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LOOK! UP IN THIS THREAD! Let’s Read… Superman!
- Thread starter Octopus Prime
- Start date
By the way, that's from Action Comics #500, and it got me thinking, "Oh, I bet Nelson Bridwell had a hand in that. He was the architect of all of the continuity "fixes" for a generation." And yeah, Marty Pasko officially wrote it, but Nelson and Julie Schwartz were the editors.
Back to Lois Lane #6 for Lois Lane: Convict. Written and drawn by some combination of Bill Finger, Jerry Coleman, Kurt Shaffenberger, Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye.
We open with Lois Lane walking in front of a store admiring a pretty dress, when she’s confronted by some guy who gives her a $5000 prize for being the fifth person to walk in front of that window and admire a pretty dress, and all she has to do to earn that money is not write anything for three days.
In retrospect, her day would have been a lot better if she simply accepted this, since she lives in Metropolis and it’s not like it’d be in the top 30 unusual things to happen on that street that day. But no, she questions it and the creepy guy immediately drops the facade; he’s bribing her because he’s part of the mob and she’s about to expose his boss.
And Lois figures, “Well… okay… I can expose the leader of this counterfeiting ring in 3 days just as easily as I can this afternoon, and that is an awful pretty dress…” and takes him up on it.
Nominally she also uses the money to get her mother a life saving operation and uses the change to buy a pretty dress, but there’s absolutely no follow up on that and I thought Lois’ mother was dead anyway so… maybe she didn’t?
Anyway, a few days later the same creepy guy shows up and offers her more money in order to stop her story again, and she initially rebukes him, but… well… mobsters aren’t known for their sense of letting bygones be bygones and he blackmails her with photos of her accepting the initial bribe.
He… still gives her the money, and continues to pay her for continuously not publishing her expose, so I feel like there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about how blackmail and extortion are supposed to work.
Anyway, Lois doesn’t seem to mind too much, outside of some nagging guilt, and immediately starts spending her
Money frivolously on cars and expensive jewelry.
And, yes, it was the 1950s and things were generally a bit less complicated back then but paying for fancy sports cars and expensive jewelry in cash tends to raise a few eyebrows, and, sure enough one of the salesmen identifies money Lois has been spending as crime money, and she’s immediately arrested for accepting bribes!
I should stress that the mob is counterfeiting license plates, not cash, so… how it’s connected is a mystery.
And despite the Daily Planets insistence that Lois would never accept a bribe and also getting a character witness in the form of Superman, and the fact that she accepted the original bribe in order to save someone’s life and the consequent ones under duress, she is sentenced to one full decade in prison.
Is… is that a normal sentence for accepting a bribe? I kind of thought it was a “Well, we’re taking that money back and also you’ve lost credibility” kind of punishment.
Superman at least does his part to make sure Lois’ dime in ol’ stony lonesome isn’t completely miserable.
Thanks, Kal. Big help.
Anyway, the nameless mobster who kept bribing Lois figures he owes her a solid for being a good sport about taking his money and stages a jail break for her, taking her to the leader of the counterfeiting mob.
Lex Luthor Baldy Pate, the unfortunately named infamous mob boss! Not sure if that’s a nickname or it’s just a coincidence. Again, Metropolis in the 1950s, both are equally plausible.
Anyway, Baldy has come to discover the ridiculously inept way his underlings have gone about blackmailing Lois and decided to step things up a touch; demanding Lois fork over the evidence of his identity, or else he’ll shoot her dead.
Luckily this is when Superman flies in and says “Oh… nah” and rounds up the gangsters for the cops, and we learn the truth about this whole sordid affair.
Surprisingly, it does *not* involve Superman gaslighting Lois. But it does require subterfuge on a ridiculous scale from a huge number of people and probably still ruined Lois’ entire careers worth of journalistic integrity.
It seems that Lois never actually knew Baldy Pate’s identity (beyond knowing him on sight, or else she’s just incredibly rude and pointed out his baldness), but DID know that there was a license plate counterfeiting ring operating out of the city. So she falsified a story that she was going to expose them, leading to them trying to bribe her, then extort her for further compliance, and then eventually meet their leader after she went to prison rather than identify him as a reward (or being executed gangland style, as the case may be). Then she’d have Superman and the cops show up to arrest Baldy.
Anyway, this all works flawlessly, Lois is exonerated for all her crimes but has to return all the expensive things she spent the mob money on. Except the pretty dress, they let her keep that as compensation for her time and her now tarnished reputation.
I’ll assume they also didn’t demand a refund on her mom’s operation but, again, it never came up and I thought she was dead anyway, so maybe they did. They just ripped that new kidney right out of her.
RIP, Lois Lanes Mom.
And there’s a third story, Lois Lane: US Army, but it’s pretty thin. Lois gets a temporary position in the army for a puff piece, and immediately goes mad with power, but it’s a trick in service of letting her examine the base commanders belongings in order to prove he’s actually a spy for a foreign government. Really it feels more like the artist and writer wanted to spend 8 pages of an attractive lady in a uniform bossing a bunch of guys around and, hey, let your freak-flag fly, some combination of Bill Finger, Jerry Coleman, Kurt Shaffenberger, Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye
We open with Lois Lane walking in front of a store admiring a pretty dress, when she’s confronted by some guy who gives her a $5000 prize for being the fifth person to walk in front of that window and admire a pretty dress, and all she has to do to earn that money is not write anything for three days.
In retrospect, her day would have been a lot better if she simply accepted this, since she lives in Metropolis and it’s not like it’d be in the top 30 unusual things to happen on that street that day. But no, she questions it and the creepy guy immediately drops the facade; he’s bribing her because he’s part of the mob and she’s about to expose his boss.
And Lois figures, “Well… okay… I can expose the leader of this counterfeiting ring in 3 days just as easily as I can this afternoon, and that is an awful pretty dress…” and takes him up on it.
Nominally she also uses the money to get her mother a life saving operation and uses the change to buy a pretty dress, but there’s absolutely no follow up on that and I thought Lois’ mother was dead anyway so… maybe she didn’t?
Anyway, a few days later the same creepy guy shows up and offers her more money in order to stop her story again, and she initially rebukes him, but… well… mobsters aren’t known for their sense of letting bygones be bygones and he blackmails her with photos of her accepting the initial bribe.
He… still gives her the money, and continues to pay her for continuously not publishing her expose, so I feel like there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about how blackmail and extortion are supposed to work.
Anyway, Lois doesn’t seem to mind too much, outside of some nagging guilt, and immediately starts spending her
Money frivolously on cars and expensive jewelry.
And, yes, it was the 1950s and things were generally a bit less complicated back then but paying for fancy sports cars and expensive jewelry in cash tends to raise a few eyebrows, and, sure enough one of the salesmen identifies money Lois has been spending as crime money, and she’s immediately arrested for accepting bribes!
I should stress that the mob is counterfeiting license plates, not cash, so… how it’s connected is a mystery.
And despite the Daily Planets insistence that Lois would never accept a bribe and also getting a character witness in the form of Superman, and the fact that she accepted the original bribe in order to save someone’s life and the consequent ones under duress, she is sentenced to one full decade in prison.
Is… is that a normal sentence for accepting a bribe? I kind of thought it was a “Well, we’re taking that money back and also you’ve lost credibility” kind of punishment.
Superman at least does his part to make sure Lois’ dime in ol’ stony lonesome isn’t completely miserable.
Thanks, Kal. Big help.
Anyway, the nameless mobster who kept bribing Lois figures he owes her a solid for being a good sport about taking his money and stages a jail break for her, taking her to the leader of the counterfeiting mob.
Anyway, Baldy has come to discover the ridiculously inept way his underlings have gone about blackmailing Lois and decided to step things up a touch; demanding Lois fork over the evidence of his identity, or else he’ll shoot her dead.
Luckily this is when Superman flies in and says “Oh… nah” and rounds up the gangsters for the cops, and we learn the truth about this whole sordid affair.
Surprisingly, it does *not* involve Superman gaslighting Lois. But it does require subterfuge on a ridiculous scale from a huge number of people and probably still ruined Lois’ entire careers worth of journalistic integrity.
It seems that Lois never actually knew Baldy Pate’s identity (beyond knowing him on sight, or else she’s just incredibly rude and pointed out his baldness), but DID know that there was a license plate counterfeiting ring operating out of the city. So she falsified a story that she was going to expose them, leading to them trying to bribe her, then extort her for further compliance, and then eventually meet their leader after she went to prison rather than identify him as a reward (or being executed gangland style, as the case may be). Then she’d have Superman and the cops show up to arrest Baldy.
Anyway, this all works flawlessly, Lois is exonerated for all her crimes but has to return all the expensive things she spent the mob money on. Except the pretty dress, they let her keep that as compensation for her time and her now tarnished reputation.
I’ll assume they also didn’t demand a refund on her mom’s operation but, again, it never came up and I thought she was dead anyway, so maybe they did. They just ripped that new kidney right out of her.
RIP, Lois Lanes Mom.
And there’s a third story, Lois Lane: US Army, but it’s pretty thin. Lois gets a temporary position in the army for a puff piece, and immediately goes mad with power, but it’s a trick in service of letting her examine the base commanders belongings in order to prove he’s actually a spy for a foreign government. Really it feels more like the artist and writer wanted to spend 8 pages of an attractive lady in a uniform bossing a bunch of guys around and, hey, let your freak-flag fly, some combination of Bill Finger, Jerry Coleman, Kurt Shaffenberger, Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye
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Well, the idea of this thread was picking a random Superman issue each time but… this was next on the list and how could I say no to a cover like The Secret of the Stone Age Superman (written by either Henry Boltinoff, Otto Binder or Leo Dorfman, and drawn by some combination of Henry Boltinoff, Jim Mooney and Wayne Boring).
Anyway, because this isn’t called Analytical Caution comics, we immediately start with a cave-in in France stranding several spelunkers (including Perry White for some reason) deep underground. Luckily this is international news and Clark Kent happens to be standing near a radio when it’s announced, so… that whole crisis took less time to resolve than it did to read this sentence.
More relevant to the plot, while Superman was busy digging an escape tunnel for the spelunkers, He happened to dig into a hidden cave deep beneath the earth… and in it he found his own corpse, dead and buried for one million years.
Thats… umm… that’s a way to start your day.
Perry doesn’t really want to write a story about a million year old superman corpse since it’s… pretty frickin’ Wild, and Supes himself says “Yeah, I’m not super enthusiastic about this whole memento mori thing either”, but can’t really let it go (understandable). So he does what anyone would do, and flies through the Time Barrier to travel back in time to France in the year One Million BC.
Unfortunately, Superman apparently never traveled to the year One Million BC before and didn’t realize that this was back when the sun was red, and not its usual healthy Yellow, so as soon as he touches down his powers quickly start to fade.
I don’t think the sun was red one million years ago, but that’s also hardly the only scientific inaccuracy we’re about to see.
Anyway, remember that episode of the Justice League cartoon where Superman travelled to the far future and had to survive amidst the mutated animals of a post apocalyptic earth? Same deal here, but the other direction. Due to a “freak of evolution” there’s still dinosaurs in Ancient France, but they’re all jacked up and weird looking (that may just be the artist drawing without a reference, however), and since Clark is all man, no Super, he has to rely on his wits to survive.
“Wits” meaning “run like hell and hide in a cave” but, like… that’s still pretty far outside his usual wheelhouse for problem solving.
Anyway, he makes a fire to keep warm using his glasses (which he brought with him back in time in case he needed to convince any cavemen that Clark Kent and Superman are different people) and he’s seen by some cavemen.
Luckily Superman made it a point to learn to speak fluent… err… Cave-French the last time he traveled through time so he can speak to the Cavemen easily. Theyre also extremely erudite cavemen, and the narrow brow ridges indicate that these are homosapiens and not Neanderthals. Which I also don’t think existed one million years ago.
Also, their leader, Guar, looks almost exactly like Abraham Lincoln. This isn’t relevant to the plot but it’s good to know that he could find work as an ancient French caveman celebrity impersonator.
Anyway, Guar first assumes Superman is a god because he dresses in bright clothing, can conjure flame from the air and has a wallet full of pictures of Guars face. Then he sees Clark struggle to open a walnut without tools and says “Oh… nah.” And declares himself the superior of God instead.
Guar is a man of powerful, changing opinions.
Anyway, Guar decides to prove he’s the superior to any god by beating the absolute holy hell out of Clark, but it winds up being more of an even fight than either expected; Guar has a huge advantage in size and strength, but Clark has taken modern martial arts classes (not a skill he employs very often) so he has the advantage on speed and reflexes.
But Guar still wins and hucks Clark into a ravine, where he’s found by a befoutiful cave lady who looks exactly like Lois (again, not relevant, a weird coincidence, just needed to get her in the story somehow I guess) who nurses him back to health with medicine that can cure… being bashed up by rocked and pterodactyls.
Cave Lois explains that she’d be able to heal Clark faster if she had access to potable water, but her village has been stricken by a drought, and the only Caveman who knows where fresh water can be found is Guar and he’s been extorting the village for months.
These cavemen have access to pottery and a financial system backed on a limited but plentiful resource (in this case; animal tusks), and those are… like… early spots on a tech tree in Civilization, but it’s pretty bonkers advanced for One Million BC. So France was once a futuristic utopia.
Anyway, Superman hears that a big tough guy is exploiting innocent people by withholding a vital resource and taking all their property and says “The hell he is!” And proceeds to Superman the hell out of this problem.
By Silver Age comics standards the solution is minimally bonkers. Clark pretends to charge at Guar and his henchmen and gets cornered and beaten to death with rocks as a result. But it turns out it was actually a dummy full of straw and red berries to simulate blood, wearing Supermans costume. Guar still takes the costume off the dummy because the fancy clothes were really all he wanted anyway.
And while Guar was distracted Clark rounded up all the impoverished Cavemen, taught them how to make aqueducts, and used them to steal the fresh water from Guars reservoir.
Aqueducts are another thing that I am absolutely certain didn’t exist in Caveman times. So either Superman simply does not give a hoot about the butterfly effect or France is the most advanced culture the world has ever conceived of and they just keep it on the DL.
Either way, Superman is still stuck in that era, since he can’t move fast enough to break the time barrier under a red sun, so he decides to settle in and make a life for himself amidst the relatively hyper advanced Cavemen of prehistoric France, when… the writer realized they only had one page left if they wanted to devote the rest of the comic to a Supergirl backup story, so it’s time for a deus ex Machina.
Somewhat more literally than usual since one of the Superman Robots Clark uses when an additional Superman is needed pops into Prehistoric France, saying that it figured something went wrong when Clark didn’t return from the ancient past right away and the red sun doesn’t affect robots like it does flesh and blood Kryptonians, so it can just bring him back to the present.
Which Clark takes him up on, obviously, but he doesn’t bother retrieving his Superman suit from Guar, who went on to wear it for the rest of his life and *that* was the skeleton Superman found that started this whole mess.
I guess the lesson here is… it’s important to go back in time if you discover a corpse wearing your shirt so you can close a time loop.
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
THAT'S WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO? Because right now I have two copies of the same outfit and it feels pretty good.
Moving on to the rest of the comic, The Anti Supergirl Plot, by… whichever combination of Henry Boltinoff, Otto Binder, Leo Dorfman, Jim Mooney and Wayne Boring didn’t work on the Superman story.
And with a splash page like that you’d naturally think “Woah, what could be causing Supergirl to come into conflict with her good friends, Batman, and the Greens Arrow and Lantern?”
Then you might think “Well, maybe not friends, but they certainly work in the same field”
Luckily for those of us who can’t handle stress of the unknown, this is a Silver Age Superman book so that enticing mystery doesn’t really have time to cook before it’s explained.
While attending the first of a weird number of school dances in this 8 page backup story that takes place in a college, the organizer reveals the band she hired to play; in the style of the Beatles and the Monkees, we have The Heroes.
But the name is spelled correctly, and “Heroes” aren’t animals (well, except, like, Detective Chimp) and those are hardly the first band to be named after a concept. So it’s not *really* in the style of those bands at all.
Also their band includes a harpsichord and a xylophone/tapdancer and their songs have lyrics like “Block Busting Baby, I’m going Batty for you” so… they’re not quite offering the same level of gifted lyricism of Maxwells Silver Hammer either.
Anyway, the band, which includes members dressed like Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Batman and Supergirl captivates the audience with their terrible songs, and admittedly impressive prop work. In fact they captivate them entirely too well, so much so that nobody notices three quarters of the band run off stage while the ersatz Supergirl performs a soft-shoe tap routine on a xylophone. And we learn the horrifying truth; the so called heroes are nothing more than dang dirty crime guys; planning on sneaking through the mansion that’s… hosting a college dance for some reason and looking for stuff to steal.
A plan which works wonders thanks to the Green Arrow having an arrowhead full of “Hyper Acid” that can burn through a safe wall!
Which sounds more impressive than it is since it takes hours to eat through the wall so they had to Come back later to rob the mansion a second time. And hope that nobody, over the course of several hours, noticed the overwhelming toxic scent of melting steel.
Luckily nobody did, it was the perfect crime.
The next day they decide to do the same thing again; this time the Heroes are playing at Stanhope College itself during a pledge drive to raise money for scholarships.
It’s the mid 1960s and don’t know enough about college finances to know if that’s weird or not. The sheer amount of school dances this college has is weird though, right?
Anyway, same thing happens again, Fake Supergirl takes the stage, the Heroes run out the back door and Fake Green Lantern uses the metal detector in his ring to find treasure and Fake Batman and Fake Arrow steal it; this time making off with the chemistry labs Rare minerals and… umm… blue prints for top secret military weapons.
Stanhope works with DARPA, I guess? Also, maybe lock those up a bit more securely than a combination lock that a guy dressed like Batman can break open real easily?
Anyway, after stopping a traffic accident on the level of the opening of Final Destination 2 (not relevant to the story but there needs to be something like that happening every couple of pages) Supergirl learns that Stanhope was robbed of its WMD plans and rather than saying “Wait… we were building what?!?” SGs main concern was with the head of the… umm… weapon development lab possibly losing his job because he’s been deemed a security risk.
He absolutely should lose his job because he’s a security risk.
I think doing that bad of a job hiding weapon Design plans counts as treason.
Anyway, hearing that a second place that the Heroes have played at has been the victim of a major robbery that same night is all the clues Supergirl needs to decide that this band might be worth questioning (the police did not and do not show any awareness of this significant piece of information), so she decides to follow up on it in the most efficient way possible; by going from hotel to hotel to see if she can see any Members of the band sitting in any of the rooms.
Luckily she guessed right on her first try.
She finds the bands Supergirl crying on a bed , and she explains to the *real* Supergirl that she was hired for her spellbinding tap dance/xylophone skills *before* being aware that the band was using her as a distraction to perform very deliberate and methodical robberies, and then they just blackmailed her into continuing to help them commit felonies/out right treason.
Supergirl comes up with a plan; to replace the Fake Supergirl in the band then, when the Heroes sneak off to do more crimes, interrupt the show to catch them doing crime. And luckily Stanhope has its third school dance that week scheduled so she doesn’t have long to wait.
The plan works well-ish and SG punches the absolute bajeezus out of half the band, but then the thing on the cover page happens and the fake Green Arrow pulls out a rock of Kryptonite he decided to bring along when he realized that the bands Supergirl was putting on a better show than usual so it was probably the real Supergirl!
The fake one performed so well that an entire audience full of people didn’t notice three quarters of the band sneak off stage and Kara hasn’t had any music training so… make of that as you will.
Anyway, Kara is being poisoned to death and the rest of the Heroes resume stealing stuff. They’re already on the hook for treason, what’s a little murder on top of that.
Luckily this is when the real Batman, GL and GA pop in to punch their doppelgängers and arrest them.
Turns out the On Stage Supergirl knew that the gang had some Kryptonite on hand but kind of… forgot to mention it when she and Kara were putting together the plan, so she tagged along in secret and got Kara away from the Kryptonite when the rest of the Heroes left her to die in silence.
Then using the most poorly explained of a Kryptonians abilities; Super Telepathy, she contacted the rest of the Justice League, told them what was up and they teleported right over to pulverize the guys who stole their valuable IP, as she was currently still mostly dead from radiation exposure.
And presumably had them sent off to The Hague because of the stolen military plans they were planning on selling to enemy countries.
Another Super End to a Super Day!
I can't speak to 1960s Stanhope College, but when I went to college, there were plenty of mansions that parties took place at. (We called them "eating clubs" because we're pretentious, but at most school those are frat houses.) And if there was a new hot band, the idea they'd play parties at multiple clubs in the same couple of weeks isn't actually that unreasonable. DJ Bob played three parties a week when I was an undergrad.
That said, I'm pretty sure there weren't any safes fully of valuables or military secrets. Drawers full of hazing equipment or old tests for cheating purposes, maybe? I remember mine had a big box of stale waffles for a while.
That said, I'm pretty sure there weren't any safes fully of valuables or military secrets. Drawers full of hazing equipment or old tests for cheating purposes, maybe? I remember mine had a big box of stale waffles for a while.
please don't make me think of Supergirl's period
I’m glad that girl’s conveniently expository thoughts explained what the heck ersatz-bats is playing there cause I was having a hell of a time figuring it out from the illustration. In my defense, harp is a pretty weird lead instrument choice for a sock-hop.
Ah, silver age Super powers, DC's Silver Age equivalent of "I've written into a corner, time to invent random BS to get out. Go, Super BLT Making!"
Classic Silver Age bait-and-switch, I saw that cover, and thought "Oh I got to see what this is about" and then BAM, the starting story is Introducing... Lois Lanes Parents, written by either Bill Finger or Robert Bernstein, and drawn by any possible combination of Kurt Shaffenberger, Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye. Nobodys head gets put into a lockbox, and people more familiar with later retcons of Lois Lanes home-life will no doubt be VERY confused (speaking from experience), but here we are.
Supermans Girlfriend Lois Lane was more in league with Archie style antics, but substantially more bonkers-ass and if Archie and Reggie were combined into a single character with the might of Earths Yellow Sun coursing through his veins, and this is a pretty good example of that.
We open in the Daily Planet offices where Lois Lane has requested a weekend off to visit her parent in her hometown of Pittsdale. And Perry White obliges because there's just no news happening at this week. We've seen what Perry White considers to be front-page worthy events for a major metropolitan newspaper, so if he's saying it's a slow news-day, then WOW, is there nothing going on.
Google tells me that this was several weeks before Hawaii was officially made a US state, and that Early August 1959 just had nothing going on whatsoever, so Perry is right. *No News*.
Anyway, Lois can't get a flight to her hometown and her (just awful) sister, Lucy Lane can't squeeze her in to a chartered flight at the last minute either (this is a pretty reasonable response, especially since Lucy is a flight attendant and not, like... a travel agent or a pilot, but Lucy is awful so her apology sounds more like a backhanded insult).
Luckily Lois is also dating a super-strong flying man so airplanes are kind of a luxury item when it comes to flying cross country.
Lois also drops some subtle concerns about her relationship status to Superman.
Anyway, in Pittsdale we meet Lois' parents. Despite the title, they're not really very relevant to the story. Now, in modern continuity, and I think it was a Post-Crisis retcon, Lois' father Sam Lane, was an army general who eventually wound up in command of the militaries anti-alien division. Which, naturally, put him in direct conflict with Superman himself, which was a good source of no shortage of Dramatic Tension in their relationship, and her army brat upbringing was a handy explanation for Lois' independent streak that granted her an excessive ability to locate and escape from danger and devil may care personality. Her mom, Ella, I think was dead, but I'm not sure; she never came up in the stories I've read.
Well here Sam and Ella are farmers in a small town, ambiguously far from Metropolis.
Superman writers really only had the one setting for character origins.
Luckily, much like how Metropolis is having a news-free weekend, so too is it having a weekend free from any kind of Silver Banshees or Atomic Skulls, so Supes decides to hang out at the Lane homestead for the weekend with her. He's extremely familiar with farm chores, since this is precisely the same as his own upbringing. All of which serves Sam Lane *just fine* and he says "Hey, why don't you marry my daughter. Then she could be a stay-at-home mother. It's the 1950s so that would be way better than her being a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper and going on ridiculous adventures several times a month."
Superman says "Uh.... no", but not because of the unexamined biases of the time and mostly because if he was married she'd have to spend her entire life hiding from supervillains who would assuredly threaten her to get to him and her ridiculous adventures would assuredly only increase.
Unfortunately, a nosy neighbor happened to be wandering nearby and overheard the part of the conversation where Siperman says he'd love to marry Lois Lane and missed the "but..." part. And, small town rumor mills being as efficient as they are, coupled with the fact that this is before Netflix or Gameboys and it's later in the afternoon before the whole of Pittsdale is convinced that Superman and Lois are now engaged and due to be married before the weekend is over. And also organized a parade to celebrate their engagement.
Lois' reaction to her surprise impending nuptials are to say "Okay... this is clearly not in the spirit I meant when I was complaining about you not proposing before. Superman, you usually solve problems like this through gaslighting and elaborate moralizing hoaxes... so... do that".
And Superman says "Well I can't do that on *command*, gimme a minute here..." and in the meantime Lois and Superman just have to suffer through the casual embarrassment of Sam Lane showing embarrassing baby photos and demanding the Strange Visitor from the Stars start boinking his daughter immediately; he's overdue for being a grandparent.
Also Lois is confronted by an old ex.
I don't know what the graceful form of this interaction would look like, but certainly not this.
Anyway, Supes still hasn't thought of a way to trick the town into NOT forcing he and Lois to get married without breaking the whole towns collective hearts and now it's time for the wedding. Complete with a surprise air-show!
An extremely surprising, dangerously low-altitude air-show, that manages to drown out the officiant presiding over the wedding. Turns out that just before the wedding, Superman managed to place a phonecall to Lucy Lane who was able to use the apparently infinite power being a flight attendant affords to to redirect a series of air force jets to buzz the wedding and interrupt the I-Dos. Which I thought were just ceremonial, but I guess they have to actually be audible to count.
Then again I also thought at least one of the married couple has to be inclined to marry the other and/or hold a wedding too. Pittsdale has its own customs and we are not to judge.
Anyway, wedding ceremony or no, Supes and Lois had a *hard out* at six PM when their weekend off was over, and the jets were enough to delay the wedding past that, so they have to bid everyone adieu and say they'll get married the next time they're in town. The Essential Superman Encyclopedia I have beside me, does not indicate Sam and Ella Lane showing up again pre-crisis, so I have to assume that Lois simply never met her parents again after this.
And so the day is saved from Superman and Lois having a shotgun wedding, and all it cost was the ear health of an entire town. And that one big-ears guy is probably emotionally ruined for life.
It's probably just a coincidence, but many years later, there was a music-themed Elseworlds story ("Rockumentary") set in a universe where the Justice League was a Beatles-style band called "The Heroes".
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
Look at this motherfucker
SuperSmugMan
Back to Jimmy and, as usual we’ve got three stories of varying quality and a few page fillers worth of sub-Archie goofs and gags. Plus a prose story of arctic survival. Kids got a lot of comic for a dime in 1955, and it all came to us courtesy of Otto Binder, Henry Boltinoff, Curt Swan and Ray Burnley.
First, Jimmy must deal with the chilling real world consequences of severe toxoplasmosis in the shorter but most fun of the stories… Jimmy Olsen: Boy Millionaire!
It’s a typical day of Nothing Newsworthy Happening (this issue was published less than a week after the assassination of the president of Panama) and so Jimmy Olsen is assigned the important story of interviewing a hyper-wealthy weird old cat lady.
Suddenly tragedy strikes and she accidentally locks one of her dozens of cats in a secure vault that she used to store cat photos in and immediately passes out from shock.
Luckily Jimmy has a signal watch for moments of deadly peril and figures Supermans default Mindset is “Save The Cat” ; so he calls him over and Supes yanks the vault door clean off the hinges, before pointedly telling Jimmy this was a stupid waste of his time as politely as possible and flying off to go fight Bizarro or something.
The wealthy dowager, her brain addled by toxoplasma, sees a reinforced bank vault sheered from her wall and figures that Jimmy Olsen must have used a burst of heroic resolve to rip it out and rewards him with millions of dollars; Turning Jimmy Olsen into some kind of boy millionaire.
Whereupon he immediately becomes cartoonishly snobby to an extent that the Monopoly Man himself would ask him to take it down a notch, it’s a bit offensive. Adjusting for inflation, that’s a little over 11,340,000 in 2024 dollars, which ain’t chump change but I don’t think it’s “Buy a new luxury car every day” rich.
Anyway, Jimmys excessive flaunting of wealth doesn’t escape the notice of… the truly ridiculous number of mobsters who call Metropolis home despite the close proximity of a flying super strong man with a real zest in his step for saving people from danger and exploitation.
One of them (whose name I neglected to screenshot but was probably something like Mugs “Fakey” Shakedown) sees Jimmy as an easy mark, despite the fact that him being friends with Superman is common knowledge, and poses as a butler for him. And Jimmy is so blinded by luxury that he doesn’t even think to give him a background check before hiring him.
Needless to say, Mugs Fakey Shakedown doesn’t waste much time before going into a needlessly complex plan to rob him, writing a fake note in Supermans handwriting saying to bring all of Jimmys wealth to a dilapidated old house, then waiting for for Jimmy to do so, lock him in a room then, after a few minutes, running in, shooting him to death and then looting his body for the money.
His plan probably would have worked better if he skipped a couple steps in the middle there.
Anyway, Jimmy doesn’t have his Signal Watch on hand (it wasn't waterproof) but he *does* have millions of dollars in assorted bills, so he chucks all of them into the fireplace and hopes that Superman can identify the odor of burning money, correctly surmise the vast value of the bills he’s burning and come and rescue him.
Luckily he can and does, which is good since we’re out of pages for this story. Jimmy is right back to being a lowly cub reporter in a minimum wage tax bracket (though the Olsen family is super rich as well. That may be a retcon)
So on to our next adventure, where no actual crime or danger takes place, The Fastest Gun in the West, where Jimmy is visiting scenic Tumbleweed USA, the rootin’ tootinest town this side of Missouri.
It also got a teensy problem with also being the shootin’est, courtesy of Gunsmoke Gus, a real bad hombre what has two shootin’ irons and a real hankerin’ to send galoots off to the wild blue yonder.
So the town is basically Deadwood but with the swears replaced with additional guns.
So Jimmy shows up under assignment by Perry White to cover the “big show in town” and is almost immediately shot several times by a psychopathic cowboy, before witnessing him gun down a man in cold blood.
Really gives a strong impression of what Perry thinks of Jimmy.
So while Jimmy is a bit shook by the bonkers-ass level of uncontested violence he witnessed as soon as he set foot in town, we cut to Gunsmoke Gus and his pardners, who reveal to… each other I guess, that the were faking all his murders. Each victim was an actor they hired in order to scare the townsfolk into thinking they’ve actually got an unstoppable killing machine in town. It’s kind of like how most frontier town educational tourist spots work except they didn’t tell anyone they were doing it also the town just… is still in Cowboy times for some reason.
Anyway, Jimmy elects to disguise himself as a cowboy even though nobody in town knows who he is anyway, and even though he witnesses Gus cheating at cards in a game amidst his friends, does not inspire the town to turn against this man who is pretending to murder strangers.
So Jimmy investigates the town cemetery for further evidence of Gus’ wrong doing (besides the fact that everyone is very certain he’s been shooting people and are correspondingly terrified of him) and discovers foot prints that exactly match the boot tracks of the guy he witnessed be shot and immediately jumps to the conclusion that Gus and the people he’s been shooting are in cahoots, he’s pretending to murder them so he can scare the townsfolk into leaving him alone while he acts like an asshole!
This is, to be fair, completely correct and exactly what’s happening but it is also, like, the fiftieth most logical conclusion to reach from the evidence.
Anyway, Jimmy decides to call his bluff by challenging Gus to a duel, surviving because Gus shoots blanks, and then expose him for not having committed any actual crimes! Gus, for his part, knows the jig is up and decides to escalate from “not doing anything illegal” to “murder Jimmy Olsen” and swaps his fake gun for a real one.
Luckily Superman shows up and intercepts the bullet meant to take Jimmys life; turns out Jimmy misheard Perry’s instructions in the first place; he was supposed to go to the town of Tumble*wood* and cover a rodeo. And once Supes realized his buddy made a mistake immediately went to see what he was up to because that kid can’t go five minutes unsupervised without someone trying to kill him for incomprehensible reasons.
Anyway, Supes reminds everyone that, up until the last couple of minutes, nothing Gus did was technically illegal so he doesn’t warrant anything more than a stern talking to… but he’s already ran out of town in abject terror, which is nominally a lesson about how bullies can’t stand any resistance, but I think he’s more concerned about the consequences of trying to murder the best friend of the worlds mightiest living being.
And that brings us to the third story, Jimmy Olsen vs Nightcrawler (the movie, not the X-Man) in The Man Who Collected Excitement, which is in that unfortunate spot where it’s actually a pretty solid story that doesn’t lend itself well to lighthearted goof-em-up recaps. Jimmy is being given tips to exciting news stories that all wind up being hoaxes (a tenement fire is revealed to be a harmless, but Smokey, grease fire, an alien attack is just an inflatable balloon, that sort of thing) and he’s accused to causing a public panic in order to drum up attention for the Daily Planet, meanwhile Jimmy himself suspects a local weirdo obsessed with taking photos of people in abject terror.
As it turns out it’s neither, a local criminal was causing terrifying hoaxes and letting both Jimmy and The Local Weirdo take the fall for it while his actual intent was to see where wealthy people hide their valuables when they’re scared, then stealing it when everyone’s calmed down.
anyway, besides the thefts and the framing, he also tried to blow up a damn with dynamite and flood the Metropolis suburbs and that’s… a bit of a threat escalation by Jimmy Olsen comics standards, so naturally Superman says “Oh yeah… definitely gotta send you to jail, bud. My hands are tied.”
It's just super science.
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
Does the camera weirdo help in some way or does he learn a lesson or do we learn a lesson about excepting his kink of photographing people in mortal terror or...
Excellent question
No, he’s just a guy whose disaster-horny.
No, he’s just a guy whose disaster-horny.
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
So he's just a red herring. What's his final moment in the comic. They decided to title the story after him, surely there's a great punch line or something for him.
This set up I'm giving you assumes no, though, despite all logic.
Not just the story, the entire issue.
The punchline at the end is Perry is making Jimmy work late to write up the story, making Jimmy the fall guy afterall.
The punchline at the end is Perry is making Jimmy work late to write up the story, making Jimmy the fall guy afterall.
According to the US inflation calculator, it's $11,778,507.46, so maybe inflation's gone up in the last twelve hours.
I think I was using the CAD calculator. Or maybe Metropolis has a really weird economy that’s throwing off the range.
We’ve got two personal milestones here as this is the first time I covered a two-parter and it’s the first issue I’ve so far found with some credits in it, so I can say, with definitive authority, that Ed Hamilton, Curt Swan and George Klein have be the ones to solemnly announce… The Death of Luthor.
Who I see was interred with his pants off.
ANYHOO, business as usual supervillain prison outside of Metropolis, which is to say Lex Luthor has escaped from it. And because this is a Silver Age Superman comic, it’s obviously an understated plan as ingenious as it is foolproof.
Lex built a robot replica of himself in the prison boiler room and set it off to rampage through the jail. When the guards were busy trying to subdue that, thinking it’s the real Luthor, Lex skeedaddle away, up to Cape Canaveral and stowed away in a rocket, piloting it to the Only Planet He Likes; the planet Lexor!
Lexor hasn’t come up before in this thread, or in my own reading, but the premise is pretty simple. It’s a planet that Lex visited once and he saved it from calamity, accidentally, while trying to help himself, so they worship him as the greatest hero in history, and Superman they regard as a great legendary evil because he has beef with their savior.
Anyway, it’s apparently a quick trip since the only supplies Lex brought on to the unmanned rocket was a single hammock and didn’t seem to mind the journey too much. And as soon as he lands he’s given a heroes welcome from the population. Later that same day he marries the planets princess.
All in all, pretty good day for ol’ Lex.
Meanwhile (relatively), back on Earth, Superman has noticed that 1. Lex Luthor is not in Prison and 2. An unmanned rocket went off into deep space and assumes these facts are related and that Lex must have stolen the rocket and scampered off to the only planet that likes him. And he feels obligated to grab him and haul him back to jail since he hasn’t really paid his debt to society yet.
I don’t know what Lexors extradition policies are like, but you’d have to assume they’re going to be strained since they appointed him ruler of the planet by popularity and adoration alone.
Additionally, Lexor is in orbit around a red sun, which saps Supermans powers making him a Normal Guy.
Still, Lex ain’t done being in jail yet, and none of the space cops on Supermans Christmas card list feel obligated to help out, so Supes gets himself in a space craft and heads off to Lexor to bring their king home in chains.
Naturally it immediately goes bad in *weird as hell* ways when he lands in a Jungle and is confronted by a Lexorian big game hunter who decides to make a name for himself by trapping and killing Superman in a tiger pit.
Superman escapes by tricking the hunter into wandering too close to an alien beast that forces you to tell the truth (I can’t imagine what kind of evolutionary niche that fills) and then realizing he’s being tricked, lures the hunter into his own trap.
Lex learns that Superman is on the planet (he built detectors to warn him which identify the colours of his costume, which I’m sure must have been going off constantly) and decides to go settle thing with him personally, despite his wife’s protests. And is in such a rush he forgot to put on pants.
So they meet in a graveyard and get into a fist fight…
…And Superman promptly Million Dollar Babies Lex.
Not… not really a “Worlds Finest” moment there, Clark.
So Superman is immediately made the planets chief pariah, is pelted by stone effigies of the gods and fed to a jellyfish before Lexs newly widowed wife says “Well… let’s at least pretend to have a code of justice and ethics and put him on trial”, so they do.
Also Brainiac, and a gang of the universes worst criminals show up to mourn Luthor, mainly to further ruin everyone’s already low-to-nil opinions of Superman.
Brainiac is a planet devouring cyber-god obsessed with his gluttonous desire for knowledge and personal improvement so… kind of petty.
Sham trial on a planet that universally hates him or no, Superman is appointed a public defender (by way of Spin the Bottle)
Superman explains his side of the story (he was looking to arrest their king for crimes committed on another planet, and accidentally punched him to death) and his attorney says “You… you can’t possibly think that’s a good defense.”
And then the comic abruptly ends because this is a two parter and we’ve got to learn about Supergirls first day of college!
Got to have priorities in order, Octo.
As promised, here is the exciting second part of the story… Supergirl Goes to College by Leo Dorgman and Jim Mooney! In which we learn that colleges are shockingly easy to get into and Supergirl only does a little mild attempted murder and bestiality.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, first a little interstitial hilarity.
Man, can’t makes jokes like that anymore. Because of woke.
Anyway, we open on Graduation Day of Middlevale High, where Supergirl has just graduated. Not with Honors Or any other distinction mind, she intentionally held back since her sun-charged super abilities would have been cheating; so she just struggled to maintain an unremarkable scholastic presence through her entire high school career.
Given that she spent most of her life up to that point on a decaying radioactive planetoid or unconscious in a space craft, that she maintained a steady C average is impressive.
Anyway while her grades were unimpressive the school board all agrees that Linda Danvers is just an all around good egg, so she’s getting a full scholarship to Stanhope College in strength of that alone.
College was really easy to get into back in the 60s.
Anyway, Linda Danvers (nè Kara Zor-el aka Supergirl) is barely in the front gates before she learns of the grim dark side of college life; sorority hazing rituals.
Among the absolute mildest ones ever depicted, like “roll a peanut uphill” and “stand in a fountain”
Truly the cruelty of the privileged knows no limit. But fortunately, Supergirl takes after her cousin in terms of “Oh… no we’re definitely asserting some limits on the cruelty of the privileged.” And vows to join the sorority, bypass its deadly gauntlet of inflicted misery and use her social clout to lower the intensity of the hazing down to… i’unno… offer a sincere compliment to someone who is looking depressed or helping beautify a public park or something.
Well it’s a Superman comic so it’d be a much more bonkers version of that.
Anyhoo, SG signs up for the Alpha Lamba sorority and it’s cruel matriarch Donna says “Okay kid, let’s see if you’ve got the goods.” and assigns her the first unimaginable challenge; to go to a department store and date the performer the store hired to draw in business.
Who it turns out is a chimp.
Do… do not hire a chimp to entertain crowds of shoppers. I simply can not overstate how dangerous that is.
Luckily Supergirls face is made indestructible by the yellow light of the sun and so the chimp can not tear it off her head. Furthermore, it turns out the chimp is Supermans oft forgotten pet, Super Monkey, and he and Kara go way back and he’s pretty receptive to going on a date with her.
They kiss, but no tongue stuff.
Kara’s second challenge is even more difficult; to take her boyfriend to the school dance in a ratty dress. This challenge is somewhat undercut by the fact that Jim Mooney apparently doesn’t know how to draw an ugly dress and the colourist didn’t think to lend any help so it looks pretty normal to me.
But this is Action Comics so there must be a ridiculous answer to this non-issue of a problem and what simpler solution could there be but to fly into space and heave asteroids at the moon so they cause a lunar eclipse that lasts for the duration of the dance so Linda’s boyfriend doesn’t notice that her dress I think has a couple of rips in it.
The third challenge is to find a mascot for the football team and it hinges on the fact that apparently a deadly virus is threatening all animal life and so all pets and livestock must be quarantined.This does not affect the plot whatsoever so it is a friggin’ bonkers-ass thing to just casually toss into a panel of this goofy story.
That is how Conquest the Planet of the Apes started!
Anyway, Supergirl knows a whole dang zoos worth of super powered animals so this is a non-starter of a challenge. She just gets Comet the Superhorse to do it. I guess she also could have asked someone to put on a costume, I don’t know why it had to be an actual animal. Pretty sure “Guys in Costumes” have been a thing for about as long as official sports teams have existed.
Anyway, at this point, Donna becomes suspicious; two of the three *simply impossible* hazing challenges have been solved by the timely intervention of the legion of Super Pets, and the third was addressed by a bunch of crap being thrown at the moon so Linda Danvers MUST be Supergirl.
She's right, but, to be fair, the thing with Super Monkey was just a coincidence.
Anyway, she decides her next challenges must be something that can't be solved by either being, or knowing, Supergirl thereby proving that... umm... their college has enrolled a lady who could derail a train by looking at it funny. I'm really not sure what the dramatic consequence of failure is here. Anyway, the fourth HUMILATING CHALLENGE is for SG to correctly identify a bus full of foreign exchange students, all from different countries, without asking anyone any questions. I guess... in case Donna is right, making Supergirl look kind of racist by misidentifying someone from Spain as someone from Italy or something.
Anyway, Linda is too smart for such a trick and instead hangs up a bunch of flags and expects that, like any college student worth their salt, they'd be compelled to salute the moment they see their countries flag.
I guess being able to correctly identify Ceylon's flag without help is a kind of superpower. (A quick search on Wikipedia tells me that Ceylon was renamed Sri Lanka in 1972, so I learned something new and interesting thanks to a Superman comic from the mid 60s)
Donna also challenges Linda to move all the books from the old Stanhope library to a new Stanhope library in one afternoon, and she gets around that by asking every student to help.
So, out of options, Donna decides to go for one final trump card in order to prove her entirely correct theory that Linda Danvers is actually Supergirl, and that's a little bit of attempted murder-suicide! She's gonna invite Linda on a nice drive, then pretend to lose control of the car and drive off a cliff; if Linda is really Supergirl, she'll save them, if not EVERYONE DIES!
So Kara can't use her quick wits to get out of this, so it's time for the old El family tradition; Deadly Pranks!
After confirming that the car is fine, Donna is just... trying to trick someone into thinking they're both about to die in a fiery car crash, Kara quickly adjusts the rearview mirror rapidly in order to hypnotize Donna so she actually does lose control of the car and drive it off a cliff; then, when Donna is panicking because her really excessive prank just took a hard swerve into "deadly misadventure", Kara pops out arranges a bunch of haybales on the nearby farmland into a cushion and guides the falling car towards that instead of the jagged rocks.
Donna says "Okay... I nearly killed myself and someone else and now I think I've kind of lost the hunger for hazing rituals I once enjoyed." and accepts Linda into the sorority. And indeed, her first act as "someone just accepted in" is to abolish hazing rituals.
Yay!
But I’m getting ahead of myself, first a little interstitial hilarity.
Man, can’t makes jokes like that anymore. Because of woke.
Anyway, we open on Graduation Day of Middlevale High, where Supergirl has just graduated. Not with Honors Or any other distinction mind, she intentionally held back since her sun-charged super abilities would have been cheating; so she just struggled to maintain an unremarkable scholastic presence through her entire high school career.
Given that she spent most of her life up to that point on a decaying radioactive planetoid or unconscious in a space craft, that she maintained a steady C average is impressive.
Anyway while her grades were unimpressive the school board all agrees that Linda Danvers is just an all around good egg, so she’s getting a full scholarship to Stanhope College in strength of that alone.
College was really easy to get into back in the 60s.
Anyway, Linda Danvers (nè Kara Zor-el aka Supergirl) is barely in the front gates before she learns of the grim dark side of college life; sorority hazing rituals.
Among the absolute mildest ones ever depicted, like “roll a peanut uphill” and “stand in a fountain”
Truly the cruelty of the privileged knows no limit. But fortunately, Supergirl takes after her cousin in terms of “Oh… no we’re definitely asserting some limits on the cruelty of the privileged.” And vows to join the sorority, bypass its deadly gauntlet of inflicted misery and use her social clout to lower the intensity of the hazing down to… i’unno… offer a sincere compliment to someone who is looking depressed or helping beautify a public park or something.
Well it’s a Superman comic so it’d be a much more bonkers version of that.
Anyhoo, SG signs up for the Alpha Lamba sorority and it’s cruel matriarch Donna says “Okay kid, let’s see if you’ve got the goods.” and assigns her the first unimaginable challenge; to go to a department store and date the performer the store hired to draw in business.
Who it turns out is a chimp.
Do… do not hire a chimp to entertain crowds of shoppers. I simply can not overstate how dangerous that is.
Luckily Supergirls face is made indestructible by the yellow light of the sun and so the chimp can not tear it off her head. Furthermore, it turns out the chimp is Supermans oft forgotten pet, Super Monkey, and he and Kara go way back and he’s pretty receptive to going on a date with her.
They kiss, but no tongue stuff.
Kara’s second challenge is even more difficult; to take her boyfriend to the school dance in a ratty dress. This challenge is somewhat undercut by the fact that Jim Mooney apparently doesn’t know how to draw an ugly dress and the colourist didn’t think to lend any help so it looks pretty normal to me.
But this is Action Comics so there must be a ridiculous answer to this non-issue of a problem and what simpler solution could there be but to fly into space and heave asteroids at the moon so they cause a lunar eclipse that lasts for the duration of the dance so Linda’s boyfriend doesn’t notice that her dress I think has a couple of rips in it.
The third challenge is to find a mascot for the football team and it hinges on the fact that apparently a deadly virus is threatening all animal life and so all pets and livestock must be quarantined.This does not affect the plot whatsoever so it is a friggin’ bonkers-ass thing to just casually toss into a panel of this goofy story.
That is how Conquest the Planet of the Apes started!
Anyway, Supergirl knows a whole dang zoos worth of super powered animals so this is a non-starter of a challenge. She just gets Comet the Superhorse to do it. I guess she also could have asked someone to put on a costume, I don’t know why it had to be an actual animal. Pretty sure “Guys in Costumes” have been a thing for about as long as official sports teams have existed.
Anyway, at this point, Donna becomes suspicious; two of the three *simply impossible* hazing challenges have been solved by the timely intervention of the legion of Super Pets, and the third was addressed by a bunch of crap being thrown at the moon so Linda Danvers MUST be Supergirl.
She's right, but, to be fair, the thing with Super Monkey was just a coincidence.
Anyway, she decides her next challenges must be something that can't be solved by either being, or knowing, Supergirl thereby proving that... umm... their college has enrolled a lady who could derail a train by looking at it funny. I'm really not sure what the dramatic consequence of failure is here. Anyway, the fourth HUMILATING CHALLENGE is for SG to correctly identify a bus full of foreign exchange students, all from different countries, without asking anyone any questions. I guess... in case Donna is right, making Supergirl look kind of racist by misidentifying someone from Spain as someone from Italy or something.
Anyway, Linda is too smart for such a trick and instead hangs up a bunch of flags and expects that, like any college student worth their salt, they'd be compelled to salute the moment they see their countries flag.
I guess being able to correctly identify Ceylon's flag without help is a kind of superpower. (A quick search on Wikipedia tells me that Ceylon was renamed Sri Lanka in 1972, so I learned something new and interesting thanks to a Superman comic from the mid 60s)
Donna also challenges Linda to move all the books from the old Stanhope library to a new Stanhope library in one afternoon, and she gets around that by asking every student to help.
So, out of options, Donna decides to go for one final trump card in order to prove her entirely correct theory that Linda Danvers is actually Supergirl, and that's a little bit of attempted murder-suicide! She's gonna invite Linda on a nice drive, then pretend to lose control of the car and drive off a cliff; if Linda is really Supergirl, she'll save them, if not EVERYONE DIES!
So Kara can't use her quick wits to get out of this, so it's time for the old El family tradition; Deadly Pranks!
After confirming that the car is fine, Donna is just... trying to trick someone into thinking they're both about to die in a fiery car crash, Kara quickly adjusts the rearview mirror rapidly in order to hypnotize Donna so she actually does lose control of the car and drive it off a cliff; then, when Donna is panicking because her really excessive prank just took a hard swerve into "deadly misadventure", Kara pops out arranges a bunch of haybales on the nearby farmland into a cushion and guides the falling car towards that instead of the jagged rocks.
Donna says "Okay... I nearly killed myself and someone else and now I think I've kind of lost the hunger for hazing rituals I once enjoyed." and accepts Linda into the sorority. And indeed, her first act as "someone just accepted in" is to abolish hazing rituals.
Yay!
Look. I’ve put in the work, I’ve done the required readings, you can check my bonafides. I’ve got a good handle on what kind of madness to expect from Silver Age comics.
So it is with no small amount of credulity that I say these might be the highest concentration of bonkers outside of a Bob Haney story I think I’ve read of Silver Age DC comics.
Let’s dig in shall we?
Starting with Alias: Lois Lane by any combination of Bill Finger, Robert Bernstein, Kurt Shaffenberger and Stan Kaye.
Where we open in “a famous big town in the western United States” (is… is Las Vegas copyrighted?) where Lois Lane is on a little vacation. And, being Lois Lane, that means “elaborate subterfuge in order to get a Big Scoop”. That’s how she frames it at least, she’s really there to get some candid snapshots of a major Hollywood western tv star who is having a honeymoon there.
He never appears on panel nor is mentioned by name, so let’s say it’s Lorne Greene.
Also, that’s really more of Nightcrawler style tabloid journalism and not the “reporter breaks up spy ring” kind of story that Lois integrates herself into, but it *is* still easier than her usual job.
Anyway, Lois dyes her hair and does less than zero backstory creation and calls it a day for constructing an elaborate disguise as Sadie Blodgette, a Dizzy Blond from Hairdye USA!
She also makes sure to pack a camera that looks like a gun, because… umm…
Hmm…
The idea is to take a discrete photo of a celebrity and I’m pretty sure pointing a normal camera at him would cause less of a stir than pointing a realistic handgun at him.
Anyway, Lois is so distracted making sure she’s able to keep her secret identity as “vapid airhead” straight that she trips over a curb and she spills the contents of her purse. Wherein the camera-disguised-as-a-gun is spotted by two motorists; who quickly surmise that she’s a career criminal who is going to rob a casino, and that furthermore she must have a criminal record that forbids her from owning a gun and also now they can blackmail her into helping them with their own crimes!
I don’t know what Las Vegas’ policies on gun control are, but this was the 1950s so I’m pretty sure that, until the bullets go inside someone, it’s totally fine to be stumbling around with one out in the open.
Anyway, these two criminals are members of the Anti Superman Gang, a mob outfit with the stated goal of Killing Superman. Since they operate out of a different state from Metropolis entirely, I have to assume they aren’t, like… super well informed on how he usually operates. But what they are immediately aware of is that Sadie Blodger, idiot, is a dead-ringer for Lois Lane from the eyebrows down. So they’re going to have Lois, disguised as Sadie, disguise herself as Lois in order to lure Superman into a trap and then murder the hell out of him.
The problem being that they’re going to first have to My Fair Lady “Sadie” into acting more like what they think Lois is really like.
Naturally this leads to a Deathnote level of double-reverse-extra-triple outsmarting each other.
And also Lois’ own ego getting in the way.
Eventually they decide to test Lois to see if she’s able to convincingly imitate herself by doing the one thing Lois does best in the world; fall off a building and have Superman save her.
Superman is in town for unrelated reasons but it didn’t come up in the story. He didn’t just fly over from Metropolis because someone who looks like Lois is in peril. Though I do think that hyper awareness of when Lois Lane is in danger is one of his powers.
Anyway, the crooks see Superman save Lois and figure “Hot dang, he doesn’t even know that’s just some lady we yanked off the street!” and decide to put the next part of their plan into effect; give Lois a fake camera with Kryptonite in it, have her take a picture of Superman with it, kill him, and then steal a box the army gave him, then get millions of dollars.
This part of the plan fails because, Of course Sadie actually is Lois and tells him “Hey, some gangsters are trying to use me to kill you. There’s some Kryptonite in a fake camera”. So he wrecks the camera, and hauls the crooks off to jail for attempted Supermanicide.
And we also find out what’s in that box that’s so damn important that someone will have to kill Superman and get paid a million dollars to do it.
Ten cents worth of space mice worth a fortune to Americas enemies, That’s what’s in it.
So on to the third story, which is a bit shorter even if it’s the one on the cover, The Shocking Secret of Lois Lane.
So we're opening up with Lois doing what she does best; acting in total defiance of passive voice as a reporter and putting herself in the story come hell of high water because that's how you Lois Lane, baby!
And in this case it was a really bad idea as she snuck into the back seat of someone she was pretty sure was a mob boss in disguise, and accidentally wrecked her car while in a high speed pursuit of what was probably an innocent man.
This is all off panel, and I have to assume it's not the second time Perrys had a call like this from her this year. Anyway a few days later, Lois does indeed come back to the office but has a little something extra added to her usual outfit; a lead lined box that completely covers her face, and she announces she's quitting the Daily planet and heading off to live in the forest as a mountain hermit. You know, because of the box on her head and all.
And everyone just goes right back to work, this is a normal weekday in Metropolis.
Superman, being a bit more concerned than confused that his girlfriend is wearing a lead-lined box on her head and moving to the mountains to live as a hermit, decides to do some investigating; and discovers some odd things in her apartment, such as that she left her make-up kit out without taking it with her ("something no woman would do" Superman thinks, because this was the 1950s) and opts to read her diary over the last few days. Normally, rude as all hell, but I'd argue that these are special circumstances.
So it turns out, just after she wrecked her car, Lois opted the best way to recover was to go to a cabaret and take in a magic show. And she's really opposed to the magicians assertion that she is Circe, the sorceress of Greek myth and decides to prove she's just putting on a vaudeville magic show.
Now, yes, "Duh". But Lois *does* live in Metropolis; the odds of a mythical sorceress coming to the modern world and starting a career as a stage magician aren't exactly negligible. But on the other hand, Circe is a Wonder Woman villain, and this is the Silver Age when heroes and villains didn't really cross pollinate so much. So Lois pokes around behind stage in order to expose this lady who was very obviously a stage magician for not actually having sorcerous powers.
And Circe says "Uh... what? What the hell lady?" and then doses her with a MAGIC POTION that will give her the appearance of a cat to match her curiosity.
And the next day, after several people saw her and were startled, Lois looks at her reflection and yep; she's Lois Lane Catgirl!
She's got a janky looking Bill the Cat kinda head rather than the sexy anime lady kind of catgirl so... that's an impediement to the ol' self esteem. Way more Dr. T'ana than Felicia.
Anyway, Lois figures "aw crap, I'm weird looking as hell" and it's about 50 years before Tumblr exists and informs her that being a catgirl is no problem for peoples judgement of your aesthetics so she gets a lead lined box made and opts to live in the mountains as a cat headed hermit.
It's a decision we all must confront in our darkest hours.
Anyway, Superman is old hat at problems like this so he has the Daily planet staff confront Lois nominally to prove they don't mind that she has a cat head, and Superman, her boyfriend, proves that he in particular is totally fine with it by hurling buzzsaws at her head to sheer off the helmet and reveal a totally normal looking Lois who still insists she's got a freaky cat head.
Turns out all Circe did was drug Lois and then hypnotize her into thinking she had a cat head (... that HAS to be at least one crime right?) and everyone who saw her earlier in the day and freaked out were startled by unrelated things that were coincidentally near her. Supes un-hypnotizes Lois because... he's Superman and he has an array of skills, and Lois has learned an important lesson about minding her own business.
...for about four seconds, because there's a hot scoop and she's got its scent.
So it is with no small amount of credulity that I say these might be the highest concentration of bonkers outside of a Bob Haney story I think I’ve read of Silver Age DC comics.
Let’s dig in shall we?
Starting with Alias: Lois Lane by any combination of Bill Finger, Robert Bernstein, Kurt Shaffenberger and Stan Kaye.
Where we open in “a famous big town in the western United States” (is… is Las Vegas copyrighted?) where Lois Lane is on a little vacation. And, being Lois Lane, that means “elaborate subterfuge in order to get a Big Scoop”. That’s how she frames it at least, she’s really there to get some candid snapshots of a major Hollywood western tv star who is having a honeymoon there.
He never appears on panel nor is mentioned by name, so let’s say it’s Lorne Greene.
Also, that’s really more of Nightcrawler style tabloid journalism and not the “reporter breaks up spy ring” kind of story that Lois integrates herself into, but it *is* still easier than her usual job.
Anyway, Lois dyes her hair and does less than zero backstory creation and calls it a day for constructing an elaborate disguise as Sadie Blodgette, a Dizzy Blond from Hairdye USA!
She also makes sure to pack a camera that looks like a gun, because… umm…
Hmm…
The idea is to take a discrete photo of a celebrity and I’m pretty sure pointing a normal camera at him would cause less of a stir than pointing a realistic handgun at him.
Anyway, Lois is so distracted making sure she’s able to keep her secret identity as “vapid airhead” straight that she trips over a curb and she spills the contents of her purse. Wherein the camera-disguised-as-a-gun is spotted by two motorists; who quickly surmise that she’s a career criminal who is going to rob a casino, and that furthermore she must have a criminal record that forbids her from owning a gun and also now they can blackmail her into helping them with their own crimes!
I don’t know what Las Vegas’ policies on gun control are, but this was the 1950s so I’m pretty sure that, until the bullets go inside someone, it’s totally fine to be stumbling around with one out in the open.
Anyway, these two criminals are members of the Anti Superman Gang, a mob outfit with the stated goal of Killing Superman. Since they operate out of a different state from Metropolis entirely, I have to assume they aren’t, like… super well informed on how he usually operates. But what they are immediately aware of is that Sadie Blodger, idiot, is a dead-ringer for Lois Lane from the eyebrows down. So they’re going to have Lois, disguised as Sadie, disguise herself as Lois in order to lure Superman into a trap and then murder the hell out of him.
The problem being that they’re going to first have to My Fair Lady “Sadie” into acting more like what they think Lois is really like.
Naturally this leads to a Deathnote level of double-reverse-extra-triple outsmarting each other.
And also Lois’ own ego getting in the way.
Eventually they decide to test Lois to see if she’s able to convincingly imitate herself by doing the one thing Lois does best in the world; fall off a building and have Superman save her.
Superman is in town for unrelated reasons but it didn’t come up in the story. He didn’t just fly over from Metropolis because someone who looks like Lois is in peril. Though I do think that hyper awareness of when Lois Lane is in danger is one of his powers.
Anyway, the crooks see Superman save Lois and figure “Hot dang, he doesn’t even know that’s just some lady we yanked off the street!” and decide to put the next part of their plan into effect; give Lois a fake camera with Kryptonite in it, have her take a picture of Superman with it, kill him, and then steal a box the army gave him, then get millions of dollars.
This part of the plan fails because, Of course Sadie actually is Lois and tells him “Hey, some gangsters are trying to use me to kill you. There’s some Kryptonite in a fake camera”. So he wrecks the camera, and hauls the crooks off to jail for attempted Supermanicide.
And we also find out what’s in that box that’s so damn important that someone will have to kill Superman and get paid a million dollars to do it.
Ten cents worth of space mice worth a fortune to Americas enemies, That’s what’s in it.
So on to the third story, which is a bit shorter even if it’s the one on the cover, The Shocking Secret of Lois Lane.
So we're opening up with Lois doing what she does best; acting in total defiance of passive voice as a reporter and putting herself in the story come hell of high water because that's how you Lois Lane, baby!
And in this case it was a really bad idea as she snuck into the back seat of someone she was pretty sure was a mob boss in disguise, and accidentally wrecked her car while in a high speed pursuit of what was probably an innocent man.
This is all off panel, and I have to assume it's not the second time Perrys had a call like this from her this year. Anyway a few days later, Lois does indeed come back to the office but has a little something extra added to her usual outfit; a lead lined box that completely covers her face, and she announces she's quitting the Daily planet and heading off to live in the forest as a mountain hermit. You know, because of the box on her head and all.
And everyone just goes right back to work, this is a normal weekday in Metropolis.
Superman, being a bit more concerned than confused that his girlfriend is wearing a lead-lined box on her head and moving to the mountains to live as a hermit, decides to do some investigating; and discovers some odd things in her apartment, such as that she left her make-up kit out without taking it with her ("something no woman would do" Superman thinks, because this was the 1950s) and opts to read her diary over the last few days. Normally, rude as all hell, but I'd argue that these are special circumstances.
So it turns out, just after she wrecked her car, Lois opted the best way to recover was to go to a cabaret and take in a magic show. And she's really opposed to the magicians assertion that she is Circe, the sorceress of Greek myth and decides to prove she's just putting on a vaudeville magic show.
Now, yes, "Duh". But Lois *does* live in Metropolis; the odds of a mythical sorceress coming to the modern world and starting a career as a stage magician aren't exactly negligible. But on the other hand, Circe is a Wonder Woman villain, and this is the Silver Age when heroes and villains didn't really cross pollinate so much. So Lois pokes around behind stage in order to expose this lady who was very obviously a stage magician for not actually having sorcerous powers.
And Circe says "Uh... what? What the hell lady?" and then doses her with a MAGIC POTION that will give her the appearance of a cat to match her curiosity.
And the next day, after several people saw her and were startled, Lois looks at her reflection and yep; she's Lois Lane Catgirl!
She's got a janky looking Bill the Cat kinda head rather than the sexy anime lady kind of catgirl so... that's an impediement to the ol' self esteem. Way more Dr. T'ana than Felicia.
Anyway, Lois figures "aw crap, I'm weird looking as hell" and it's about 50 years before Tumblr exists and informs her that being a catgirl is no problem for peoples judgement of your aesthetics so she gets a lead lined box made and opts to live in the mountains as a cat headed hermit.
It's a decision we all must confront in our darkest hours.
Anyway, Superman is old hat at problems like this so he has the Daily planet staff confront Lois nominally to prove they don't mind that she has a cat head, and Superman, her boyfriend, proves that he in particular is totally fine with it by hurling buzzsaws at her head to sheer off the helmet and reveal a totally normal looking Lois who still insists she's got a freaky cat head.
Turns out all Circe did was drug Lois and then hypnotize her into thinking she had a cat head (... that HAS to be at least one crime right?) and everyone who saw her earlier in the day and freaked out were startled by unrelated things that were coincidentally near her. Supes un-hypnotizes Lois because... he's Superman and he has an array of skills, and Lois has learned an important lesson about minding her own business.
...for about four seconds, because there's a hot scoop and she's got its scent.
Sorry this was a continuation of the issue I started a while ago, with Introducing Lois Lanes Parents
It was the late 1950s, so LSD was still legal.