Lois Before Clark: In Defense of the Superhero Girlfriend

Superman whomst? Lois Lane outsold.

This is Superhero Girlfriends Anonymous, a column by Ravynn K. Stringfield about comic books’ greatest weapon: the superhero girlfriend.

Comics became part of my identity out of spite. During my teens when some of the most important people in my life were boys obsessed with the Joker, John Constantine, and Superman, I resented feeling left out of conversations. When one of those boys said I wouldn’t understand what was going on in the superhero blockbusters that defined the 2010s because I hadn’t read the comics, it was all the impetus I needed to send me straight to the public library and dump a small mountain of titles I’d found on the circulation desk.

They were wrong, of course; I was smart and capable, and I refused to register the idea that there was anything I couldn’t do.

I was a regular consumer of superhero films as a direct result of being the daughter of a nerdy father, but I hadn’t yet made my way into actual comic books. So I read—and found myself deeply in love. Superhero comics were not only about flashy fight scenes and good versus evil. Many of the comics I read in those early days were smart commentaries on the world in which the writers and artists found themselves. It was a fact I came to appreciate more fully when I encountered those stories again as a graduate student, now a critical observer and analyst. They asked questions about what it meant to have power—and to lack it. Comics speculated; they wondered about what it would mean to have a better world than the one we inhabit, and they regularly pushed the boundaries of what we think is possible. I loved that there were endless versions and stories about the same heroes, creating what I imagined to be an American version of the Greek myths I loved as a kid.

My capacity for boundless imaginative stories kept me riveted and going back for more.

After a while, I was able to go toe-to-toe with the boys in heated discussions about origin stories and potential victors in imagined battles, but they still had something enviable that I didn’t: a personal champion. They were the kind of guys who wore the iconic Superman S as a belt buckle on game day around school and whose cosplays were the stuff of legend. They had options upon options of heroes with whom they could align themselves; I was a nerdy Black girl with a sharp tongue and bad attitude on a good day. My options were too nice, too dainty, or too much of a sidekick. As a sixteen-year-old with a healthy dose of “Main Character” syndrome, I had no intention of picking a hero whose personality didn’t jump off the page.

Lois Lane was not one thing; there were infinite sides to her.

The irony is that I almost missed Lois Lane out of spite and my habitual contrariness. I read her in a few Superman stories and she stood out to me like a bold question mark—how did mild-mannered Clark Kent end up with a wildfire like that? And with a consistency you don’t often find in comics; as iconic as Superman’s red and blue is the name of the woman beside him. When the resident Kal-El fanboy in my circle—a boy on whom I nursed a crush during most of my teens—regularly recommended the CW’s Smallville to me, because I would like Lois and I reminded him of her, I was privately pleased. Even though I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of watching the show on his recommendation, it didn’t escape my attention that a kid I had a crush on saw some part of Lois Lane in me.

A couple years later, I stumbled across one too many Smallville GIFs during a summer in college when I was too sad to do much other than scroll through Tumblr, and I finally gave in. I watched the first episode, then two more immediately after, and by the end of the week I had binged the first season. It made me laugh: I would never admit it to his face, but that Kal-El fanboy was right. I loved Smallville. Tom Welling’s farm-boy charm as a young Clark Kent was endearing, his family and friends were the kind of people whose warmth I could feel, and every episode’s story was one I could get lost in. It was a baffling kind of show—equal parts mystery, fantasy, thriller, drama, and romance that also often made me cackle out loud. But as I watched the first few seasons, a sense of anticipation built in me: I hadn’t even gotten to my main event. I was looking for Lois.

When I found her, she did not disappoint. Smallville’s Lois Lane, performed by Canadian actress Erica Durance, was a lot. In her first appearances in season four, Lois attempts to kick a nasty habit of smoking, gets expelled from Metropolis University, and puts her foot in her mouth with alarming regularity. Compared to Clark’s primary love interest for much of the show, the girl next door and his high school sweetheart, Lana Lang, Lois is a disaster. She manages to irritate everyone around her with her bluntness, abrasiveness, and inability to read—or, rather, her general disinterest in—social cues.

She was deeply imperfect—both enchanting and exasperating. It bewilders Clark, who is initially put off by Lois’s personality, causing more than a few uncomfortable moments. But by the end of the season, they settle into frenemy-ship characterized on Lois’s end by mild antagonisms, followed up by a punch to the arm and smirk to soften the blow. I saw a lot of the uneasy relationship that crush and I shared in the way Lois and Clark behaved together: our on-again, off-again friendship, the teasing, and the unspoken agreement to stick up for each other when it mattered . . . Their romantic relationship seemed less of a goal once the show prioritized their friendship because it gave Lois space to be a person outside of Clark. It didn’t matter to me that she didn’t have superpowers; I was struck by how much space she dared to take up. And just like that, I had a champion of my own.

*

Never one to do things by halves, I began my descent into a Lois Lane rabbit hole after I finished Smallville. I read anything I could find her in, reveled in Margot Kidder’s and Teri Hatcher’s performances in film and TV; I even listened to what I could find of the radio show The Adventures of Superman from the 1940s on YouTube.

It was a journey that yielded mixed results for me. In my exploration, many of the stories in which Lois appeared obscured the core essence of my fictional kindred spirit. I found advice-columnist Lois of the Golden Age of comics cringey at best and was decidedly disgusted by the Lois who begged Superman to turn her Black for a day so she could chase a story in “Little Africa” in a 1970s comic. She’s there, in glimmers, but rarely, if ever, did any of the other stories I encountered her in come close to what I had seen in Erica Durance’s Lois. It stung to not feel the vibration of recognition every time I read or watched a story with her, but it birthed reflection, and curiosity.

The questions were endless: Why did different types of media produce slightly different versions of characters? How do we examine this whole body of superhero stories? Do we think of it as a mythos? How else can these stories, which sometimes contradict, exist to create this larger picture?

It wasn’t until I stumbled across comics historian Tim Hanley’s book Investigating Lois Lane: The Turbulent History of the Daily Planet’s Ace Reporter that I was able to begin making sense of how there were versions of Lois that resonated with me and others that didn’t. He drove me to the heart of the matter, writing: “One of the keys to Lois’s long-term appeal is the solid base at the core of her character. Lois has been the same woman since her very first appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938. She was tough, she was ambitious, she was fearless, and she had very little respect for authority. Through every reboot and adaptation, these basic facts have remained the same.”

It was possible for each of these messy stories and contexts to be integral to Lois’s mythos because so many people—primarily white men—had gotten to imagine her over several decades, but her core essence remained. I had a strong grasp on what I believed to be Lois’s essence, which made some of the stories in which I encountered her troubled because they ran counter to what I knew to be true about her character. Hanley’s history helped me to understand that it is possible, and sometimes advisable, to take what resonates with you in superhero media and leave the rest.

In a moment immediately post graduation from undergrad when I was struggling to internalize that my inherent worth was not tied to a romantic relationship, returning to Smallville’s Lois Lane showed me the value of handling my business. She regularly walks past the person the viewer knows is her future partner—in life and journalism—and instead of centering him, she goes on adventures, finds her vocation, and, most importantly, seeks truth. I needed to see stories where Lois isn’t an afterthought or sidekick—but stories in which she is the heroine and has a life full of joy and love, ones in which Clark Kent is a well-loved part of her world, not the axis around which it revolves. It helped me readjust my focus as I learned to center myself and spread out in my own life for once: prioritizing my curiosity as a researcher, creating the schedules and routines that suited my life, and tending to my very own apartment. I knew who I was in relation to other people, but I was learning who I was on my own.

I comfort-rewatched Smallville in the new apartment on the gray couch I’d carefully picked out, with my dog curled beside me, and this new season of my life gave birth to new reflections and observations. The characters I loved in comics were not always the ones I loved in film, which were not always the ones I loved in television. The expansiveness of superhero media and the depth of its characters’ mythos was fascinating. I found myself wanting to follow the trail of individual characters—not necessarily as far back as I could, but expanding out. I wanted to hold characters’ renditions in comics next to their television counterparts and ask how one begat the other.

Lois Lane was not one thing; there were infinite sides to her—and a lot of possibility.

*

While I was doing a deep dive into Lois Lane’s various backstories with Hanley’s book, I struck gold—he mentioned a young adult novel featuring my favorite snoop penned by Gwenda Bond: Lois Lane: Fallout. I was starting to realize my favorite iterations of Lois were of the “B.C.” variety—Before Clark. Those stories were rare: Lois was often written as an attachment to Clark, but Bond’s novel positions Kent as a digital pen pal, granting Lois the spotlight she doesn’t like to share anyway and making Fallout an easy sell.

It was just what I needed after reading a bunch of Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane comics: a story about a smart young writer figuring out who she was in the world, and not who she was as one half of a pair. Bond’s Fallout solidified my understanding of Lois Lane as a character who was called to truth and justice through her own life experiences. It gave her friends, which she sorely lacks in many stories, as writers often tend to position Superman as the center of her uncharacteristically small universe. She was deeply connected to her younger sister, Lucy. Lois, as Bond imagined her, had a full and vibrant life as it was, and it was only brightened by the digital presence of Clark Kent.

Getting to know Lois outside of a relationship was important to me—I wanted to know she could be loved loudly in every area of her life. At the time, I was embarking on a path in writing myself, and I needed to know that in a world where writing was my vocation and career, having friends and family who loved and supported me and a life partnership to come home to at night while maintaining my strong sense of self was possible. I was struggling to juggle all of the different elements of early adulthood at the same time: the dates I didn’t go on and friends’ birthdays I missed to make time for the academic work that never ended, leaving almost no energy left for my creative projects. I was lucky if I remembered to eat more than some popcorn and a cup of French press coffee. My own balance wasn’t there yet, but I wanted to know it could be.

Superhuman powers or not, it’s undeniable: Lois Lane is a force.

The iterations of Lois that resonate the most with me aren’t just the “B.C.” ones; they’re also the stories where I see her grow. She never actually smooths out her rough edges, but she does become more self-aware of their presence. It enables her to go from a passionate girl with a near-fatal propensity toward curiosity to a determined, focused, and esteemed journalist, from a teen who questions whether she’s even loveable at all in Smallville to the self-assured Lois I love.

Lois B.C. is a reminder that even my heroines had growing pains too, but she turns out just fine.

*

In the years since I first chose Lois Lane as my champion, my world has expanded. Black comics—books by Black writers and artists, featuring Black characters, sometimes from Black-owned companies—are always at the top of my priority list. I cherish them because they offer me a comfort Lois can’t: a more fully realized shared lived experience. It’s fun to imagine partaking in one of Lois’s grand schemes as she chases a story, but the fantasy doesn’t usually get very far. While I love her brash nature, her occasional disregard for the law with no worry about the consequences if a squad of cop cars catches her trespassing, for example, sobers me. As a Black woman, I don’t have the luxury of assuming police officers will find my determination gutsy—I don’t even have the luxury of assuming I will walk away from any such encounter.

It’s a reminder that nothing—no one—can be all things to you. I found characters to fill my heart that spoke to different pieces of me: Riri Williams’s innovation, Storm’s grace, Shuri’s imagination, Jo Mullein’s attitude. All Black women, all heroes, all amazing.

Still, I always find my way back to Lois. At the end of the day, I didn’t want superpowers. I didn’t want to be a hero with national levels of responsibility, expectation, and the world’s eyes on me at all times—why would I when my personhood was already subject to surveillance? To provide more of my labor and offer nothing short of excellence at all times when my right to humanity was already in question?

What I did want was to be seen for who I am. Lois Lane was loved, respected, and valued by her peers and her partner. I didn’t want to feel as if I needed to have powers for that. Lois Lane showed me that in a world full of extraordinary people, I didn’t need to be anything other than myself to shine. She doesn’t have to be perfect for me to see her value. I prefer to revel in who she is and the promise of who she may grow to be as more writers get their chance to add to her legacy. Superhuman powers or not, it’s undeniable: Lois Lane is a force.

She’s a league of her own.