Starling City but in the comics, Queen is a Seattle mover and shaker by night and stalker of bad guys by night.
In the first DC Rebirth story, writer Benjamin Percy even used “The Jungle” an infamous real Seattle homeless camp as part of Ollie’s crusade. The Archer has a “Sherwood Forest” base in Rainier.
Ollie is joined by Dinah Lance aka Black Canary, his kung-fu fighting, sonic screaming, fishnet wearing partner in love and war on crime. The high-tech glamour, gritty underbelly and rainy, green forests of Seattle are evident in the current book. Emerald Outlaw pits the Seattle Police and the city against Ollie thanks to dark archer and a mysterious cartel called the Tenth Circle.
Lazarus
In the near future the world is carved up and ruled by a handful of powerful families. If you’re not family, you’re lucky to be “serf” class if you have skills they require but millions are considered “waste.” Each family has a Lazarus, a genetically engineered “child” born to do their bidding from assassinations to leading armies.
House Carlyle rules the western half of North America from their home base in Seattle. The family’s Puget Sound Compound is a high-tech wonder of medical technology and luxury where the Carlyle children plot to expand their holdings and defeat their rivals. Forever is the family Lazarus who now knows her genetic identity, family’s secrets and may be breaking her programming and having the most dangerous weapon of all – free will.
Lazarus is a creator-owned Image comic by Portland based writer Greg Rucka and artist Michael Lark and is being developed as a television series.
iZombie
The cold gray rainy winter may make you feel a zombie until you’ve have coffee but Olivia “Liv” Moore is living a secret life as a member of the undead in iZombie from Vertigo Comics and The CW television series.
Chris Roberson and Mike Allred created the comic starring Gwen, a gravedigger who’s actually a zombie. She must eat a brain at least once a month to keep from losing her intelligence and memories. When she does, she temporarily gains the memories, personalities, and thoughts of the dead person.
In the television series, Gwen became Liv, a medical intern in Seattle who becomes a zombie and begins work in the morgue with access to dead bodies with a steady supply of brains. Liv taps into the victims’ memories to help solve crimes with a Seattle police detective and medical examiner who know her secret. Liv broke up with her boyfriend to protect him from becoming infected but the course of true love never runs smooth when he become a zombie hunter.
Seattle was even the home of crime fighting activists who went on the streets in costume once upon a time. In a moment of surreality where fiction, fact and fiction blurred in a multi-meta convergence, an Emerald City superhero movement was part of a storyline in X-Factor where the mutant detectives came to Seattle to investigate amateur costumed heroes who called themselves X-ceptionals. There’s something about this city…or is it in the rain?
If this list has you excited for Seattle’s epic comicon here’s our ECCC 2017 preview.
By Editor