Jolt City

Jolt City is: the name of the longest-running Eightfold series, which won RACC's Favourite Acra (or adult) Series award three years in a row before taking home the coveted Favourite Series award the following year; the name of a novel collecting and improving upon issues 2 through 11 of the series, as well as the Favourite Miniseries winner Green Knight, which preceded it; and the name of the large Midwest city which serves as the story's setting.

The Series and the Novel
Primarily, the series is concerned with Martin Rock, a former kid sidekick now in his forties and taking on the mantle of his mentor the Green Knight, and Rock's various acquaintances, such as his own sidekick, Derek Mason, his lovers Dani Handler and Pam Bierce, gadgeteer Dr. Fay, his friend and confidante Father Roy Riddle, the son of his former mentor Anders Cradle, rival superhero Brian Clipper (Darkhorse), and scheming City councilman Carlos Canton.

Including the Green Knight miniseries that came before it, there have been three complete storylines so far, with a fourth still ongoing. They are:

Bread and Lentils, in which Martin Rock attempts to mend fences with his terminally ill mentor;

The Verdant Vigilante, in which Martin attempts to achieve balance in his life while pursuing "untouchable" drug lord Samson Snapp;

The Sensational Character-Find of 2007!, in which Martin teaches Derek about superheroing, and learns some lessons of his own about anger, manhood, and forgiveness;

and Green Knight and Blue Boxer, the current storyline.

Spin-Offs
Jolt City Adventures is a series of self-contained stories that allow other authors play with the Jolt City mythos and characters.

The City
Jolt City is a large metropolitian city in the midwest with extremes of both affluence and poverty; it is often described as being "two Jolt Cities", one poor and one rich, the former predominately black and the latter white.

During and after the Second World War, there were a number of heroes who made their homes in Jolt City, including Pharos and the Midnite Man. By the time Ray Cradle debuted as the first Green Knight in the late sixties, he was the only hero in town. Besides protecting the city for most of his adult life, Cradle used his genius for invention to found Cradle Industries, a thriving powerhouse that became Jolt City's biggest property owner and tax payer, as well as its number one employer. In many ways, the City's fortunes rise and fall with that of Cradle-- a potentionally precarious situation, to be sure.

Another company, Proctor Products (formerly the Proctor Unicycle Company) has seen its fortunes rise in recent months, though how well it could fill the void left by Cradle Industries in the event that that company fell on hard times remains to be seen.

Twenty miles outside of Jolt City is Earbox Prison, a super-security facility designed by the genocidal computer virus the Gorgon to house super-powered inmates.

The city is also home to Jolt City University, which has an extremely advanced science department and a well-regarded medical school.

Geography
Like many fictional metropolises in superhero-class universes, Jolt City's exact geographical location is hard to pin down. It's been established that Jolt City is in the midwest (Jolt City 11) and that it's not unreasonably far from Naperville, IL and Michigan City, IN (Jolt City 19).