A hero grows in Brooklyn

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.”

Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers, a 98-pound weakling who becomes a super soldier nicknamed Cap. He’ll reprise the role in next year’s “The Avengers.”

“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.”