#superolsen

That's right, it's another fleeting Lois Lane/Lana Lang crossover. Once again, Lois refuses to take a hint that her man is clearly not interested in her and makes the like of being Superman's "girlfriend..."

Ugh, I'm sorry. These comics do Lois Lane so dirty. A lot of the time she's portrayed as such a stalker that she drives Superman to extreme behavior just to get her out of his hair.

In fairness, she is being depicted as a brave and clever investigative journalist who will go to great lengths to expose corruption. But so often she's also written as a damsel in distress or an emotional burden for Superman, and not a capable person in her own right.

While as children, Lois and Lana's only common ground was their mutual ladyhateboners for Superboy, when they meet as adults they are a lot more chill with each other. Lana has come to Metropolis looking for work, but crashed out so badly she lost all her money and became homeless. She was too proud to go to Superman for help, but Lois refuses to leave her. She takes Lana in, lets her stay in her apartment, and even gets her set up with a job at the Daily Planet.

They spend the night talking about their pasts with Superboy, and knowing what kind of comics these are, I expected there to be jealousy between the two. Instead, Lois is the perfect host to Lana, and their respective crushes on Superboy only bring them closer together. It's genuinely sweet to see them bonding like this.

Naturally, it doesn't last. Once Superman makes a ring for Lois to match the one he gave to Lana, Lana starts making the moves on Superman. At first Lois is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it gets more and more blatant until she catches them making out in their apartment. This gets her mad enough to throw away her ring, which is what the whole dang thing was about.

It turns out that whatever the ring was made of was violently explosive, and Lois was in danger as long as she was wearing it. Really feels like this comic could have been an email. The three of them all make up and Superman does his best to keep this toxic love triangle upright. That note could refer to at least four women in Superman's life, one of whom is a mermaid and another is his cousin.

We meet a few members of Lois Lane's family around this time. In Jimmy Olsen #36, we're introduced to her younger sister, Lucy Lane, who works as an airline stewardess. Jimmy Olsen falls for her, and tries to charm her by dressing up in a bunch of silly costumes and acting like a big shot. We don't really see in Lucy's head but I like to imagine she sees right through this and is just having fun with it. Jimmy and Lucy have a much better relationship than Clark and Lois.

Meanwhile, in Lois Lane #13, we meet the Lane parents, Sam and Ella Lane. In more modern comics, Sam Lane is a US Army general, and the Lanes are military brats. In the Silver Age, the Lanes were just a carbon copy of the Kents. They really only had one character archetype and kept stamping it out whenever there was a blank space in the narrative.

Also in Jimmy Olsen #36, we get the story of how Jimmy and Superman first met. I expected this would just be a workplace comedy where Jimmy helps Superman out of a snag, but it turned out to be absolute silver age nonsense.

On his very first day in Metropolis, Jimmy answers a classified ad for an assistant with a time machine. Having no sense of self preservation, Jimmy steps into the time bubble and is shot back into the fourth dimension. The first flight of the ship was meant to go back some 20 years, but he winds up back on pre-explosion Krypton.

Jimmy is such a krypto-weeb that he can fluently speak the language and immediately ingratiates himself with Jor-El and Lara. He gets a job as baby Kal-El's babysitter and helps save the precocious little boy from Kryptonian security agents trying to silence Jor-El. It's interesting to see how even when Krypton was unironically presented as a science utopia, they still have their thugs around willing to beat up scientists and kidnap babies.

Because whenever you time travel you always wind up at the most historically significant events, Jimmy is there right on the very day that Krypton goes asplody. He makes it back to his timeship but when he returns to the present he has no memory of anything that happened, because of the dumb rules of time travel.

Superman does remember, because of the dumb rules of superpowers, and as soon as Jimmy arrives back in the present, Superman flies in, slaps a signal watch on him, and declares that they will be best friends. This is... honestly, I've read slash fiction that started the same way. Jimmy is lucky that Superman didn't slap a collar on him and start calling him his pet human.