Polite Dissent

No medical review in this week’s Lois Lane Friday. Instead, I’m going to take a look at Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #121 and the debut of the “new look” Lois.

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #121 “Everything You Wanted to Know About Lois Lane * But Were Afraid to Ask!”
Cary Bates, writer
Werner Roth, penciler

The cover is wonderful, but unfortunately there is no scene even remotely resembling that cover in the comic. Sigh.

Distraught over the death of her sister Lucy¹, Lois Lane wanders the streets of Metropolis for days on end. At one point, a young woman named Julie saves her from muggers. Only when Julie’s life is threatened by these muggers does Lois finally wake up out of her funk.

Later, as Julie and Lois are talking in her parent’s apartment, the landlord comes by and tells them that unless Julie can pay the rent, her parents will lose their apartment. It seems that her parents and all the other elderly couples in the apartment building received brochures from a retirement village called “Paradise Haven.” A bus from Paradise Haven was sent to pick up the retirees, but they never returned. The police have no leads².

At this point Lois decides that she needs to rededicate her career as a journalist to helping others. She quits the Daily Planet and starts work as a freelance reporter. She shows up at the Planet office in her new hairstyle and hip-70s outfit to tell Perry, Clark and Jimmy she quits. On the way out, she tearfully breaks up with Superman, telling him she’s no longer “the girl he comes back to between missions.”

Her first job as a freelancer is to discover what happened to Julie’s parents. She digs through old papers and finds out that their landlord is a former con artist. She dresses as an old lady and threatens to blackmail him unless he cuts her in on the deal. He flies her out in his helicopter to Paradise Haven, which is really just a row of shacks in the desert. He then revels that he knows that she’s an imposter and not an old lady because she’s wearing sexy fake eyelashes. “Oops! This is the kind of mistake that can get a girl killed!” thinks Lois as she is pushed out of the helicopter.

Superman arrives just in the nick of time to save Lois. He rips the blades of the helicopter and knocks out the landlord. Just then an earthquake hits Paradise Acres and he flies down to help. In my favorite scene, he tells Lois to take control of the helicopter – that’s right, the helicopter he just ripped the blades off of.

Superman is able to rescue the elderly couples and makes an astonishing discovery, the land Shady Acres is built on is loaded with uranium – they’re rich³!

Lois returns to Metropolis and decides that since she’s no longer a star reporter, she needs to take in some roommates. Julie moves in with her, along with the mysterious Kristin Cutler and the Rubenesque Marsha Mallow⁴. These roommates remain characters in the comic until it is finally cancelled with issue #137.

¹ Lucy disappeared over a waterfall while in a canoe in South America. Superman could find the ruined canoe, but no sign of Lucy. He believes her dead, but I believe to be in The Land of the Lost.
²Exactly how hard is it to find a large bus full of retirees?
³I wonder how this uranium find made the older couples rich. They had never actually bought into Paradise Haven, they were just touring it. The crooked con man still own the land — so he’s the rich one.
⁴I think some people are just doomed to be chunky from the day they were born. With a name like “Marsha Mallow” what chance did she have? She sould changer her name or at least sue her parents.