Of course I remembered this the minute I hit submit.
Tony Robinson’s Opal City is the perfect example of why I prefer fictional cities.
I think you mean James Robinson.
Hella Egotistical Anal Twats.
No. Actually it is Hal’s Emerald Action Team.
It was(is ?) a group of people who protested via an Internet and snail mail letter writing campaign to get Hal Jordan back as Green Lantern and to get Ron Marz fired.
Much vitriol was spewed by their leader, who’s name escapes me.
They claimed that not only was it wrong to make Hal nuts and murderous, but that Kyle Rayner was crap and that Ron Marz should get the Edward the Second treatment.
Of course, I paraphrase.
FYI, Mockingbird, I never protested, either via the Internet or snail mail, the decision to make Hal into Parallax or whatever that horrible monstrosity was called. I never read any of the stories that involve Kyle Rayner so I can have no opinion of that character.
However, many people, including Fenris, apparently, who were reading DC back in the '60’s and '70’s, feel that the decision to make Hal into Parallax was totally out of character for Hal and denigrates the character.
FWIW, I like Kyle. I don’t like the Spectre series, and I wish Hal hadn’t gone bad, but I like Kyle.
Personal story: I was able to score a tour of the DC Comics offices back in the summer of 1996. While there, I met then Green Lantern editor Kevin Dooley, who showed me the cover art of the unreleased GL issue chronicling Hal Jordan’s funeral. He didn’t explicitly tell me that Hal was going to die, but he did let me put 2 and 2 together.
I was part of the DC Comics Online community on AOL back then (it’s how I got the tour) and mentioned this to one of my buddies…in confidence, of course. This issue hadn’t even been solicited yet, so I made it clear that it would be best if this info didn’t get out. Regardless, this eventually got back to some H.E.A.T. members who knew me, who decided to publicly post on the DCOL boards that “a friend of theirs” saw Hal’s funeral cover. Luckily, nobody got into trouble, but I was pissed as all hell that I would get used like that.
Jack Grimes might have been H.E.A.T.'s leader, although I’m not 100% about that. The reason why I’m skeptical is that Jack was about 14 or 15 at the time I knew him, when H.E.A.T. was formed. More likely, I think it was Rich Morrissey, who was a Hal Jordan fanatic and would frequenly curse out Kevin Dooley in chatrooms. (Dooley’s wife cursed him right back, and more power to her, I say.)
Kyle is much better than he used to be. Then again, anyone would have had trouble.
Oh, yeah. Being the most retarded person on Earth, I make that mistake a lot.
I can’t tell if you disagree with their message or their method. Assuming it’s their message:
How’d you feel, Mockingbird if Wonder Woman got a whole new direction where she decided that the “patriarch’s way” is the correct one and she was gonna go out a-huntin’ for a man to trick into marriage so she could clean house for him and be a “helpmate”, like a l’il woman should? Hey! She could even have wacky “I Love Lucy” adventures with Etta as Ethel. But her husband can teach her lessons. The butchery to Hal’s character was equally offensive to Green Lantern fans.
In addition, lots of the anger from HEAT came from such idiots as Peter David mindlessly chanting the mantra: “You’re just against change. If you’d been around in 1956, you’d have been complaining that Barry Allen was no Jay Garrick”.
After David’s third or fourth CBG column repeating the same garbage, I wrote in a letter (paraphrased) “No, I wouldn’t. I don’t object to Hal being replaced or to Kyle, I object to the cock-teasing that Dooley’s doing (“Hey kids! Hal’s back! The Corps is back! Woops! Jes’ foolin’!”) and the blatent disregard for a 3 year storyline and a 40 year character history. I’d be just as pissed if Wonder Woman had become June Cleaver or Superman had become a child molester. Jay was retired quietly. If that’d been done to Hal, no problem. If Hal had died of a heart-attack, no problem. If Hal had died noblely in battle, no sweat. Why is it so hard for DC to undo the butchery to Hal’s character and simply let him retire or die gracefully?”
I never got a response, but people who went to David and his ilk at conventions to discuss the issue reported that David, et al, would put their fingers in their ears chanting “Lalalala-Ican’thearyoulalalala” And it’s hysterical/pathetic how, after Dooley did the same bullshit to David on Aquaman that Dooley did to Gerard Jones on GL, how David suddenly shut the hell up about HEAT.
I have some sympathy for HEAT, though in retrospect their anger at Marz was way misplaced: it wasn’t known at the time that Dooley was behind most of the problem (Marz has said that it was Dooley’s idiot idea that the can only be one person who does the Green Lantern stchick in the entire DC universe, which f*cked up a 2+ year ongoing Legion of Super Hero story) Yeah, they may have WAAAAAAAY over-the-top, but still: they had a bunch of valid points and in the long run, they won. Sort-of. (Dooley and Marz are gone (which is a shame, 'cause Marz, free of Dooley is a decent writer), the Corps is back, Hal’s getting fixed (badly, in Spectre, but still), Alan Scott and Jade have been repowered, etc.)
Fenris
Um…on the other hand, if you just think they were too over-the-top and disagree with their methods…nevermind. 
shy guy: Not to derail the H.E.A.T. conversation at hand, but I too, prefer most of the ‘fictional’ cities, esp. ones with well-thought-out histories. While Opal City has its charms (from the few STARMAN issues I’ve read) Kurt Busiek’s ASTRO CITY has, IMHYUCO, being one of the very best of the best thought up, with TOP TEN’S Neopolis running a very close second. Marvel Comic’s New York might have been terribly thrilling in the 60s and 70s, but I don’t find much of what goes on in contemporary comics to be all that innovative.
Where ARE Gotham, Metropolis, etc.?
That’s kind of my take on it. Marvel’s New York is fine, but one only needs to look at how lame the three year Daredevil in San Francisco experiment was (not the stories, the setting), or any time that a story’s set in Denver (wherein Denver moves about 50 miles west and it’s population drops by 90% and we live in log cabins surrounded by snow) to see that “real world” settings carry their own problems. I prefer fictional cities.
**
They’ve never been even remotely consistant for location. Every time they’ve said, they’ve contradicted it later. What I find to be more useful is to figure out what the cities are analogues of.
A famous quote from the '70s by someone (Elliot S! Maggin? Cary Bates?) is “Metropolis is everything good about New York, Gotham is everything bad about Chicago”. Coast City was essentially San Diego. Central City was St. Louis (maybe). I never figured out what Star City was supposed to be. Ivy Town was Boston.
Fenris
IIRC, in one of the DC roleplaying games in the 80’s, they had Metropolis located in NY, close to Manhatten, and Gotham was in NJ.
Sorry, no cite…it was a book!
No, Metropolis is in Delaware according to the Mayfair RPG. There is a FAQ here that gives several other locastions from the game.
My understanding was that Central City was originally a take off of Columbus, OH, but it has moved and changed since then to a sister city of Keystone.
Lok
Cool, thanks for the update! Sometimes a cite is necessary. Coulda sworn they were a lot closer together.
Of course, the tv show “Smallville” has Metropolis within view of Smallville putting it somewhere in the middle of Kansas.
Here’s one I’m wondering about: how much of the DCU Earth is still standing? Of late, DC has had a knack for destroying real-world locations due to mammoth events. I have no idea how permanent these are, of course…the beauty of comics is that you can shrug and look the other way (at the risk of upsetting the continuity-driven).
Anyway, as I recall…
Montevideo (somewhere in South America…Argentina?): destroyed in “DC One Million”
Topeka, KS (and several other major cities): destroyed in “Our Worlds at War” (Kansas also took heavy damage in The Kingdom)
Frankfurt, Germany: invaded by General Zod in “Our Worlds at War;” to the best of my knowledge, he still has it.
Mount Rushmore: destroyed in Young Justice
The planet Pluto: captured and rebuilt by Brainiac in “Our Worlds at War” (although Green Lantern built a new Pluto, :rolleyes:)
I know I’m forgetting others.
Uruguay.
Chaim Mattis Keller
They were: for a while in the early '80s, some writer had the idiot idea (World’s Finest, maybe?) that Gotham and Metropolis were twin cities seperated by a single bridge and there were at least a few dozen stories with that premise. :rolleyes:
Fenris
To my mind they’re both pretty clearly New York – with the possible exception of Chicago there’s no other city in the U.S. with the kind of sprawl, population density, diversity of neighborhoods, skyscrapers, waterfront, and just-plain-bigness of these cities. (L.A. definitely doesn’t fit the mold – too idiosyncratic, no real concentrated city center, and also, Metropolis and Gotham both have the feel of East Coast cities. Anyway, L.A. was practically a one-horse town during the Golden Age). Maybe at the very beginning Metropolis was supposed to be Cleveland, where Siegel and Shuster grew up, but by the time the Superman strip was being published, they had learned the difference between a big city and The City. Also, “Gotham” was an continues to be a nickname for New York, and Bill Finger says he and Bob Kane came up with the name of Batman’s city after flipping through a New York phone book and seeing a listing for “Gotham Jewelers.”
Someone (Kane?) once said Metropolis is New York during the day, and Gotham City is New York at night. I think that’s the best way to think of it.
–Cliffy