Welcome to Lake City, 'Home of Heroes!'

I wanted to go with a made-up city as Grim’s base of operations for a number of reasons. For starters, you can go nuts and say the mayor is Satan, the streets are filled with hookers and dope fiends, and all the kids have rickets, and not piss anyone off. Well, you can still piss them off, but it might reduce the number of angry emails a bit, and anything that does that is a good thing. You also get to have fun making up street names, buildings and sports teams (“Go Cleavers!”), and go to town with homages and in-jokes to show how clever you are (wink wink, nudge nudge).

But the best part about making up a comic book city is the chance to use it to say something about the characters themselves. Why have they chosen to defend this city, and not someplace else? Why does this town need these heroes, or does it at all? How does the town affect and reflect the heroes, and vice versa? And what if there was a city that is forever associated with superheroes, that is considered the birthplace of the world’s greatest superteam, but has lost its luster and lost its way?

For my setting, I came up with Lake City, a post-industrial Midwestern town set upon one of the Great Lakes. I wanted a town that felt like my native Chicago, but was a bit smaller and had a sort of shabby faded glory to it. I liked the idea of a city that peaked during the late 50s/early 60s (comics’ Silver Age), but has struggled to maintain that sense of wonder. Lake City is neither as dark as Batman’s Gotham City nor as hopeful as Superman’s Metropolis, but falls somewhere in-between, a city that remembers its own greatness but can’t quite recall where the time’s gone. I wanted my city to have parallels with Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, three wonderful American cities that are often the butt of the nation’s jokes. A city of underdogs, of half-remembered dreams and missed opportunities, but with the heart of a champion, just waiting for the right moment to show the world how it’s done.

I love my little city.