August 1967: A Giant Jimmy in a Jimmy Giant

After the great superhero extinction event of the early-to-mid 1950s, any number of perfectly serviceable character concepts were going begging, and ended up recycled into non-superhero titles.

So it was that Jimmy Olsen ended up with Flash-like speed in September 1956, Hawkman-like wings in February 1958 and finally the flexible form of Plastic Man (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen 31, Sept. 1958).

Plastic Man had only been out of business four years when exposure to an alien chemical gave Jimmy his stretchy powers. Later, Prof. Phineas Potter’s stretching formula would enable Jimmy to become Elastic Lad for short periods.

Elastic Lad’s adventures became almost a backup feature for Jimmy, appearing repeatedly and even earning him an honorary membership in the Legion of Super Heroes.

Even Lois Lane got in on the act as Elastic Lass (Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane 23, Feb. 1961). The unstoppable Composite Superman used Jimmy’s Elastic Lad powers to defeat both Superman and Batman.

The quirky, oddball nature of the Elastic Lad powers made them perfect for Jimmy’s adventures. They enabled him to maintain an occasional superhero persona while never threatening to steal the spotlight from the real hero, Superman.

The 80-Page Giant Jimmy Olsen 104 (Aug. 1967) also featured Wolfman Jimmies, Giant Turtle Jimmies and a Jimmy tied up by tiny Superman.

The tiny city of Kandor would become the urban bottlescape for Superman and Jimmy’s Batman-and-Robin adventures as Nightwing and Flamebird. And, in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen 48 (Oct.-Nov. 1960), it would give us the Superman Emergency Squad, a silly team I loved.

In this Otto Binder story with art by Curt Swan, we met Superman’s tiny flying army from Kandor. After shoving their way out of the corked bottled, they swarmed to the rescue dressed in Superman costumes (which would in fact make them uniforms, I suppose). Initially someone insisted that they should all look like Superman too, which seems a bit too fetishistic even for Silver Age comic books.

July 1961: Challenge of the Super Friends

   By July 1961, Superman editor Mort Weisinger’s elaborately developed mythology for his family of magazines enabled him to just throw everything at the wall to see what might stick.  For example, what if the fifth dimensional imp Mr. Mxyzptlk lost his purple derby, but Jimmy Olsen found it and used its magical residue to give himself Kryptonian super powers?

But then what if an invading horde of giant, intelligent, telepathic red ants attacked Lana Lang’s dad on a South American expedition? And then what if the ants’ leader, Mgoro, hypnotized Jimmy into using a green kryptonite meteor to destroy Superman?

But what if that all turned out to be a fever dream induced by red kryptonite dust in the derby’s hatband?

Why giant ants? Because Weisinger believed in recycling, and had a good memory for pulp magazine gimmicks that had worked in the past. The story was inspired by Howard V. Brown’s cover for the December 1938 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, a magazine edited by Weisinger.

Another of Superman’s close friends gained his powers in Jerry Siegel’s “imaginary” story The Wife of Superman! in Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane 26 (July 1961) — not Lois, but Lana.

Superman gives his bride super powers, and because Lana’s not from Krypton, she’s also invulnerable to kryptonite. In the context of 1961 sexual politics, that happy outcome turns out to be tragic.

As Super-Lana repeatedly rescues her husband from kryptonite traps, his attitude shifts from gratitude to depression.

Finally, Lana decides she must sacrifice herself for Superman’s fragile ego. Tearfully, she flies away into space, never to return.

“One of Weisinger’s most common themes was that of rejection, by no coincidence the radioactive core of childhood anxiety,” observed comics historian Mark Engblom. “Lana ‘being better’ than Superman hit young boys right where they lived … and, like a young boy would think, she needed to quit. Immature? Of course … but RESONANT with a child who experienced similar feelings.”

March 1961: The Power of Lois Lane

In the 1960s, Lois Lane acquired super powers with such frequency that she sported her own recognizable green-and-yellow super costume for appearances in Action Comics and Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane. 

Lois acquired her costume — even as her romantic rival Lana Lang got a yellow-and-purple one — in Lana Lang, Superwoman! (Lois Lane 17, May 1960).

In The Battle Between Super-Lois and Super-Lana! (Lois Lane 21, Nov. 1960), writer Jerry Siegel and artist Kurt Schaffenberger reflected the ambiguous attitudes of the era, trivializing women’s power as often as they celebrated it.

Instead of corralling killers or blowing out forest fires, Super-Lois and Super-Lana whipped up super-pancakes and super-pizzas in their efforts to impress Superman. So fevered were their desires to marry him that they even engaged in a super-catfight.

Siegel and Schaffenberger brought Lois’ costume back in The Reversed Super-Powers! (Action Comics 274, March 1961) when Superman’s anti-kryptonite experiment accidentally transferred his powers to Lois.

Something was there, in the American air, beyond all the condescending silliness. The cultural gravitational pull of this theme of an empowered Lois Lane has been strong enough to affect even the Superman stories outside the comic books.

In the final episode of the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman, All That Glitters, Noel Neill’s Lois gained super powers. 

And in the 1990s TV series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Terry Hatcher’s Lois accidentally siphoned Superman’s powers to become Ultrawoman.

Ironically, Margot Kidder, the actress who played Lois in the four Christopher Reeve Superman movies, predicted this turn of events. She was unaware that the characters had become engaged and then married in the comic books, but she wasn’t unappreciative of the changes.

“She’ll have to get some super powers next,” Kidder said. “As women’s liberation goes on, that’s how it should be. Know more and do more. I’m all for it.” She added with a laugh, “But skip the marriage. And make sure he does the cooking.”

January 1961: Here There Be Super-Dragons

You might think that a winged, fire-breathing dragon from the planet Krypton would give even Superman pause.

But you’d be wrong.

The last surviving snagriff arrived to menace Metropolis in Superman 78 (Sept.-Oct. 1952), having been injected with what amounted to an experimental immortality serum by Superman’s father, Jor-El.

Although more powerful than Superman, the super-beast posed no direct threat to him because it was distracted by its insatiable appetite for metal, a side effect of the serum.

That appetite proved fatal when the creature swallowed six atomic bombs and was vaporized.

Or was it?

In Superman 142 (Jan. 1961), an identical Kryptonian monster — now called a flame dragon, not a snagriff — attacks Earth, but is disempowered by red kryptonite, frozen by his super-breath and hurled into eternal orbit somewhere beyond Pluto.

Also spotlighted in the house ad above are Superman’s Girl Friend  Lois Lane 22 (in which the girl reporter acquires real “x-ray glasses) and Action Comics 271 (featuring an “electrical alien” hoax meant to trap Superman).

Enter the son of the flame dragon.

When an egg left by the frozen creature hatched in Superman 151 (Feb. 1962), the Man of Steel was able to carry the young beast into the prehistoric past, where it would be at home and couldn’t menace humanity. In the process, its fangs, stronger than steel, injured his hand.

And there’s a good illustration of how frustrating Superman stories sometimes were for readers in the 1960s.

Instead of a battle between Superman and a truly formidable monster (which is what we wanted to see), this story turned out to be yet another secret identity puzzle, with Lois Lane determined to prove that Clark Kent’s hand was visibly injured, just like Superman’s.

Meh.

As for the flame dragon, he ended up starring with Titano the Super-Ape in a knock-off of King Kong Vs. Godzilla in Jimmy Olsen’s Monster Movie (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen 84, April 1965)

How the mighty were fallen. 

July 1960: Too Astounding to Be True

Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel anticipated digital catfishing in Lois Lane Weds Astounding Man! (Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane 18, July 1960)

Catfishing, as you know, is a form of digital fraud in which someone creates a sock puppet fake identity on a social networking platform, often as part of a romance scam.

This story, drawn by Al Plastino, is one of those in which Siegel features characters in the grip of obsession. They virtually vibrate with unresolved trauma.

Here, Lois’s car engine dies on a lonely road and she’s confronted by a flying saucer carrying what amounts to a super-stalker, Astounding Man.

He instantly announces that he loves her and wants to marry her, having spied on her for years.

Ignoring the forest of red flags waving right in her face, Lois agrees to fly to Astounding Man’s planet, Roxnon, where he has built a “Lois Lane palace” and written “hundreds of volumes” in her praise. He also isolates her on a lonely planetoid, saying he can’t bear to share her.

Apparently impressed by this extremely normal behavior, Lois agrees to marry him. 

In fairness to Lois, though, the story contains heavy hints that she is being mentally manipulated, i.e. mesmerized or drugged. 

Astounding Man reveals his “secret identity” as the Oz-like Oogamooga, an ugly old man manipulating the Astounding Man android through a control panel.

Interesting when you consider that Superman was the alter ego, and sometime “puppet,” of the aging and often financially distressed Jerry Siegel, who turned 46 in 1960.

With Superman’s help, Lois out-catfishes Oogamooga, and marries the Astounding Man android off to a Lois Lane android.

As in several Siegel stories during this period, Superman remains largely passive.  Although he assists Lois, Superman takes no punitive action against the alien who attempted to con and seduce her. 

Maybe Siegel was disenchanted with his world-famous, immensely lucrative co-creation, a character that was then providing benefits to many others, but not to him.

November 1959: The Year of the Catty

DC characters tended to share certain bizarre experiences — accidentally acquiring Superman’s powers, getting trapped in the Phantom Zone, traveling in time and space, pretending to die, pretending to turn evil, turning invisible, developing futuristic brains, becoming elastic, attaining giant size, instantly becoming fat, instantly growing older or younger.

 And, unlikely as it might seem, acquiring the head of a cat.

In Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane 13 (Nov. 1959), writer Bill Finger and artist Wayne Boring present us with a mystery for Superman to solve. Why does Lois show up at the Daily Planet for a tearful goodbye to her friends with her head encased in a lead box?

In the vanished reporter’s diary, Superman reads that Lois had confronted a vaudeville sorceress calling herself Circe, only to find that she wasn’t dealing with a fake — that her head had been transformed into a cat’s.

Passing a circus sideshow where people are laughing at freaks, Lois thought, “I can never go back to the normal world I once knew — not with my freakish face. (Sob!) And I could never be Superman’s girl friend again! I knew that though Superman would try not to show it, he’d be repelled by my face!”

Superman discovers that Lois doesn’t have the face of a cat, but only thinks she does — thanks to a drugged lemonade and some hypnosis practiced by the fake Circe.

Despite Lois’s traumatic experience, Superman’s sympathy only extends so far. At dinner that night at a restaurant, he orders Lois a saucer of milk to mock her cat-like curiosity.

The story is a reversal of what happened to Superman 15 months earlier in Action 243’s The Lady and the Lion!, when the real Circe gave the Man of Tomorrow a lion’s head.

It might have seemed to readers that Superman’s writers and editors were spinning in Circe circles.

August 1959: Lois of the Leopards

On her way back from interviewing Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa, Lois Lane’s small plane develops engine trouble.

Bailing out, she strikes her head on a rock upon landing and develops amnesia. And that’s how the Daily Planet’s star reporter became The Leopard Girl of the Jungle (Lois Lane 11, Aug. 1959).

So maybe a subplot involving a jungle girl novel written by Lana Lang made little sense. And maybe writer Bill Finger had to perform logical backflips to “explain” why Superman didn’t simply rescue Lois, but let her knock about for weeks with wildlife while secretly helping her.

But all that really didn’t matter. We wanted to see Lois as a jungle girl, with all that gorgeous Kurt Schaffenberger art. And that’s what we got.

“The end result is an homage strategically placed in the jungle girl history,” observed G.W. Thomas. “Most of the jungle comics and movies were done by the early ’50s. The only significant one was in 1959 with Audrey Hepburn playing Rima the Jungle Girl in Green Mansions. That premiered around the same time this issue of Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane appeared. Coincidence? Probably not. 

“DC had no jungle comics in 1959. Bill Finger’s tale is a swan song to an era of liana-swinging gals in leopard bikinis. The 1960s would be the decade that gave us Ron Ely on TV, Jack Benny and Gilligan parodies, George of the Jungle and Ray Stevens singing ‘Guitarzan.’ We had become too sophisticated for Nyoka serials or Irish McCalla as Sheena.”

As usual, Jimmy Olsen had macheted a trail through the jungle before Lois, in this case three years before (Jungle Jimmy Olsen!, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen 10, Feb. 1956). 

Because Lois’s title began four years later than Jimmy’s, the kinds of things that had happened to him tended also to happen to her later. So he became Elastic Lad and she Elastic Lass. Both moonlighted as werewolves. And both tried the Tarzan life.

March 1958: The Witch of Metropolis

Here’s a full-page DC Comics house ad promoting the first issue of Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane (March-April 1958). On the Curt Swan cover, Lois, flying on her broomstick with the powers of a witch, gloats to the Man of Tomorrow about her superhuman abilities.

Especially unsettling to adolescent boys was the recurring suggestion that Lois might become more powerful than Superman. In the mid-2oth century, being physically defeated by a girl was said to be a terrible fate, you know.

Interesting to think that more people will now have heard of “Lois Lane” than “Yul Brynner.” Brynner had shaved his head for The King and I, a musical performance that earned him two Tony awards and an Oscar.