Not Taking The L(L)

Shortly after the release of the recent Superman movie, I made a post elsewhere about Catherine “Cat” Grant and the challenge of adapting the character to other media, or even in comics after the Triangle Era. (Note: I may have to do a Reference post about that era one of these days).

In response, someone suggested that I should expand on my thoughts in a post here. That’s not what this is – though I may yet do it – but the suggestion sparked the idea of creating yet-another feature here that I would call “Character Assassination,” focusing on the mistreatment or misunderstanding of certain characters and diving deep into what I see as defining traits for those characters that are often overlooked or underutilized.

Then I just let the idea sit and did nothing with it.

This morning, however, I awoke from a dream that led me to have an epiphany about why it is that I hate Lana Lang (even though the dream had absolutely nothing to do with her; I don’t know how my brain works).

I thought about posting a thread on Bluesky about my thoughts, but then I remembered that other idea, and so, here we are with an inaugural Character Assassination post in which I am the assassin.

When I started reading comics, and Superman comics in particular, I didn’t really have any strong feelings about Lana Lang.

She was fine, I supposed. A little annoying sometimes – I did hate her tendency to refer to people as “luv” – but mostly she was just…there.

The only thing I liked about her was that she did at least seem to like Clark for Clark. Having known him for most of their lives, she had grown to accept his quirks, and after having largely stopped believing that he was secretly Superman, she was able to look at the man himself and recognize his attractive qualities.

Of course, it’s no secret that I love Lois Lane. She and her hubby pretty much share the top spot for favorite character, and while I’m not much for shipping, Clois is the OTP for me, so that obviously leaves Lois’s would-be rival out in the cold.

When John Byrne rebooted Superman in 1986, one of the things I liked about his take was the way he sidelined Lana, relegating her to someone Clark viewed primarily as a friend and leaving her back on her farm in Smallville. (And getting rid of the “luv” thing.)

It was only right and proper, to me, that Clark would only have eyes for Lois.

Still, I didn’t actually hate Lana. That came later. And in force.

She'll be acquitted via jury nullification.As soon as they learn that the "victim" was Lana Lang they'll decide that no crime was committed.

— Jon Maki (@jonpaulmaki.com) 2024-12-22T20:11:52.303Z

It was Smallville that did it. Nothing against Kristin Kreuk, but that take on Lana – and the fact that literally everyone was completely obsessed with her for no good goddamn reason – just pushed me from ambivalence/mild dislike to full-on hatred, a retroactive hatred that was not limited to the show.

But the show wouldn’t have been able to do it so effectively if the potential weren’t already there.

To be clear, a lot of my “hatred” of Lana, especially on social media, is performative. It’s my schtick, the bullshit that I’m always on, much like responding with “Fin Fang Foom” to every “three words” (and sometimes more words) prompts, like, “The three words every girl wants you to whisper in her ear.”

That said, I really dislike the character, though I also recognize her as an established character in Superman’s life and I wouldn’t necessarily want to be rid of her.

So why was it so easy for me to come to hate Lana?

Part of it, I think, is a bias based on the status quo when I started reading comics. Though they weren’t actually together, it was clear that Lois was endgame for Clark.

Lois was the woman he turned by time to save in the movie.

Lois was who he married on Earth-Two.

Lois had been there right from the start. Though in-universe, Lana was Clark’s childhood sweetheart, she was a retcon. An afterthought to provide a pale imitation of Lois to serve as something of a foil for Superboy.

And those sorts of early biases will always affect how you see things and how you think things ought to be.

But there’s more to it, and that’s where the epiphany came in.

By the time I met Lois Lane, she was a part of the main cast in two main Superman titles, frequently appeared in other Superman books, and while she no longer had her own series, she did still have an ongoing feature in Superman Family, which later continued as a backup feature in Supergirl after Superman Family folded, and the alternate, older, married Lois appeared in the “Mr. and Mrs. Superman” feature that also ran in Superman Family.

Lana was part of the main cast, too, but to a lesser extent, and there weren’t any stories about Superman and Lois going out on dates in those books. Sometimes Clark and Lana went on dates, though, then again, so did Clark and Lois. Such tangled romantic lives!

Lana had no feature of her own and had never had her own series – Jimmy Olsen was the only redheaded headliner in town – so she didn’t really pop up in digests collecting reprints of old stories as much as Lois did.

And that’s what I realized.

My most sustained encounters with Lana were in the pages of The New Adventures of Superboy, and those were stories in which Lana – who at least didn’t call everyone “luv” as a teen – was an immature pest.

Just a pure nuisance, always trying to prove her theory that Clark is secretly Superboy…when she’s not busy treating Clark like crap.

Me: Pete Ross was a hero for doing this.You: Because doing it helped prevent Lana from finding out that Clark is Superboy?Me: It prevented Lana from finding out what now?

— Jon Maki (@jonpaulmaki.com) 2024-09-14T04:08:58.164Z

It’s an obvious thing to have failed to realize for so long, but in my earliest readings of the character I was primarily exposed to her when she was at her absolute worst.

Now, in fairness, one could argue that she was no different from how Lois had been presented for decades, particularly in her own series, to which I would counter “Shut up.’

Okay, more seriously, you have a point – though I still think Lana was worse, if only because she was, as noted, a pale imitation – but my point is that wasn’t the Lois that I grew up with.

The Lois I knew was one reshaped – poorly – by the Women’s Liberation movement. She wasn’t a Lois who was obsessed with getting Superman to put a ring on it, or with finding out who he really was. She was a smart, driven modern, liberated woman living in a post-Gloria Steinem world.

She regularly beat the living shit out of people.

Yeah, sure, it might be nice to settle down with the man she loves someday, but in the meantime, she had shit to do, teeth to knock out, and Pulitzers to win.

Adult Lana….read the news on TV and called people “luv,” and sometimes dated this guy.

And teen Lana – the one who I arguably saw the most – just spent all of her time being annoying.

She didn’t stand a chance.

In the decades since I first met her there has been a lot of development of the character, and for the most part, my hatred of her – outside of when I’m doing a bit – has largely subsided.

But I don’t think I can ever like her, and I kind of bristle at the pro-Lana agenda in the current (as of this writing) run in Action, which is shaped by the biases of someone who got to know the character long before I did and thus has a very different bias from mine.

So yeah, it wasn’t really much of an epiphany, but I guess it’s just something I never put much thought into, a bias I never interrogated, so it just kind of jumped out as me as I groggily awoke this morning and I thought it was worth talking about.

But that’s my own bias speaking, so who knows if any of you will agree on that last point.

Future installments of Character Assassination, if I decide to write them, will likely be very different from this one, so if this didn’t do it for you, maybe one of those will.

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