When DC Comics started the Golden Age of superheroes, Superman and Batman were both operating in New York. That changed very quickly to assign them to fictional Metropolis and Gotham City.
In Silver Age DC, everyone hung out in fictional cities. Flash had Central City, GA had Coast City, college professor Ray Palmer AKA the Atom worked in Ivy town and so on. The cities themselves didn’t matter much, they were simply convenient backdrops: as someone once pointed out, Central City implies a location in the middle of the country but based on several issues it’s also a seaport
Marvel Comics, by contrast, located its characters in New York City. That fit the company’s image — way more realistic than those other guys! — though it was typically just as generic in Stan Lee’s work. However Gary Friedrich, who took over writing Hulk in ’68, made the most of it. He (or artist Marie Severin — under the Marvel method of scriptwriting she’d have done a lot of the plotting) has the Hulk crashing into Yankee Stadium in his first story, as I discuss at Atomic Junk Shop.
The following issue threw in multiple New York references on top of that. It’s the advantage of using real settings — they have a meaning fictional towns don’t have. There’s no emotional punch in Flash and Captain Cold destroying Central City Stadium for instance.
There’s also the advantage that if you know the setting from personal experience, writing it becomes much easier. In one scene I wrote years ago, I was having a terrorist attack on a school. It didn’t come to life until I imagined it as my old junior high school and then it was easy to visualize the action.
I set Impossible Takes a Little Longer in my old home town of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., because it was so easy to imagine — and superheroes in the Florida Panhandle strikes me, as a resident, as extremely funny. Both Southern Discomfort and Let No Man Put Asunder are set in fictional locales, Pharisee County Ga. and Bluestone Pa (there is a real Bluestone but it’s a ghost town in Ohio).
With Pharisee I didn’t have a choice: if part of the premise is that the setting is run by elves, it’s more plausible in a fictitious town than if I set it in Roanoke, Va. With Bluestone I wanted to write a more realistic setting — it’s normally magic free — and make it a large city rather than a small town. However I didn’t want to use a real city because that would require more research than I think practical (and even then I might get it wrong.
The advantages usually given for small towns are that everything’s connected; everyone knows everyone else, at least at two or three degrees of kinship; the protagonist often has a lot of family around. In Bluestone Mandy has plenty of family around and she’s well-known to folks on her street, but outside of that? The police don’t know her or her family; outside her neighborhood she’s surrounded by strangers. For some reason that appeals to me, maybe simply because it’s different from Pharisee. I’m also wondering if there’s a way I can use the Not A Small Town aspect to enhance the story … but so far I haven’t thought of one.
#SFWApro. Art by Bob Kane and Marie Severin.
