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.
As usual, I’m devoting the last day of the year to a review of my year’s performance. As I wrote 
Plus while I really enjoy being back in journalism, writing articles for 
The Zoom group’s criticism is that I’m overusing the references: like 
A second criticism, echoed by someone in the live-action group, is that (for example) when Paul refers to his TBR mystery shelf including The Mysterious Mr. Quinn, 
(Here’s another photo of Wylan the kitten, with one of his favorite toys.)
As for this week’s performance, it was underwhelming. Even with a writer’s work day last Sunday, I just barely made my hours for the week. Maybe it’s that working six days is pushing it, or some other reason but today and yesterday I really slumped. It felt like the days before TYG worked from home, when the dogs would scrunch up with me and erode my personal space to the point my brain fried. As I haven’t had more dog-care than usual this week, I don’t know why that would be. But it was.
I got some more work done on my Doc Savage nonfiction book, including rereading The Red Skull; despite the relatively low stakes (land containing valuable deposits) it’s a dynamic, action-packed adventure and a pleasure to reread. There are no scenes as cool as the James Bama cover though.
Over at Atomic Junkshop I look at 
#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders, Millie cover by Stan Goldberg, Undead Sexist Cliches cover by Kemp Ward.
But as I’ve said before, that’s the nature of “average” — some days just by blind chance will come out below average. I recovered today, applying for a writing gig and submitting a couple of shorts, but I wound up short of my hours for the week. I’ve been over in other weeks, though, so that averages out too.
#SFWApro
First, thank you to whoever checked out Atlas Shagged on 
For once it was TYG and not me who woke up because I’d knocked myself out with my ambien prescription and slept through it. I did take Trixie to the vet the next day which threw me off my game I spent Tuesday mostly doing blogging rather than the fiction I’d had scheduled.
Over at Atomic Junkshop I channeled my past writing on political paranoia in 
#SFWApro.
It’s grown a couple more blooms since then.
While I didn’t get any Atomic Junk Shop posts up this week, my Con-Tinual panel dealing with mythological tropes is 
Other than that panic, this was a good week for writing, though putting in 30 hours on personal projects is really exhausting by this time on Friday. Taking scheduled breaks would help but I continue to have a bad habit of forging ahead when things are going well, then wondering why I’m losing steam later.
Infinity comes out and I’m not sure I’m a good fit for any of them. More frustratingly, I’d gathered a long list of book blogs to ask for reviews of the book, plus a few to solicit for Undead Sexist Cliches. All but a couple are “too busy, no new reviews!” and the ones that didn’t flatly rule it out are “maybe, possibly, sort of” at best. Come to think of it, I had similar problems with Questionable Minds; I wonder how other authors manage it?
#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with me.
To my surprise, I’m not feeling the usual sense of “where did the time go?” I guess when I’m doing fiction and personal nonfiction full-time, rather than the usual business and finance articles, I feel I’ve filled the unforgiving minutes with 60 seconds worth of distance run (as Kipling puts it). Even if the last week of March hasn’t been so satisfying.
Oh, and I posted at Atomic Junk Shop about DC comics 
Others, as you can see at the link, were painful attempts to talk to kids in their own hip language.
