Lois Takes Action
Midway through the very first Superman story in 1938, meek Clark Kent gets a chance to dance with his beautiful co-worker Lois Lane. No sooner do they begin than a tough called Butch decides to butt in, pushing Clark aside. “Clark! Are you going to stand for this?” Lois asks in disgust. She then turns that anger toward Butch, slapping him in the face when he refuses to let her leave.
“Good for you, Lois,” whispers Clark, even if he more openly chides her. Of course Butch and his pals don’t accept Lois’s refusal and choose to rebuild their crumbling masculinity by kidnapping the reporter. Yet their masculinity still completely collapses when they drive their car into Superman, who then smashes the vehicle in a panel reused for the iconic cover to Action Comics #1 (Butch is the guy with hands on his face in the lower left-hand corner).
Although much more impressed by the imposing, active Superman, Lois doesn’t bow to him either. “I’d advise you not to print this little episode,” he tells her at the end of the night. In the very next panel, Lois leans over her editor’s desk and declares, “But I tell you I saw Superman last night!”
In that short interlude, not even five full pages long, Superman and Lois Lane creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster establish everything we need to know about Lois Lane. She’s smart, she does her job, and she holds to her convictions.
To be sure, that characterization didn’t always manifest in the same way. A lot of stories from Lois’ longest-running solo book, Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane reduced her to the hapless heroine of a standard Silver Age romance story. Examples include Lois using her significant intelligence and cunning to trick Superman into marrying her, Superman using his significant power to trick her back, and the hero then often winking at the reader as she storms away.
But even these stories imagined Lois as someone with agency and wits, someone who took the title “Superman’s Girlfriend” for herself. It wasn’t hoisted upon her. The same hasn’t always been true in movie adaptations.
