I recently watched the entirety of BBC's "Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares" on Netflix. In every episode scales back, limiting the chefs to smaller menus and simpler ingredients.

I bring this up because I've been putting off writing a review of Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #16 because I haven't had a lot of free time to write of late. Then, as Gordon Ramsey explained that a good broccoli soup can be made from broccoli, salt, and water, I concluded this story need no embellishment.

One day, Lois gets jealous of Jimmy Olsen's Superman signal watch...

But when he gives her one of her own, Superman forgets to consider that women are stupid and worthless (per 1960's comics written for adolescent boys). She calls Superman when she has a nightmare.



On the note of Superman's temper, compare how he speaks to Darkseid when the latter comes to destroy the Earth...... to the way he speaks to Lois about calling him to spring her from a stuck revolving door.As always seems to be the case when Lois, Jimmy, or Superman says anything in public, a petty criminal happens to be standing nearby, overhears, and devises a plan to use this new development to his advantage.The plan is to have Lois draw Superman away from a bank robbery. But Lois flips the script and refuses to signal Superman because not doing so allows her to lay a guilt trip on Superman.

I picked up Showcase Presents Superman Family Vol. 2, and am pleased to report its as insane as the first book. I'll be recapping some of the finer tales and reflecting on 1950's values, but first let's check the old Diversity Meter.

You'll be relieved (or horrified) to know there are still more people in Metropolis who look like Superman...

... and more people who look like Jimmy Olsen...... and more people who look like Lois Lane...... than there are black people.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating.

In Metropolis, there are more people who look like Superman...

... and more people who look like Jimmy Olsen...


... and even people who look like Lois Lane...
... than there are black people.

In the interest of equal time, following yesterday's post about Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #110's casting a spotlight on how Native Americans are often treated as caricatures, we now offer this rebuttal from Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #61:

Indulge me if you will and let's turn the clock back a week. I've been sitting on my copy of Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #110" for almost five months waiting to post a recap of this story about racism, compassion, environmentalism, terrorism, single motherhood, foster parents, Viet Nam, and the fact that no matter how independent a woman tries to be, she'll never feel complete without a baby.

Ha ha, in your face, When Fangirls Attack!

Ryno bought me this comic as a Christmas present and as soon as I read it, I earmarked it as a perfect Mothers' Day post. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about it until I was shuffling some comics on my desk and said, "Oh, I have to remember to do this one on Mothers' Day... which was last... aw, crap..." So, let's pretend you read this seven days ago, okay?

On the cover, an angry mob is hurling rocks at Lois Lane, who appears to be on her way to play the mascot at a Florida State football game. But these angry folks aren't just drunken Gators fans. Instead, they're... um... well, I'm not really sure which of the many angry groups from this story the mob is supposed to represent, but I'm guessing it's white people who don't think a Native American baby should be allowed to live in a two-bedroom walk-up brownstone in Metropolis because there's too great a risk of it growing up to kill General Custer and thus should have its head crushed by a flying brick.

Lois's path to motherhood is a bit different than the one you learned about it biology class. It begins when she is assigned the story of finding Metropolis's Mother of the Year. Of course, we all know a career woman, who has put her job ahead of gestation, can't possibly know what qualities to look for in a good mother and is unqualified for the task.

The words of the PMS-ing mom hit Lois right in the uterus, but nine months is too long to wait to change poopy diapers and be thrown up on and never sleep in past 7:45 again, so she stops by an adoption agency to see if she can get a baby. Unfortunately--or rather, quite sensibly--they won't give her one, so Robert Kanigher decides to shift gears entirely and talk about racism and the treatment of Native Americans in a manner so sensitive, I'm shocked the terms "Injun," "firewater," and "How!" are never used.

Lois goes to cover a Pueblo Indian rain dance outside Santa Fe. The Indians, however, aren't dancing, and the people who paid to see the event are getting unhappy.Seriously? Is anyone really still upset about Custer? Based on this story, we're led to believe Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn resonated with the people of 1971 about as strongly as the World Trade Center collapse did on September 14th.

Anyway, the Indians won't dance because it's a religious ritual, not a show. The people get angry and call them ripoff artists, but since a tour bus company sold them the tickets, and the Indians told the tour bus company they wouldn't dance, it's suggested the tour bus company might be the ripoff artists.

The angry patrons insist that's all beside the point and decide to kick the Indians' asses to honor the memory of General Custer and the 50 cents they'll never get back from the tour bus company. Then Superman shows up and stops the fight by blowing everyone's hats off.As calmer heads prevail, Lois Lane learns the Indians are planning to all become suicide bombers and destroy a dam the construction workers are building. The Indians then explain the reasoning behind their plan by pretty much paraphrasing all the political points made in Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman. The white man killed all the buffalo, put them on reservations, and so on.

So, a dam is being built on a sacred river that will flood a Pueblo village, killing all the Indians. The government has apparently done nothing to help relocate the Indians. The construction workers and the Indians hate each other... yet the construction workers will take a break in the middle of the day and pay good money to go watch an Indian rain dance.

Superman comes along again and solves the conflict by picking up the dam, flying it up river twenty miles, and completing construction in a matter of minutes. One might think the conflict resolved, but tragedy strikes in a most unexpected way when a mother who was going to strap her baby to a bomb to destroy the dam slips on some loose gravel."Would you like me to take you to a hospital?"
"No, I'll just lay here an die. No big."
"Well, can I at least pick your face up out of the dirt?"
"Aw, why bother? I'll have six feet of it over my corpse in a matter of hours."
What is this? Al Jaffe's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions?

Friggin' help her. Don't let the clinically depressed woman whose husband was just declared dead after being MIA in Viet Nam and who was just about to explode her baby decide whether you should let her live or die.

Hour later, much longer than it would have taken to get to a hospital, bandaged her head, and prescribed some anti-depressants, she finally dies, but not before doing something else Kanigher-ianly stupid.First off, what kind of shitty brother do you have to be for your sister to--with you sitting right there next to her--give custody of her child to a stranger she'd met just a day earlier? Second, why is everyone giving this obviously insane woman's decisions so much gravitas? Because it was her dying wish that Lois have her baby, the brother declares he cannot do anything to oppose it.

Too bad her dying wish wasn't that you produce a Broadway rock opera about HIV-infected New York artisans based on La Boheme because then you would be a millionaire, dude. On the bright side, she also could have used her dying breath to whisper, "And eat bagel as big as a house," and croaked before you could appeal that even if you built an oven large enough to bake such a monstrosity, a bagel of that size would never bake evenly and the inside would still be raw dough on the inside while the exterior would be burned. You'd have to find a way to do it though or you'd dishonor her dying wish.I love the look on Superman's face when Lois returns to Metropolis. It's as though he saw her getting of the plane and thought, "What the... no, it can't be... shit, it is! All right, all right, gotta give her the benefit of the doubt here. Just give her a chance to explain. I'm sure there's a perfectly logical reason my superbrain just hasn't considered." Unfortunately, Lois's answer does nothing to allay those fears.

Lois takes a leave of absence from work to care for Little Moon, but her decision to care for the baby stirs up all kinds of controversy, pitting Native Americans against their natural enemy (other than construction workers), feminists.Native American protesters face a frustrating catch-22. Most of the time, the topic of protest is something along the lines of "treat us with respect, we're not all caricatures with big feather headdresses," yet to be recognized, they have to wear their headdresses and full outfits to the protest. I'm sure there is some obvious distinction between the authentic garb they wear and the Lil' Indian costume in the dress-up section of Toys 'R Us, but the average tailgater going to a Kansas City Chiefs game has no idea what it is nor does he care.

Lois decides to get Little Feather away from the city and the negative vibes, but when an army truck loses control, tragedy strikes again.Poor Little Feather, he's already had one mom die this week. This has to be some kind of parental mortality record.Make sure you get to the surface, Little Moon. That is Lois's dying wish and failing to survive would dishonor her memory which is apparently the greatest tragedy your people can imagine. Or at least the greatest tragedy Robert Kanigher can imagine your people can imagine. Fortunately, Lois and Little Moon are both saved by that soldier diving into the water in the above panel, and we learn why the truck lost control.

It was overloaded and the rear axle broke because it was carrying the biggest deus ex machina in the world.

The soldier in the truck just happened to be Little Moon's dad, fresh from his escape from a Vietcong POW camp and on his way to an army discharge office. Lois returns the baby to his rightful father (completely dishonoring the dying wish of Singing Rain) and fails to mention that she let his wife slowly bleed out and die of a head wound last week rather than take her to a hospital.

With almost all of the loose ends tied up, the last question is finally answered. Who is Metropolis's mother of the year?Has there ever been a worse indictment of a city's foster care system? A woman who babysat a kid for a week and a half was just elected foster mother of the year! Who were the other nominees she beat? I'm guessing if you can stay in a room with a kid for six hours without eating it, you're a finalist. The skin of the foster children of Metropolis must be 68% cigarette burns.

But for all of you who didn't get your kids by watching a tragically depressed Native American woman will herself dead and then pawn said kids off on a magically resurrected father a week later, yet have never been honored with a rally in the park to recognize you as mother of the year, Happy Mothers' Day.

I may have to just do a clearing house post where I touch on the 15-20 posts I've wanted to do in the last three weeks, but haven't had time. Maybe summarizing them in one sentence with a few images. Briefly, Spider-Man 3 was bad the first time I saw it and got worse the second time, Marvel seems to have a vendetta against Reed Richards ("Hmm, zombies are the height of efficiency... even though they eat human flesh constantly and do nothing but complain about their hunger."), I worked 35 hours between 6AM Friday and 1AM Sunday for Free Comic Book Day, All Star Batman and Robin could be a hell of a lot shorter and closer to "on schedule" if instead of writing each issue, Frank Miller just went to every comic book fan's house and punched us all in our faces, and I did an awesome interview with John Romita Jr. that will be up at AtomicComics.com later today.

Enough talk, more rock.

A man doesn't know how much he loves water until the well runs dry and a Superman doesn't understand how much he gets off on stringing along a girl reporter until she gets fed up and marries his best friend.

Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #89 presents an imaginary story that "may or may not ever happen," which is what DC regularly did when writers couldn't come up with a plot that made sense even by the fast and loose standards of the Haney/Kannigher Era.

The cover (which depicts a scene very similar to what actually happens inside the comic, which is startlingly rare for the Silver Age) features a pouting Superman staring longingly at Lois Lane as she marries Bruce Wayne. The mopey Man of Steel envies his best friend because Lois is marrying him for himself, whereas she never fell for Clark Kent. But considering that Superman goes out of his way to make people think Clark Kent is a bumbling, clumsy, absent-minded hayseed whose only positive trait is his ability to scoop Lois, showing her up in front of their colleagues and negating a day of hard work on her part, it's hard to believe he was really trying to get her to love him for Clark.

By that same token--and maybe I'm getting too philosophical here--Batman is a costume Bruce Wayne puts on, but Clark Kent is a costume Superman puts on. In other words, just as Bruce Wayne tries to convince criminals that he is a shadowy creature of the night, Superman makes an effort to disguise himself as an average guy, but their true selves are Bruce and Superman. So Lois did love you for yourself, douchebag.

Also, it's hard to feel sorry for you and the fact no one accepts you as regular folk when you're attending a wedding in your blue body suit with red panties on the outside.

In case you're wondering why Gotham City has such a high crime rate and so few convictions stick in the courts, look no further than the fact masked vigilantes take home souvenirs from their arrests.

"Officer Burgas, do you have any proof that my client is a mad bomber, allegedly known as 'Mad Blaster'?"
"Well... uh... I had an entire case of bombs he made with 'Property of Steve 'Mad Bomber' Wilkins' written on each one in red Sharpie. But then Batman was like, 'I sure wish I had a memento of tonight for my trophy room...'"

After displaying the bomb collection in the most feng shui manner possible, Bruce goes into a large, secret vault, the contents of which Robin has always wondered but never bothered to ask. What the Boy Wonder doesn't know, but we do through the magic of Silver Age thought balloons, is that the room is full of gifts Bruce Wayne has purchased for Lois Lane over the years, but has never had the courage to give her.

That night, Dick and Bruce attend a costume party where the theme is to come dressed as heroes and meet up with Lois, who has come as Joan of Arc.Who is the bigger idiot: a drunk accountant who runs around pretending to fly because he's dressed as Superman and has been goaded into it by other partygoers who are having a good chuckle at his antics or the woman who piles 150 pounds of armor onto some poor horse and makes it stand precariously by the side of a pool?

On a similar note, when standing your horse beside the pool, point its butt away from the water. People will be swimming in there later and no amount of chlorine is going to counter the psychological impact of seeing plops of manure floating into the skimmer.

So the startled horse almost tramples Lois but Bruce saves her. The horse winds up in the pool and no one is strong enough to pull him out and all the armor is weighing him down, threatening to drown him. Fortunately, Superman shows up to break off his date with Lois just in time to save the animal.Here's another interesting point. This is an imaginary story, yet the writer is trying to explain things according to current (at the time) continuity. Wonder Woman had lost her powers, but if this is an imaginary story, she could have them for the four panels in which she appears. If you're going to create a world where Bruce Wayne harbors a secret love for and winds up marrying Lois Lane, why require Wonder Woman to wear a Legion flight ring? It's like writing a book about a gay, time traveling werewolf who gets elected mayor of a conservative Southern town and quibbling over a scene where Domino's delivers after midnight on a Thursday. I've already suspended my disbelief, Leo Dorfman! Give me what you've got!

After Superman takes off in a huff, unable to understand why Lois might be upset that he regularly breaks his dates with her in favor of hanging out all night with an Amazonian princess who's into bondage fantasies, Bruce carpes the diem and asks Lois out on a date. Lois is still angry with Superman, but remains loyal... until she remembers that Bruce Wayne is richer than Daddy Warbucks and Thurston Howell III put together.

The couple is inseparable for four to five weeks and finally Bruce pops the question, which means he waited about three and a half to four and a half weeks longer than characters usually wait from the time they meet Lois Lane to the time they propose marriage.

When Superman gets the news, he takes it really well...... except not.And Superman isn't the only one feeling the pangs of a lost love.Of course, Robin didn't go all Nightwing on us because Julius Schwartz knew no one would read a Dick Grayson solo book. Instead, Robin just harbors doubts and worries... for a year... or five."That purpose? To prove I'm completely batshit insane. I was thinking of how irresponsible it is to take a teenager into fights with street thugs and sociopathic clowns and realized I could be an even worse human being if I exposed a four year old to such ultraviolence."Come to think of it, if that kid's four, that means Bruce and Lois have been married about five years. Dick Grayson had already been Bruce Wayne's ward for several years by that point. Robin should be in his twenties. Put on some pants, dude.

Unfortunately, the second half of the story doesn't bring much to the table. Gimmick Master, a super criminal who's entire shtick you can probably guess, takes control of the Crime Syndicate, which appears to be a bunch of low-level thugs who spend most of their time hanging around complaining about superheroes."As your new leader, my first directive will be to cut all funding for four foot tall portraits of superheroes! We all know what Flash looks like, do we really need a 1:2 scale photo? For what we spent on this picture of Green Arrow, we could have two-ply toilet paper in the headquarters bathroom for an entire year."

Gimmick Master sets out to discover Batman's secret identity by inviting eight people with ties to the Caped Crusader, one of whom is Lois Lane, to an "intelligence study." The study consists of having the people lay down on a cot and listen to music on headphones. A fake news bulletin declaring Batman's death then plays and the headphones--which are really brainwave monitors--see who has the strongest reaction to the news, because that person assumedly would know Batman's true identity.

However, one doesn't really need brainwave monitors to figure out who has the strongest reaction.God, I want to play poker against Lois Lane.

Gimmick Master tortures Lois until she finally cracks and blurts out Batman's true identity... Clark Kent. Damn. It's already been established Lois didn't love Clark, but telling mobsters he's their foil so they can issue contracts on his life is going a little far.

Sure enough, the bad guys try to kill Clark by blowing him up with a bomb. When he survives, they assume something when wrong with the bomb, but Clark and Bruce realize that won't last long. The more assassinations Clark survives, the more likely the criminals are to figure out his true identity. So they set up a trap at an opera, where Clark sits in a loge seat and Gimmick Master shanghais a tenor, steals his costume, and gets on stage to shoot Clark with a springloaded sword.

Batman swoops in, proving he's not Clark Kent, and Clark survives, leading Gimmick Master to guess Clark is really Superman. Clark then reveals a steel plate he was wearing over his chest, casting doubt on his superpowers.

Trust me, it makes even less sense when you read the actual comic.

And the whole thing wraps up with Superman able to--after five or six years of happy marriage--tell Bruce, "I told you so.""My wife... my child... I can never know they'll be safe because the very criminal element I seek to destroy could use them to get to me. They are my everything, Kal-El. I just don't know what to do."
"Yup... that's why I never married her. Guess I'm just smarter than you. Oh well, good luck, buddy."

What a great friend.