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Lots of superheroes call New York City home. Peter Parker/Spider-Man hails from Queens. Tony Stark/Iron Man has an office in Midtown. Matthew Murdock/Daredevil lives in Hell’s Kitchen.
But only one Marvel comic-book star is a Brooklyn boy — Steve Rogers, a k a Captain America. From his humble beginnings as a scrawny shrimp bullied in back alleys to his modern-day incarnation as a Red Hook-based crime-fighter, Captain America is the sole major superhero to call the “Fuhgeddaboutit” borough home.
“He’s not a fancy lad,” explains Christopher Markus, co-writer of the screenplay for “Captain America: The First Avenger,” in theaters on Friday. “He’s an outer-borough guy.”
“It’s a pretty classic underdog story,” adds his co-screenwriter, Stephen McFeely.
“And that seems to sit better with him coming from Brooklyn,” says Markus, “than from, say, Westchester.”
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The movie begins with the origins of “Cap,” as the red-white-and-blue-clad superhero is later nicknamed. In 1941, Steve Rogers is a frail young man who wants to fight the Nazis but can’t muster the muscle to get into the Army. “This is a guy who just really wants to serve his country,” says the film’s director, Joe Johnston. “He struggles and struggles, and gets rejected — they just don’t want him.”
“He’s had a pretty rough life,” says Chris Evans, the buff actor who plays Cap and had to be digitally downsized to be a believable weakling. “He’s been dealt a lousy hand.”
To that end, Markus and McFeely even put in a scene with Rogers getting roughed up Brooklyn-style.
“I know this neighborhood — I got beat up in that alley,” Cap says in the trailer as he’s in a car driving through the borough’s streets. (“I think that still happens to some people, no matter how gentrified it gets,” says Markus.)
The film’s point is not that the borough is the province of bullies, just that it’s shorthand for “regular guy.” Even after Rogers undergoes the transformation, induced by a military experiment to create “super-soldiers,” he’s never really “super,” says Johnston.
“The interesting thing about the character is he’s not a superhero, per se,” the director says. “He can’t lift tanks and throw them. He’s just the greatest human athlete. That was a lot more interesting to me than somebody who has sci-fi powers. Especially when he started out as a 97-pound weakling.”
Indeed — when Cap is asked in the film, “What makes you so special,” his answer is “Nothin’ — I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.”
(Cue raucous cheers from audiences at the Pavilion, Court Street and BAM theaters.)
But what does the “just a kid from Brooklyn” ethos mean, exactly?
“This guy is just a good man,” Evans says. “I think everyone can aspire to that. It’s about doing the right thing just because it’s right. It’s not about searching for praise from your peers or searching for medals.”
The patriotic crusader’s pivotal transformation also happens in the borough, as it turns out. “Not every brownstone in Brooklyn is as it seems,” says Markus mysteriously. “Behind some doors are not old ladies with cats — or, in modern terms, irritating hipsters — but possibly secret laboratories.”
Following the scientific pumping-up of Rogers, says McFeely, there is also “at least one very extensive action set piece that takes place in Brooklyn.”
In the trailer, a fireball can be seen near the fictional Brooklyn Antiques building. The action subsequently takes the now-Captain America off to war in Europe — where he clashes with the superhuman baddie Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), leader of the top-secret Nazi science branch HYDRA.
Cap will be seen again soon in “The Avengers,” the superhero movie due out next year, which unites him with a host of other Marvel Comic heroes, including Thor, Iron Man, The Hulk and more. (A brief after-credits sequence to “Captain America” features Evans with Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Avenger Nick Fury, setting up Cap’s entry into the modern world.)
But the Avengers’ crime-fighting league is headquartered in . . . Manhattan.
(Cue boos from audiences at the Pavilion, Court Street and BAM theaters.)
In the comics, though, Captain America continued to be loyal to his native borough. In the ’70s, according to Marvel, he rented an apartment in Brooklyn Heights at the fictitious address 569 Leaman Place after he “decided to devote more time towards his personal life. He became a commercial artist and rented the fourth-floor apartment, which he turned into his drafting studio.”
“The story of Steve Rogers is based in Brooklyn primarily because the guys who drew the original comics — Joe Simon, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee — were all New Yorkers,” Johnston says. “They drew and wrote from what they knew.”
In his 2000s iteration, Cap revealed his identity to the world — and moved from tony Brooklyn Heights into the more rambling, waterside Red Hook neighborhood.
“Basically what [the artists] got out of Red Hook was that it’s a warehousing district,” says comics expert Joseph Koch of New York company Collectible Modern Media. “They take advantage of some of the pier locations.”
Markus and McFeely say Red Hook lends itself well to the superhero lifestyle. “It’s near enough to the water that you could have a reasonably brief foot-and-car chase and arrive at the docks,” Markus points out.
Markus also offers another explanation for Cap’s move to the scrappier ’hood, though: “Maybe he’s been priced out of his apartment. He’s used to paying 1940s prices.”