Wednesday, May 4th, 2011, 12:45pm ET

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(Click the image above for the high-res version)

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Edit, Thu. 5/12/11: Last chance to puzzle through the map yourself! Cuz here’s the answers. Also: aLp returns next week. Gonna make this happen.

If it seems like all the movies you’ve ever seen take place somewhere in New York City, that’s because they do. New York is where the aliens must attack, where landmarks are destroyed, where the world ends, and where good-looking people go to find other good-looking people. It’s practically a law.

This is an illustrated 18″x24″ map of the history of films set in New York – more specifically, all the movies I could cram into a tiny 12-square-mile chunk of Manhattan. There’s exactly 91 movies on here. Can you name them all?

(Edit: Deadline’s over!) I’ll be giving away a FREE copy of this poster to the first person who sends me the names of all the movies, numbered 1-91. AND also winning free posters will be 3 randomly selected people from the rest of the correct lists sent to me within this first week, before next Wednesday, May 11. Here’s a high-res version of the map with each movie numbered from 1-91.

After a week I’ll release the full list here; follow me on Twitter to make sure you catch it.

This took about 5 months of researching and watching a ton of old movies, and about 3 weeks of drawing. The best movies I watched included The Warriors (on the map), Escape from New York (on), and an old one called A Thousand Clowns (not on). The worst movie I watched was Sex and the City, holy goddamn. A big thanks to the sites On the Set of New York, The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations, TV Tropes, and Scouting New York for their awesome info, and to my buddies Dean, Stu and Noah for their advice.

I’LL BE AT TCAF IN TORONTO THIS WEEKEND! Sitting with the rest of the Topatoco crew. Hopefully I’ll have copies of the poster on hand for you! See you there, ok yes?!

So yeah, this is one of the things I’ve been doing since November instead of working on aLp. It hasn’t kept me from doing comics per se, but it sure didn’t help. I got this idea back in December and just felt like I needed to do it. Now that it’s out of the way I think I can get back on the comics horse, but yeah we’ll just see about that, won’t we. In any case the best ways for me to keep you updated are if you follow me on that Twitter, join that aLp Facebook page, or get up on that RSS feed.