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Yesterday, Noel Neill tragically passed away at the age of
95. Though Ms. Neill enjoyed a
long and storied career, her most famous role was as the very first actor to
play Lois Lane, appearing initially in a pair of serials and on the Superman
radio program. Later, Neill would
continue her role on the first live action Superman television series The Adventures of Superman and cement
her place as one of the most iconic figures in comic adaptations.
Seriously, alongside Dana Delany on Superman the animated series and Margot Kidder in the 1978 film
series Noel Neill is one of the three women who define Lois Lane as a character
and helped shape her history in the comics and the public eye. Given that, and the fact I haven’t seen
The Adventures of Superman, I thought
I’d focus in on that history and break down the strange evolution of Lois Lane
from girl reporter to the wife of Superman.
Lois Lane has been a part of the Superman mythos since the
very beginning, debuting right alongside him in the pages of Action Comics #1 in 1938. During what’s referred to as the
“golden age” of comics, lasting through most of the ‘40s Lois was a major
supporting character and romantic foil for Superman.
I’ve mentioned previously that, in terms of representation,
the split between DC and Marvel is that Marvel has always been more inclined
towards racial diversity while DC has always had a stronger collection of
complex and engaging women characters.
Lois Lane is right at the forefront of that divide, being depicted as an
aggressive and career minded reporter from her very inception. Remember, this is in 1938, well before
feminism was a major social movement or the migration of women into male spaces
during the upcoming war.
Most of the core elements of Lois’ character emerged at
this time; her romantic interest in Superman, her dogged determination to get
scoops, her completely apathy towards milk-toast Clark Kent, and her suspicions
that Clark and Superman were the same leading to multiple failed schemes to
expose his identity.
By 1944 she had proved popular enough to earn a series of
solo stories running in the Superman
comics under the title ‘Lois Lane, Girl Reporter.’ The stories revolved around Lois busting crooks and getting
headlines completely on her own, making her one of the first solo women in the
Golden Age of comics after Wonder Woman and Miss America.
By the time the ‘50s rolled around the kind of plots
involving Superman and Lois began to change quite a bit. While the ‘40s was an era of vast development
for comics it was still pretty limited development, mostly shaped by the
popularity of the pulp genres of the ‘30s. Most stories being told tended to revolve around crooks and
mobsters with the occasional super villain only being slotted in very rarely.
Remember, most of the characters we consider essential
super villains for both Superman and Batman didn’t come about till well after
the Golden Age had ended. In the
‘50s the focus shifted from the crime centric ‘30s style stories to the weird
science and strange fantasy yarns that would come to dominate the B-movie scene
for that entire decade. Remember,
comics have, for the longest time, existed as part of Pulp media; low end
consumable stories produced to check-off specific genre boxes so as to cater to
an underserved market. And in the
‘50s the DC hero most catering to a major growing market was Lois Lane.
See, in the middle of all that sci-fi and fantasy focus the
writers decided that Lois Lane would blend those genre elements with her romantic
shenanigans from the previous decade.
As a result, Lois’ stories started all revolving around fighting with
her rival Lana Lang over Superman’s affections using increasingly complex
means.
The bizarre result of this was that her stories ended up
romance stories that boys enjoyed, blending together the high concept nature of
superhero comics with the blossoming melodramatics of teen romance comics like Archie. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko would pull this same basic blend a
decade later when they invented Spider-Man. However, give Lois’ appeal to older readers and girls she
got so popular DC decided, in 1958, to give Lois’ her own comic: Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane.
The Lois Lane book is much the same as the other ‘50s
stories and was one of DC’s biggest hits of the ‘60s. Come the ‘70s the comic did change to reflect growing
feminist ideals in the popular culture, with fewer romantic plots and more
stories about Lois solving problems on her own in the vein of the ‘Lois Lane,
Girl Reporter’ stuff of the Golden Age.
This is the era when most of Lois’ backstory was fleshed out, her father
got established as a major general and her sister Lucy, who had previously just
been Jimmy Olsen’s girlfriend, got a bit more development. We also see how she first met Superboy
when she was younger and how she eventually came to work at the Daily
Planet. Really though, a lot of
the big, bizarre, interesting stuff to befall Lois in the ‘70s and ‘80s came
from the Lois Lane of Earth-Two.
In the early ‘60s DC had introduced the idea of a
Multiverse, a collection of parallel universe co-existing together, each Earth
with its own heroes and history.
The idea popped up as a way t explain the incongruities between the ‘40s
Golden Age stories and the ‘60s Silver Age stories that were the being
published, like why the Flash and Green Lantern were now different heroes or
why Superman’s paper changed from the Daily Star to the Daily Planet. The answer became that all those ‘40s
stories took place on a parallel Earth; Earth-2.
Introducing Earth-2 gave the writers a chance to revisit
this other world and even develop it free from the burdens of maintaining a
status quo and that’s exactly what they did. In the late ‘70s the idea was introduced that on that other
Earth Superman briefly had his memory wiped and become a much more powerful and
assertive Clark Kent. Lois ended
up falling for this Clark, marrying him, discovering his true identity, and
returning his identity thus making her the wife of Superman on this world. Also the two adopted Superman’s cousin
of that Earth Power Girl as their daughter.
All of this ended up more important than you’d think in 1986
when DC decided to do away with the entire Multiverse and restart all of their
comics in the event Crisis on Infinite
Earths. The crux of the shake
up was that things were too complicated and that starting over would allow the
writers to get rid of the junk stuff but keep the most popular parts of the old
universe. As it turns out, the
marriage of Lois and Clark was a pretty popular element of that old universe so
plans got underway pretty quickly to hitch the to back together.
The idea sprung out of a revised status quo for Lois and
Clark as people. In the
post-crisis universe Clark Kent was made to be a lot more competent and
intelligent rather than the classical milksop bungler of previous comics and
Lois’ relationship with him evolved from antagonistic to friendly to actively
romantic. Clark and Lois eventually
ended up together and after awhile Clark proposed marriage, eventually
revealing his identity to Lois shortly after proposing.
The marriage didn’t happen immediately though. By this point we’ve entered the early
‘90s and WB was working to revitalize their Superman media property in the wake
of their recent successful Batman franchise. As such, they were scrambling to get Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman off the ground and
didn’t want to create confusion by having Clark and Lois married in the comics
but unmarried onscreen.
For this reason (and several others) DC decided to pull the
trigger on a major event comic and actually have Superman die, beaten to death
by the super menace Doomsday. In
the wake of Superman’s death, the Reign of the Supermen follow up series, and
Superman’s eventual return to normalcy, the two didn’t actually get married to
fall 1996; the same time when Lois and Clark also got married in the live
action TV show.
From this point on Lois got a lot less vital to Superman and
his attendant mythos. She sat out
the rest of the decade and most of the 2000s as well, she was still around she
was just never as important as she had been in previous decades. She only really returned to any kind of
prominence in the late 2000s during the long build-up to the mega-event New
Krypton. As part of the long road
to that series Superman and Lois briefly adopted the son of General Zod, naming
him Chris Kent and raising him as their own.
This graduated Lois from wife to mother and gave her a more
active role beyond just Superman’s emotional support buttress. Later, when two whole cities of
Kryptonians survived and set-up an artificial planet called New Krypton, a
wedge was driven between Lois and Clark when Superman chose to stay on New
Krypton, helping them build their new world. This was the time when writers were really trying to beef up
Lois’ role, sending her on a globetrotting news hunt around the mysterious
Earth force Project 7734, an anti-Superman/Kryptonian defense unit.
All of this development got swept away pretty immediately in
2011 during the New 52 reboot, which reverted Lois and Clark to their unmarried
position. Most of New 52 Lois’
adventures are pretty standard for her, running around as a Superman supporting
character and usually serving as the human perspective on Clark’s
adventures. Things do get a little
more interesting in the ‘Truth’ storyline, in which Superman’s secret identity
became revealed, first to Lois and then to the world, but all of that got blown
out by the Convergence event before
much could come of any of it.
In the wake of that event, the Lois and Superman prior to
the New 52 were reintroduced to continuity, acting as secret superheroes to
help this world avoid the mistakes of the previous one. This Lois was a mother once more,
managing to have conceived a child with Superman named Jonathan. As for the New 52 Lois Lane, she
developed superpowers of her own and took up the name Superwoman, her comic has
yet to premiere so I can’t tell you much about what’s happening there.
However, if you needed any indication of Lois Lane’s
persisting importance to the DC universe it should tell you a lot that there
are currently 2 Lois Lanes in the comic, one working as a mom and undercover
journalist and the other acting as a full on superhero in her own right.
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