I happened to stumble across this photo of the season 5 cast of “Arrow” earlier today:
Now, I don’t know diddly squadoo about Arrow, having never seen a single episode (it premiered on CW several years before my satellite system carried it, so… meh, too late to get involved). It’s based on the DC comics character “Green Arrow” who generally inhabits the same world as Superman and Batman. I know that “The Flash” spun off of “Arrow,” and that last year there was a crossover episode between “Flash” and “Supergirl,” and now this year Superman has put in an appearance on “Supergirl,” so… there ya go, I guess.
All that said, I glanced at this photo and something caught my eye. See the feller way off to the left, in the hockey mask? He looked familiar. So I dug through a box and found a half dozen comic books I bought in 1987-88. And, yup, that is the little-known minor DC character “Wild Dog.”
“Wild Dog” was sold to DC, in part, on the unusual setting. Instead of a Gigantic Mega City like Metropolis, a fictionalized version of New York, “Wild Dog” was set in small-town heartland America, in the fancifully named “Quad Cities” straddling the Mississippi, with the Rock Island Arsenal on an island in between. Why did I care in 1987? Because I grew up and lived in the Quad Cities, a set of small-to-medium towns straddling the Mississippi, right near the Rock Island Arsenal. As memory serves, the creator was a local, and DC believed that all the places were fictional, even though nearly all the locales were modeled after and mostly *named* after actual local places. One of the later stories even takes place briefly in “The Time Machine,” a local comic book shop… which was where I bought at least a few of the comics.
So a real place, my home town region, is sorta-canonical in the DC universe. I’d bet good money that if they ever delve into the back story of “Wild Dog” they’ll end up changing things, though. Heck, they have already changed the name and ethnicity of the character (because of course they did, from Wheeler to Ramirez), so the back story is almost certain to change.