Keystone City
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Keystone City is a fictional city featured in stories of The Flash published by DC Comics. Specifically, it is the home of both the original Flash, Jay Garrick and the third Flash, Wally West. Keystone City first appeared in the 1940s in the original Flash Comics series.
Within the comics, Keystone is been described as being "the blue collar capital of the United States", and a center of industry.
Keystone City's location over the years has been treated as vague, much like DC's other fictional cities such as Gotham City and Metropolis, though most writers have shown it as being located in Pennsylvania (likely due to Pennsylvania being nicknamed "the Keystone State"). Starting in the 1990s, however, Keystone has been treated as being located in Kansas, near the Kansas/Missouri border, adjacent to Central City. JSA #16 (November 2000) explicitly states that Keystone City is in Ohio, but Flash v.2 #188 (September 2002) states that it is in Kansas. In the latter, the Flash constructs a bridge that connects Keystone City and Central City. ("Keystone City, Kansas. Central City, Missouri. Forever united, and under my protection," as his internal monologue reads.)
Originally, the city was defended in the 1940s by the original Flash, Jay Garrick, against such villains as the Fiddler, the Thinker, Shade, and Turtle; coinciding with the real-world cancellation of All-Star Comics (the last venue in which Garrick's adventures were seen, as part of the Justice Society of America), Garrick went into retirement in the early 1950s after the forced breakup of the original Justice Society due to McCarthyism.
Under DC's Multiverse system between the early 1960s and 1985-1986's Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries, Keystone City was located on Earth-Two (home of the Justice Society and DC's Golden Age characters), in the same space as Earth-One's Central City (Earth-One being the home of the Silver Age superheroes, and Central City being the home of the Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen). With the changes rendered to DC's fictional reality due to Crisis, Keystone and Central became twin cities.
In the early 1960s, Garrick was shown coming out of retirement (in the classic story The Flash of Two Worlds, published in The Flash #123 in 1961), and continued to defend Keystone; starting in the late 1980s, Keystone became the home of Wally West, the current Flash. Most of Wally's "rogues gallery", including the Weather Wizard, Mirror Master, Captain Boomerang, and Gorilla Grodd, also began to plague Keystone instead of Central City. Over the years, many of these rogues have fluctuated between criminal acts and crimefighting. With the events of the Identity Crisis crossover, it has become apparent that this is due to the actions of the brainwashed supervillain known as the Top.
Three miles from Keystone is Iron Heights, the security prison which hold the supervillains when captured.
Besides heavy industry, Keystone also is the home of WKEY-TV, a television station where Wally's girlfriend/wife Linda Park worked.
In the Teen Titans story arc, "Titans Tomorrow", set ten years in the future, the whole of Keystone City was converted into a giant Flash Museum.
