How Metropolis, Illinois Became Superman's Hometown

The short version: There is a real Metropolis, a little river town across the Ohio from Paducah, and it was named a hundred years before Superman ever flew. DC Comics made the match official in 1972. What came after was a $50 million dream, a statue full of bullet holes, and a festival that swallows the town every June. Here is the whole story.

Fifteen minutes from downtown Paducah, across the Ohio in southern Illinois, sits the only town in the country called Metropolis. It shares the name of the shining city Superman calls home. That is not a marketing trick. The town got there first, by a full century, and the timing is the whole story.

Metropolis was platted in 1839, laid out on the north bank of the Ohio by men who thought big. They picked the grandest name they could find and bet the place would grow into a great city on the river. There was a French fort here before that, built in 1757, and Massac County still carries its name. The town never did become a metropolis. It settled in around a few thousand people and stayed that way.

Superman's Metropolis showed up in 1939, a hundred years later, first named in Action Comics No. 16. Joe Shuster, who drew the earliest Superman, modeled the skyline on Toronto, where he grew up. On the page the city has never sat still. Writers have parked it in New York and a few other places over the years. It was always a made-up town without a real home, which is exactly what made it possible for a real one to raise its hand.

The idea took until 1972. The Metropolis Chamber of Commerce went looking for something to hang the town's hat on, and the answer was sitting right there in the name. They reached out to the people who owned Superman, then National Periodicals, now DC Comics. DC signed off in January of 1972. That June, the Illinois House made it official and declared Metropolis the Hometown of Superman.

A name on a page became a name on a map. Now the town had to do something with it.

The first plan was enormous. Metropolis wanted to build the Amazing World of Superman, a theme park on a thousand acres, fifty million dollars in early-seventies money. DC brought in the comic artist Neal Adams to draw it. His concept had a two-hundred-foot Superman standing at the gate, and you would drive your car between his legs to get in.

It never happened. The oil embargo hit in 1973 and gas got scarce and expensive, which is a hard time to open a destination people have to drive to. The interstate that was supposed to run past the park kept slipping. The money ran out before a shovel went in the ground. The town had already spent a small fortune on posters and promotion, and it took the better part of ten years to climb back out. Superman's official hometown got saved by nobody.

What Metropolis could afford was a statue. In 1986 the town put up a fiberglass Superman, about seven feet of him, on the courthouse square. Vandals shot it full of holes, curious whether the Man of Steel could really stop a bullet. He could not. The perforated version eventually came down.

So in 1993 they tried again, and this time they did it right. Fifteen feet of painted bronze, three tons, cast at a foundry out in Utah and standing in full red and blue on what the town renamed Superman Square, right in front of the Massac County Courthouse. The people of Metropolis paid for it themselves, buying engraved bricks for thirty-five dollars apiece until they had the hundred and twenty thousand dollars it cost. It is billed as the largest Superman statue anywhere. This one has held up against the bullets.

The bronze Superman is the front door, but the town leaned all the way in. That same year, 1993, a collector named Jim Hambrick moved a lifetime of Superman gear to Metropolis and opened the Super Museum. He had been at it since he was a boy. The museum says it holds around seventy-five thousand pieces, movie suits and ray guns and lunchboxes and cereal boxes, one of the biggest collections of its kind anywhere.

Then there is the festival. The first Superman Celebration ran a single day in June 1979. It is four days now, with costume contests, artists, and actors from the movies and the shows, and a town of about six thousand people swells past twenty thousand for the weekend. Noel Neill, who played the first Lois Lane on the old serials and then on television beside George Reeves, became a regular. Metropolis named her its First Lady in 2003 and raised a statue of her in 2010, a couple of blocks from Superman. She died in 2016.

The local paper, for the record, is the Metropolis Planet. Make of that what you will.

It is about fifteen minutes across the river from Paducah, closer than most people in the Purchase realize. The big blue statue is free to stand under, the museum is a few dollars, and the whole downtown plays along. Go on an ordinary Tuesday and you have the square to yourself. Go the second weekend of June and you will not find a parking spot for a mile.

By our count, that June festival more than triples the town's population for a weekend. Not bad for a name somebody picked in 1839.