One of many reasons why it’s usually a good idea to create fictional places in your superhero comics.

Not that it would make this any weirder. Even as a kid (of Middle Eastern descent) I remember reading this Robin story and getting to this part and being like, WTF. https://twitter.com/notpotbol/status/1387519530549727232

*not that it would make this any LESS weird, I meant to say.

A good example is Coast City, which in DC is considered to be a stand in for San Diego. In a famous Green Lantern story, that fictional city was nuked by an alien warlord. Easy.

If the story had nuked San Diego itself, that’s a chain reaction of messes you need to deal with.

It’s part of this weird balance of disbelief with readers. You buy the concept of Green Lantern itself, but if San Diego simply doesn’t exist anymore in the DC Universe, that invites scrutiny that unravels the universe. It doesn’t necessarily make sense but it is the case.

If I’m not mistaken, Central City is meant to be a catch all for the American Midwest.

The point of fictional cities is to avoid a 1:1 relationship with real ones. They expand storytelling possibilities. A unique strength of the DCU. https://twitter.com/james_pa22/status/1388566827970834435

I’ve heard Opal City is here or there but it’s such an utterly unreal place that I don’t think it matters. Like Gotham and Metropolis, it’s so well defined on its own terms that to try and link it to any specific American locale diminishes it. https://twitter.com/shanembailey/status/1388569395287445510

I enjoy encyclopedic interpretations of fictional universes, they’re cool and fun to create. But new ideas are necessarily contradictory to those things. Conforming a universe to a specific timeline, for example, seems futile. Broader is better, IMO. https://twitter.com/nickthehobo/status/1388571779996782596