The city. That was a commonly used term on the Benz Family Farm that instantly brought to mind a skyline of old wooden skyscrapers and broken plastic dollhouses, at least for the adults.
However, for me, and later my nieces and nephews, it generated an image of gleaming towers and lights, all centered around one iconic brown high-rise with a rotating golden globe adorning its rooftop.
Built atop an old sandbox and under (and later around) the old family tree house, Metropolis spanned over 600 square feet and stretched over 20 feet tall. It was visible from Google satellite, and every inch of the city was explorable. It possessed working electric lights, flowing water fountains, and so much more.
In a series of six articles, all leading up to Lois Lane’s birthday on August 17, I’ll be exploring our newspaper’s secret origins and how the founding of this real-world interpretation of the Daily Planet is tied to this Metropolis in Minnesota. Beware, this story contains tales of ghosts, aliens, and superheroes like you’ve never heard before.
I’m planning on sharing a new chapter every week, so strap in, and I hope you find this creative journey as fun as I remember it being. This first chapter will explore the first decade of the city’s life.
‘Superman’
I love how “Superman” has been inspiring the world lately. It feels as if Metropolis has been in the dark for years, and suddenly, all the lights are turning on throughout the city.
Entire new generations are discovering what makes the Man of Steel so iconic, and I love it. This new movie has inspired me as well. The iconography of Metropolis in the film reminded me of a city I once knew. It was a character in its own right, and it made me feel like it’s time to share our super-secret origins with you.
Secret origins
I’ve been a fan of Superman for many years now, and I can trace my love for the character (and Lois Lane) back to three major moments: seeing “Superman: The Animated Series” reruns on a Disney-adjacent channel, my mom gifting me old Fleischer Studio cartoons she found in a dumpster (she was an avid dumpster diver), and my cousin Moriah introducing me to “Smallville” when it was marathoning on ABC Family.
Of course, I took in other variations of Superman here and there and everywhere in between, but these three made a lasting impact on young Zack and inspired a quiet, reserved, and mentally confused kid to be creative and create a world where he could escape. Thus, Coolsville was born!
Confused? Let me explain. Before I created Metropolis, and before I discovered Superman, my first love was Scooby-Doo, who lived in an Ohio town named Coolsville.
Establishing Coolsville
At a young age, I was diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), so I was prone to emotional outbursts and to distraction in my adolescence. I needed a constructive outlet. At least that’s what my childhood psychologist suggested to my grandmother, Grace.
As the woman who raised me, she recognized my talents and helped cultivate my knack for the arts in many forms. I loved to draw, write, build, and sculpt. She encouraged these with praise and recognition, and it helped me find the confidence to grow mentally and emotionally.
Thus, in 2002, on a picnic table at our seasonal campsite in Tower, Minnesota, on Hoodoo Point, Coolsville was born. That year was a formative one for me. I was eight, about to be nine, and was overflowing with creative energy.
As I sat in my family’s camper one rainy morning watching Superman, I discovered something that would later become a character trait of mine: I loved big cities.
While the Man of Steel was protecting Metropolis and having all sorts of zany adventures, I felt envious. I wanted to be there. To be a part of something bigger than myself. I realized that there was this unbounded energy when it came to big cities. A collection of humans all creating, helping, aspiring, loving, dreaming… I was so moved. But I was only eight. How could I be a part of something so magnificent when I recently just learned how to properly ride a bike on my own?
Then it hit me. I’ll build it. I took common household items and morphed them into streets and structures. I used toys as extensions of myself so I, too, could be a part of something greater. Then I fashioned story arcs in my head just for the hell of it.
What I didn’t realize while creating this first city is how deeply rooted the obsession with Coolsville would become. As I grew older, so too did the metropolis I constructed. Eventually, this summer escape would find its permanent home on the Benz Family Farm and grow into something so much greater than that eight-year-old boy in a camper could imagine.
Discovering Metropolis
Coolsville was officially renamed Metropolis in 2006 after I saw “Superman Returns” for the first time. But before that, Metropolis and Coolsville were sister cities residing right next to each other. One was in the treehouse, the other in a small sandbox by the swingset.
It was 2004, and I just tapped into the stock of Christmas lights stored in the nearby red shed (named for its color) to help illuminate the twin cities that I constructed. This was also the year I built one of the most important creations of my entire life, the Daily Planet Building.
My father figure, my grandfather Gerald Benz, assisted me in the project. I told him I wanted a building with multiple floors and something fashioned on the rooftop that could hold a large metallic globe in place.
He took an old display he constructed for my grandmother’s wooden garden roses and fulfilled my request. It was a long, table-like structure with multiple drilled-in holes for the wooden dowel bases of her tulip. To this day, I still have one of her artificial flowers perched in one of her plants just feet away from the Daily Planet Building preserved in my bedroom.
I was so excited to receive this upcycled wooden structure from my grandpa, but it needed more. The inside was exposed to the harsh Northern Minnesota elements, and the giant globe wasn’t staying in one place like I had hoped. I snuck into my older sister’s room and searched for CD cases that no longer had CDs in them.
The two were notorious for losing the discs or leaving them in a compact binder library in their cars, so I knew I would get away with it.
I used the clear acrylic parts for windows and then found an old playdough lid to hold the globe in place, along with the long screw my grandpa put in place. I felt pretty resourceful and proud of that building until the CD cases cracked a few years later.
There was a moment where I used the Hot Wheels diorama featuring the Daily Planet from “Superman Returns” as the newspaper’s headquarters, but that was a momentary lapse in judgment. Coolsville and Metropolis later merged in 2006, with Metropolis claiming the naming rights. It was a more dynamic town anyway.
Leaping imaginative buildings in a single bound
While I was growing up, the city was simple. It consisted of wooden blocks and concrete structures. It was more of a silhouette of an urban landscape than the actual mini-metropolis it would grow to become. It served as a landscape for pure imagination and adventure, and it stayed that way for a few years. Then my first niece was born.
From 2007 to 2008, before my niece Miley entered the fold, my cityscape started to become a place where I could escape. As I grew older, my emotions became more complex. I discovered I was gay, and the city became this art project where I could spend hours creating something while my mind raced through the newly discovered emotions I was experiencing.
By the time Miley was born to my oldest sister, Felicia, I was 15, taught to hate myself by my pastor, and the city was overcome with vegetation. In the history book I created for my nieces and nephews documenting the city, I blamed Batman villain Poison Ivy for that. In reality, my depression was to blame.
Like DC Comics, I decided the city needed a reboot. My aspirations of being the best uncle ever gave me a newfound sense of purpose in life. I completely overhauled the city and decided to rebuild it, but this time with actual functioning buildings where Miley could play with her various dolls and action figures.
It was Miley’s Metropolis until Blake came along
For a solid three years, Miley was the only kid who played in the city frequently. She would tell me what she wanted, and I would figure out a way to make it happen. She once told me she wanted the highest tower in the city, but it took almost 10 years for me to fulfill that request. You’ll read about Metropolis Tower in a later chapter.
Miley was so grateful for each new creation, which made me so excited to build something even more fantastic. By the time my first nephew, Blake, was born (Miley’s younger brother), the city was flourishing. It truly looked like a gleaming, glowing, glamorous metropolis.
As Miley grew with the city and Blake aged to be old enough to start playing in it, I had to come up with some new ground rules to ensure it was a fun and happy place for all. The first rules for the city were simple: no fighting, no pushing, no destruction, and have fun.
The first in-city society rules were equally as easy: do a chore in the city (work a job) and earn what we called “city money.” City money was essentially fishbowl marbles that each equated to a dollar. I found myself taking many trips to town to visit our local Walmart for supplies during this time in my life, but hey, there’s nothing better to do in Hibbing, so.
City money played a major educational role for the kids. It taught them how to earn an income, save money, and spend funds appropriately. I’d buy toy cars that they could then purchase with their marbles. I’d enlist them to sweep the streets, which would earn them more marbles, and show them basic economic functions. It sounds dreadful, but they found it fun. They all ended up working for the Daily Planet anyway.
I also had to figure out how to populate Metropolis with characters both kids adored and buy toys that resembled them so they could use their imagination to extend themselves within the realm of mini-Metropolis, just as I did at their age.
With my nephew’s budding adventurous spirit now impacting the city, I had to get even more creative with structure, safety, and city adventures. He wanted cars that fit the characters that inhabited it, so I retrofitted the city with wider roads and better transportation systems.
As Blake and Miley aged, the city grew taller, and I found myself turning into a structural engineer. The first super skyscraper to go up in this model town was none other than LexCorp. Originally standing at six feet tall, I discovered a way to make this tower over twice the size while maintaining safety and city integrity. I had to compensate for wind friction while also keeping Blake and Miley’s adventurous spirits in mind.
Inspired by “Smallville’s” LuthorCorp, LexCorp Tower rose right across the street from the Daily Planet Building, standing as an ominous behemoth trying to intimidate the local press. I spent a lot of time on detail work for the city, and I’ll be exploring said details in a later installment.
Reboot in mind
Like I previously said, when Miley was born, I intentionally rebooted the city to become safer, more fun, and a place chock-full of imagination. I did the same after Blake came into our lives. Blake was born in 2011, and by this time, I knew a new Superman movie was on the horizon.
In a few short years, Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” would hit theaters, and I wanted the kids’ impressions of the city to correspond with the stories of that movie and later films. I had limited access to the internet at this time, so I had to get creative with the upcoming storylines that were to usher in the golden age of Metropolis.
I put my writing skills to work drafting up a five-year-long plan for lore that mixed together Marvel heroes, Disney Princesses, Scooby-Doo, and what would eventually become the Justice League. I stripped the character history from the city records (my phone at the time) and started from scratch.
I also plotted future city events, such as a New Year’s Eve ball drop and confetti celebration in Planet Square (which would become a tradition for our family) and the Metropolis Anniversary, which would celebrate the city’s birthday with fireworks and a pizza party around Superman Day every June. As Brealyn and Maddy were born, the city grew larger and increasingly complex, and the events got even more extravagant. We’ll explore those in later chapters, though.
Blake’s birth reboot was a real-life crisis-altering parallel universe shift, and it was a huge success. By 2013, the city was already 11 years old, and the stories that would come through the next half-decade were to be epic, sometimes terrifying, but always full of hope—just like “Superman” was—but that’s a tale for a later time.
Next chapter: Glue, grit, and golden globes
My second installment in my mini-Metropolis series will explore the locations that made Metropolis my masterpiece. From the Daily Planet to Centennial Park, we’ll explore the details of a city that felt real, but just on a much smaller scale.
