The first issue of Seven Soldiers, published last February, features a broad Manhattan skyline that includes a hotel that the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí designed for New York nearly a century ago. Not far away is the so-called Rolls-Royce Building (its facade resembles a grill) that the Austrian architect Hans Hollein unsuccessfully proposed as the new headquarters for Chase Manhattan Bank in the late 1950's. And snaking around the two buildings is the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, the elevated highway long championed by New York City's powerful urban planner Robert Moses.

All of these buildings, Mr. Morrison said, will reappear in other issues of the Seven Soldiers series, as will other unrealized architectural marvels. The opening panel of Manhattan Guardian's third issue, for example, featured Frank Lloyd Wright's domed futuristic complex Ellis Island Key, which the architect designed shortly before he died. Mr. Morrison, who lives in Glasgow, said by embellishing on the existing New York he was tapping into his favorite comic book power: the ability to create alternative realities. "Things as they are have never really been enough for me," he said.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:57 AM  |