A Look at Lois Lane

Originally published March 19, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1322

Okay… I admit it. I was a bit hung up on Lois Lane when I was a kid.

When one judges the Lois Lane from the comics of the time, one would be hard pressed to figure out why in God’s name anyone would find her vaguely interesting as a “person,” much less a fictional character. She was apparently rather shallow, concerned only with trying to prove her theory that Clark Kent was, in reality, Superman, due to her oft-stated observation that no one “had ever seen them together.” Curiously, Lois’ suspicions never fell upon any of the other millions of people in Metropolis and/or the rest of the United States who’d never been seen with the Man of Steel either. Certainly that process of elimination could have been a full time job for her all on its own.

The fact is that, overall, Lois seemed shallower than the average bassinet.

But I liked her. I liked her so much that I even regularly bought her title. You have to understand what a concession this was for a boy to make. I never would have touched, for instance, a Nancy Drew novel. Nor would I have gotten within eyeball distance of Betty and Veronica. Those were giiiirls titles. Likewise Lois Lane should have been verboten to me. But I never considered avoiding the title. Certainly there was the boy-safe connection to Superman, but it was more than that.

My main inclination is to credit to Kurt Schaffenberger. The simple fact is that the only artist who was Schaffenberger’s equal at drawing women who were easy on the eyes was probably John Romita (pre-senior).

Schaffenberger’s Lois was soft, feminine, and attractive. When she smiled she seemed to light up the page. She was attractive, but not in the comic book over-the-top super-woman manner. She seemed—well—real somehow. Perhaps, to some degree, I also admired her intrepidness. No matter how many times she came up empty in her search to prove the Clark/Superman connection, she kept coming back for more. She was probably the pre-eminent underdog in comics, because the odds were stacked so thoroughly against her, and we Americans do tend to side with the underdog (something that the GOP had driven home to them during the entire Clinton impeachment.)

No matter what she did, no matter how clever she was, Superman was cleverer still. Sometimes he was even insufferably smug about it, laughing it up with Batman about how they had managed to once again foil Lois’ latest scheme to prove Superman’s secret ID. Neither of them seemed impressed with the fact that it had taken the combined efforts of the world’s mightiest man and the world’s greatest detective (not to mention, on occasion, Supergirl, Superman robots and/or the entire bottled city of Kandor. Boy, with a name like Kandor, you’d think they’d be interested only in truth and honesty) to thwart the plans of one woman reporter who had nothing to rely upon except her own ingenuity and wits. That she repeatedly came so close to uncovering Superman’s secret should have been cause for being impressed, not derision.

Indeed, the Superman/Clark/Lois triangle remains one of the most perverse of that era, when you get right down to it. Here you had Superman, a.k.a. Clark Kent. He would endeavor to woo Lois in his persona as Clark, because he felt that Clark was his “normal”, i.e. “true,” self, and if Lois fell in love with him as Clark, then her love was true and genuine. Whereas if Lois remained attracted only to Superman, then obviously she was only attracted to the glamor and powers of the Man of Steel. But, y’know, you can’t really blame Lois if that’s where her attractions lay. Put aside the glamor for the moment. Isn’t it possible that Lois was simply attracted to the more honest incarnation of Kal-El? His powers and abilities, far beyond those of mortal men, were a part of him. He was tossing around tractors from the days when he was still Superbaby, displaying a lack of understanding for personal pronouns that was shared only by Bizarro-Superman and possibly the Incredible Hulk. And because of those powers, he dedicated his life to helping those who were not as physically capable as he (which is to say, pretty much everybody.) His superpowers weren’t like a huge goiter or some other appendage that just happened to be there; they informed and shaped every decision he made in regards to how his life was going to go.

The fact is that, although he had “been” Clark Kent for as long as he could remember, the persona of Clark Kent was carefully manufactured through years of practice. Clark was, in reality, neither meek nor mild. He could bench press the entire planet and kick the butt of most anybody on it. And he was so utterly confident in his masculinity that he could wear tights and red undershorts on the outside. It wasn’t like, for instance, Barry Allen, who probably would have been perpetually late for dates with Iris whether he’d become the Flash or not. In Clark’s case, the attitudes and behavior that he developed for his alter ego of Clark were deliberately chosen in order to draw attention away from his double-life as Superman. They were carefully selected and manufactured.

Ostensibly he became a reporter so that he could become immediately aware of any emergency that required his attention and help. But that’s nonsensical. We’re talking about Superman here. The guy could have walked into the Oval Office or Pentagon, said, “Okay, here’s what I need,” and within hours he would have been set up with an office with a complete staff and monitors to inform him of where and how he was needed throughout the world. As a matter of practicality and managing his Superman ID, his Clark Kent identity was completely unnecessary excess baggage (a realization currently being explored, some thirty years after I first started reading about the character.)

No, the truth is that in those halcyon days, he maintained his identity as the mild-mannered Kent for one reason and one reason only: To have social intercourse with mere mortals without the 800-pound gorilla of Superman hanging around his neck. One wonders why since, perversely, he had pretty much all the same friends whether he was wearing the glasses or the blue suit. (I’m talking “civilian” friends. Indeed, it could be argued that Lois, Jimmy, Perry, Lana, Pete Ross et al were the better friends than, say, the JLA. They could be friends with Clark or Superman with equal aplomb. But how likely would Green Lantern, the Flash and the rest been to hang around with the so-called “real” identity of Clark Kent. It was they, and not the rest of the cast, who were friends with Superman purely because of his super powers.)

And most of those civilian friends were so dense that they couldn’t see through the disguise (although, as I’ve said in the past, at least Chris Reeve made such a blindness among his acquaintances seem credible. When I came out of the first Superman film, I still didn’t believe that a man could fly, but I did believe that a man could actually—with no more than some good acting, slumped shoulders and a changed timbre in his voice—deceive those around him into believing that they were two different people. To my mind, that was certainly the far greater accomplishment.

Clark’s desperate endeavor to disassociate himself from Superman almost comes across in retrospect as a sort of self-loathing. Although he acknowledges the need for Superman, he tries to distance himself from the ID at the same time, as if he considers the presence of his powers and the personal obligation to use them for the common good to be something that destroys any hope he might have for a “normal” life. Except… normal is what you’re used to. His powers were normal, for him. But he spent the vast majority of his time not only not using them, but actively hiding them.

Really, he had set a task for Lois that bordered on the impossible. He wanted her to fall in love with a man who was, in fact, a sham. A fabrication. Meek and mild Clark Kent didn’t truly exist anywhere except within Superman’s own head of wish fulfillment, in terms of his desire to be seen as no more “special” than any other beings on the planet. He aspired to being a human being, except it was the one thing he couldn’t be since he was truly a superpowered alien. And he tormented himself, issue after issue, by pretending to be one of us without actually being able to be one of us.

And Lois saw through this charade with such facility that it was completely unnerving to Superman.

As noted before, the notion that she was on to him because they’d never been seen together was just ridiculous. Even if we confine the notion to the Daily Planet building alone, there had to be dozens, perhaps hundreds of employees there whom Lois had never seen side-by-side with the Big Guy. Every pressman, every janitor, everybody in classified or advertising or promotion or subscriptions, she’d seen them all in Superman’s presence? Aw, c’mon. No, the truth had to be that she was truly a woman in love, and as a woman in love she was able to see through the sham that was the Clark Kent identity and perceive the true individual within.

This may very likely have been threatening to Superman on several levels. First, it threatened his self-delusion that Clark was his more real, accurate personality. And second… well, let’s face it, deep down he knew dámņëd well that he was superior to everybody else around. Smarter, faster, better. How unnerving it must have been to that sense of superiority challenged, even ruthlessly punctured by not only a mere mortal, but a mere woman. Yeah, sure, yok it up with Batman, big guy. But we, the reader, knew that deep down the man who was faster than a speeding bullet had been sweating bullets for a while there.

The bottom line is that no relationship can possibly function without trust. Then again, how could Superman trust Lois to love him for himself when even he was conflicted as to his “real” identity was.

As far as I’m concerned, Superman’s problem wasn’t that Lois was constantly trying to find out who he really was. His problem was that he wasn’t trying to find out who he really was.

(Dr. Peter David, amateur psychiatrist, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. And hey… here we are in the supposedly more “aware,” “attuned to women’s needs” 1990s, and there hasn’t been a Lois Lane comic book in years. Wassup with that?)