Flash's Most Tragic Day?

From back in the days when covers actually told you what was going on inside the comic:

Oh, really? And what is the most tragic day in the life of the Flash?

OK, I guess that would be kind of a bummer.

And that was no mere symbolic splash page:

Well, this was the Silver Age, and DC didn't destroy entire cities just to torture their heroes back then, so you know there's an out:

Yup, DC Science in the form of Flash's speed and a "time viewer/recreator" has teleported Central City to the year 4005:

Well, Barry solves the problem by running faster (and, surprisingly, he didn't have to have three different scientists shouting "run faster" into his earpiece!):

So, a happy ending to the most tragic day in Flash's life!!

Unless you count the day his wife was murdered. Or when he sacrificed his life to save the cosmos. Or when his protogee was killed. Or when his son was killed. Or when his greatest villain traveled back in time and killed his mother. or when Barry traveled back in time to stop that, but in doing so created a vicious hellscape of a timeline, and then undoing that wiped out his entire history. Or...

Man, "most tragic day of the Flash's life" was a lot less depressing back in the Silver Age...

From Flash #184 (1968)

DC Geography--A Home For Central City?

Well, if there is anything good to come out of the new Superman arc (SPOILER ALERT: there isn't), it might be that the story at least managed to whet my appetite for fictional DC Geography!!

MINOR SPOILERS FOR ACTION COMICS #41 CONTAINED HEREIN.

If you do want to know any of this, come back later. Spoilers commence after the map of the USA:

A mostly-depowered Clark Kent, his identity doxxed, is tooling around America on a motorcycle like a cooler David Banner trying to get away from Jack McGee.

Because traveling the nation on a motorcycle is sooo much better than walking the country. Call this Grounded, the emo-biker-chic version.

Anyhoo, Aaron Kuder gives us a splash page chronicling Kal-El's journey:

Now, the perspective is clearly a bit off, so we're deep into grain-of-salt territory.

But the pair of captions that begin "Feeling my first caffeine rush" are clearly covering Michigan. Which means the "dot" representing Central City is south of the western tip of Lake Superior...

Which, depending on how you're figuring distance and direction on this goofy map, that the Flash's home town is going to be in eastern Iowa/western Illinois/northeastern Missouri.

At the very least, it's a firm rebuke to those who have tried to place Central City in Ohio. As if.

And what about Metropolis?

Well, the lack of detail presented along the east coast makes it pretty difficult to tell. But the tilt of the map suggests that the City Of Tomorrow is slightly northeast of Central City, which would put it in the New Jersey/Delaware area...perhaps even Maryland? Frustratingly hard to tell, but at least it's a little more information...

So, even in a story that presents all humans in the nu52 as selfish, ungrateful xenophobic buttheads who will completely turn on their world's greatest hero the second he's down on his luck, we can still find tidbits on the location of fictional cities.

So who says that I can't find the positive in even the stupidest stories?!?

How Big A Rube Town Is Central City?

Actor Fred Pearson is having a bad day...

No, that call isn't to his agent, wondering why he can't get a better gig than walking around in a monkey suit.

Well, it turn's out that Fred's problems are all caused by Grodd (this story was Grodd's debut!). The gorilla creep has been messing with Pearson's mind, and taking his place on stage:

Now, it's hard to review a show from just one panel...but I will anyway! This looks like the "show" is just a guy walking around the stage in a gorilla costume!

That's not so bad, is it? Well...

This show has been held over for 3 years in Central City!! THREE. YEARS. And it's still selling out as Centralians flock to see...a man dressed in a gorilla suit cavorting about the stage. Did they not have TV yet? No interesting movies to go see? No touring companies of real shows coming to Central City? No movies?

So, basically, Central City-ites are a couple of notches below Springfield in their love of legitimate the-ater...

From Flash #106 (1959)

Manic Monday--Wither Central City

How nice to find another clue in my ridiculous fascination with DC Geography.

And this time goes far beyond a mere clue.

Central City/Keystone City has always been a bit problematical.

Pre-Crisis, they were in the same place, just different Earths. And DC more or less committed to it being in Ohio--a Flash story said it was in the same place as Akron, and an Ask The Answer Man also said Ohio. That's as canonical as you could get, in those days.

Post-Crisis, of course, both cities had to exist on the same Earth, and DC made them "twin" cities, connected by a bridge across a river. The exact location, though, was never really nailed down. It seemed to float around, from Florida (!), Missouri, Kansas, Illinois...there was no firm answer.

(If you ask me, it always felt like Kansas City/Kansas City to me...but what do I know?)

But we haven't had a clue in the nu52. Until now.

In last week's Flash #28, we get a flashback to the founding of Keystone City:

Now, even allowing for approximations and somewhat different geography in the nuDC Universe, that pretty much nails it as Kansas (with Nebraska and Oklahoma still being possible--but Oklahoma sure doesn't feel right, you know?).

So Smallville and Central City and Keystone City are in Kansas? There's stories there, people...