“Comics today are too violent! They don’t make any sense!
Give me the good ol’ Silver Age days when comic books were just simple,
uplifting easy to understand entertainment!” If you’re a comic book fan and
you’ve spent any time online over the past couple of decades, then you’ve
undoubtedly seen this type of argument from aging fanboys such as myself. But
have you ever looked for yourself? Nostalgia can be an insidious mistress. She
loves to mess with one’s mind and make the past look rosier than it ever really
was. In nearly EVERY case.
Let’s take a look at a typical Silver Age story, shall we?
Just a random story from...let’s say, late 1969. Oh! Here’s one now! LOIS LANE
# 98, the January 1970 issue. Hmm...Okay, there are TWO stories in this issue.
The first one is the cover story. Why don’t WE concentrate on the second one?
Entitled, “Tomorrow I Die,” the 2/3-page splash panel shows
our heroine—Superman’s longtime girlfriend for those not familiar with her
since she’s not exactly given much respect these days in comics or movies.
Ahem!—in a cute little bob haircut with stylish sideflips. But she’s crying!
Wha’s a matter, baybeeee? Hmm? I see. I see. She’s marking off the days of
November of ’69 (when this book was on the stands) on her calendar, thinking to
herself that she has only one day left to live.
In comic book parlance, What th..?!
Okay, let’s go back a ways and find out what the heck is
going on. For the record, that splash we just talked about never once appears
in the story that follows. It was just representative of what happens, you see.
Just to draw us in.
Our story proper starts with Daily Planet editor Perry White
“taunting” his three best (and perhaps only, as we rarely saw anyone else there
in the Silver Age!) reporters for missing a major scoop that’s right under
their noses! It seems that the following Saturday will mark 1000 days that Lois
has been volunteering at the local hospital as a volunteer nurse! OMG! How did
they MISS that? What a scoop! Quick, let’s...Wait. Umm...first of all, 1000
days is, like three years. We’ve never seen any indication of this little side
job before. And besides, when would she find the time with all the wacky stuff that
was always happening in her title?
Ah, I see. She doesn’t sleep. After her “hectic day as a
reporter,” she shows up at said hospital to work the night shift. Seems that
for some reason—just like Perry—everyone there has also been keeping track of exactly
how many days she’s worked there as a volunteer nurse so they’re throwing her a
banquet that weekend, with a bronze plaque and “solid gold nurse’s insignia!”
Wowee!
But wait! She’s not just a VOLUNTEER volunteer, emptying
bedpans and changing bandages like a candy striper or whatever they call them
nowadays. She’s actually a volunteer NURSE! In fact, another treat to celebrate
her 1000-day benchmark comes when the head of the hospital gives her a special,
secret patient—Dr. Albert Einstein! Well, no. Dr. “Walter Stern.” But he’s a
ringer for Einstein and he’s described as a very important scientist. So Lois—a
reporter by trade, you’ll recall, and rarely one to pass up a scoop—is assigned
to give him radium treatments over the following weeks for...whatever the heck illness
he has. It’s never said. It isn’t important. He seems just fine, and the two
have no real interaction anyway. After the fourth day of the radium treatments,
however, the Man of Steel himself shows up and tells her he’s heard about her
upcoming banquet. Betcha that Clark Kent put it in the paper. That snitch!


Meanwhile, back at the hospital, it’s time for the doc’s
radium treatment again. Remember! She is NOT an accredited nurse. She is JUST a
volunteer! A long standing one as we keep being reminded but still just a
volunteer!
Soon afterwards, she finds herself in a lampless supply
closet and realizes that she now glows in the dark! YIKES! Luckily, she is
right there in a hospital where she can quickly have someone check her out!
Whew! No. Wait! Lois! You’re going the wrong...Lois! Hey!
Apparently, in spite of working around them for the last 998
days, she doesn’t trust doctors as far as she can throw them! Instead, she
rushes to the hospital library in those pre-Net days to self-diagnose. Radium
Poisoning! No cure! Dying!
AARRGGHH!
She hurries home witout telling anyone so she can make out a
will. Apparently she’s also a volunteer lawyer. She decides to leave everything
to the Lois Lane Foundation for Volunteer Nurses, the Superman Fresh Air Fund
and the Jimmy Olsen Fan Club. Well, not QUITE everything. Next we see her
giving away all her clothes to black folks and Hispanics down in “the slums.”
“Mil Gracias!” Then it’s home to bed where the light keeps her awake—the light
from her own glow!
The next day is the banquet but Lois freaks out and runs out
just before receiving her plaque! She’s determined to go out in a “blaze of
glory” by getting the biggest and most dangerous scoop of her career! That’s
right! Lois Lane will get an interview with...an old man who lives in a cave
outside of town. I’m serious. “The Hermit of Haunted Cave!” No one has ever
gone to interview him and returned alive!


So, “after phoning in the story of the hermit’s death, Lois
races to Metropolis airport.” Wait a sec...Did she only have one dime or what?
I mean, she just called the Planet with the story and that was it?? But...! Oh,
and did she even say goodbye to Perry and Jimmy and, Shh!, Clark?
Of course not. Instead, she catches up to her mini-skirted
stewardess sister and begs her to get her on a flight to that island. Never
occurs to her to just BUY a ticket like everybody else. Sigh. Cheapskate. That
sneaky Lucy, though, calls the Daily Planet where Clark is as suspicious as she
is and says—as he often does—that he’ll get in touch with Superman.
While he’s presumably doing that...,umm...Lois’s flight gets
hijacked to Havana, Cuba. For you younger readers, this was an event that was
happening so often in those days that it amazingly became fodder for TV comedy
sketches. For their part, Cuba would always just send the plane back and
usually no one was even hurt. Just annoyed.
In this case, though, the hijacker grabs Lucy and has a
ticking bomb with him, threatening all and sundry. Once more, with nothing to
lose, Lois directly confronts him. He replies by telling her to “Eat this TNT”
and throwing the bomb right at her! Luckily, the ticking stops and it doesn’t
blow up. Coincidentally, Superman shows up at what might have been just a
moment too late and uses his superbreath to blow down the would-be hijacker.
How he got into a plane in flight, though, is left to our imagination.

Turns out the beast is from Krypton, too...err...somehow.
Thus, it also has superpowers and Superman can’t defeat it. Oh, no! The end is
near for BOTH our heroes!
Not to worry! Just at that exact moment, Humphrey Bogart
shows up and zaps the monster with a ray gun! With a nod to the Comics Code,
Lois asks how the stranger turned the thing into a skeleton, rather than
saying. “You KILLED it!”
Tra-Gob is his name. That’s Bogart spelled backwards. Bogart
was big that year with posters of him popular on college campuses and his old
movies being revived in major cities nearly 15 years after his death. Turns out
this guy is yet another Kryptonian—a villain, in fact, who’d been minding his
own business in the Phantom Zone when it just sort of opened up and dropped him
into the fortress a couple minutes earlier. So why did Bogart...I mean,
Tra-Gob, save our happy couple if he’s a villain? Well, it seems that that busy
little Kryptonian bee, Jor-El, Kal’s late father, once saved Tra-Gob’s life
back on the home world so he felt obliged to save his SON’S life in
return...Oh, and Lois’s while he was at it.
Wow. Thanks, Bogie. Okay, back to the Phantom Zone for you,
pal. Then Superman says, “Oh, by the way, Lois, you DO know you’ve been glowing
in the dark lately, right? Just some harmless residual radiation from that
nectar you drank on that asteroid before I could stop you, y’know? Just enough
to, like, scare a snake and diffuse a bomb and accidentally tear a rift in the
Phantom Zone. Nothing serious, of course. It’s wearing off about now anyway”

Oh, wait...that’s never mentioned again...nor is the
honeymoon cottage. Not even the Lois Lane Foundation for Volunteer Nurses! It’s
like none of it ever happened.
This story was written, by the way, by Robert Kanigher, one
of THE great Silver Age writers...although not on LOIS LANE! Kanigher’s forte
was DC’s war stories, of which he wrote and edited them for a couple decades in conjunction with Joe Kubert. 1969
was a big year for recreational and mind-altering drugs in America. With
stories like this, it’s obvious that Kanigher didn’t need ‘em!
I was going to guess the writer was Bob Haney, he was great at inventing never-before-mentioned best friends, family members, side jobs and super powers.
ReplyDeleteAs silly as the Silver-Age stories were, they at least were efficiently told. A modern version of this Lois story would have taken about 12 issues (2 Trades), and would not have delved any more deeply into the plot.
ReplyDelete