Polite Dissent

It’s Friday, so that means it is Lois Lane Day here at Polite DissentThe last day of the workweek can only mean one thing here at Polite Dissent (and I’m not talking about Happy Hour) – Lois Lane Friday! Today’s tale is the first story in Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #27 (and reprinted more affordably in Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #95) titled “Lois Lane’s Super-Brain”. It’s not clear who wrote the script, but the art is by Kurt Schaffenberger.

Lois is interviewing Professor Holt who has invented a Brain Bank. This is a machine that “collects the wisdom and knowledge of great people! It has already absorbed the intelligence of hundreds of famous people.” Lois spends the afternoon interviewing famous scientists and mathematicians and watching them get their knowledge stored in the machine. After the professor leaves, Lois puts the machine on her head to pose for a picture. Unfortunately, she hits the reverse switch and all the knowledge stored in the machine is crammed into Lois’s brain.

The next morning, she wakes up startled to discover that her head has tripled in size and all her hair has fallen out. Even though the effect is only supposed to last for a few days, Lois doesn’t want anyone to know what has happened so she comes up with a series of schemes to hide her gigantic head. Most of her plans are actually quite clever and fun to read.

She decides to hide out in Las Vegas until the effect wears off. While there she helps an unlucky newlywed couple win their money back at the roulette table. To her great dismay, she finds that she has accidentally won the grand prize at the local science fiction convention’s costume contest. To add insult to injury, Bizarro Superman shows up and asks Lois to marry her, since he thinks she is the most beautiful girl on Earth (oops, “he think she am the most beautiful girl”).

Superman shows up a few moments later and reveals that he has known her secret all along. Her head will soon return to normal size, but her hair won’t grow back. Luckily, Superman has a special machine that will allow Lois to regrow her hair. The next morning, Bizarro Superman shows up again but is repulsed by her restored beauty. Lois hugs her picture of Superman now that all is right with the world again .

Assuming for a moment that a greater intelligence results in a larger brain, Lois’s head would still not be able to expand like it did. The skull is actually made up of several different bones. The joints between these bones are known as “sutures”. Early in life, these bones fit together loosely. This is because babies need a flexible skull to fit through the birth canal and to allow for the tremendous growth of the brain in the first two years of life. Adults don’t need as flexible a skull so the sutures begin to fuse and harden starting about age 2. By the time a person reaches adulthood, almost all the sutures have hardened and there is little (if any) ability for the skull to expand in size. If Lois’s brain really did triple in size overnight, her skull would either explode or she’d develop the world’s worst headache followed by a coma and death due to brainstem herniation.

• Lois’s situation is nearly the opposite of Tony Stark in Ultimate Iron Man #1. His neural tissue is increased in size, but unlike Lois his skull is not fixed in size yet. That’s why I suspect he would end up with an enormous head and brain, despite what his mother Maria maintains.
• I don’t accept that smarter people necessarily have bigger brain, as I noted in my Ultimate Iron Man #1 review. Make sure to check out the comments as well, as this issue is addressed by people more knowledgeable than me in this area.
• And before you ask about the Leader, remember the gamma rays! I’m not sure I can explain Hector Hammond, Blockbuster or MODOK.

What I am most amazed by is Superman’s hair growing machine. Surely this wondrous machine would have solved the Lex Luthor problem from the very beginning. I have got to get one of those for my office.