Friday, June 9, 2017

Looks Like We're Not In Kansas Anymore (Smallville Edition)

We've had many, many discussions of DC geography in these parts.

And it seems clear that, pre-Crisis, Smallville was somewhere very near the east coast of the USA:

That's from All-New Collectors' Edition #C-55 (1978)--the treasury edition sized wedding of Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl, and you'd think that Paul Levitz knew what he was talking about. "Just inland from the eastern seaboard" would surely seem to rule out Kansas, or anywhere in the Midwest or the plains states.

That's pretty consistent with the map from The New Adventures Of Superboy #22 (1981), which pretty clearly shows that Smallville is either in Delaware or Maryland.

I think the 1978 Superman film was the first to put the Kents' farm in Kansas (look closely at Pa Kent's truck). And gradually that idea seeped in, and by the time of the Byrne reboot, most of the comics and TV shows settled on Kansas--maybe because filming in Alberta and other rural locations was cheaper, maybe because the myth of Clark Kent being raised as a true red-blooded American icon fit better with "flyover country" than with being a short bus ride from the "east coast elites."

But pre-Crisis? Smallville was definitely Eastern time zone.

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