On 26 September 1938 — a little over eighty-two years ago as the crow flies — issue six of Action Comics (cover-dated November of that year) featured the Superman story “Superman’s Phony Manager” (full disclosure: that title didn’t appear in the original issue and has been applied retroactively).
This was a milestone tale not just because it featured the first case of a bad guy pretending to be Superman, but also because it was in this story that ace reporter Lois Lane plummeted from a skyscraper for the very first time.
As has been documented before on this blog, Lois Lane is particularly gravity-prone and skyscrapers are a common stumbling block for her. In this case, she was thrown through the window (by the aforementioned baddie masquerading as Superman) but there have been many times in the subsequent eight point two decades when Lois’s departure from a high point on the skyscraper was through accident, as we saw in Superman the Movie…
.. or by choice: in the Richard Donner Cut of Superman II, Lois tries to prove that Clark Kent is Superman (hint: he actually is!) by jumping out of the office window.
Lois seems to do this one a lot: “I’m sure Clark is secretly Superman so I will put myself in danger and he’ll be forced to save me and reveal himself!” This action not only risks Lois’s own life, but shows her callous disregard for the people in genuine danger whom Superman might not be able to reach in time because he’s too busy catching her again.
He does save her, of course, because he’s Superman and he loves Lois for some reason, and thus doesn’t want her to become a kerb-kebab through malice, misfortune, carelessness, bloody-minded arrogance or just plain stupidity.
Going back to Action Comics #6, here’s Supes catching Lois for the very first time…
…unaware that he’ll be doing this so often that before long “Catching Lois Lane” will end up on his list of hobbies and interests.
And these are by no means the only examples. It’s hard to be sure how many times, exactly, Lois Lane has narrowly avoided being cruelly renamed Lois Plane* by the gutter-press, but if we take all the comics, radio shows, TV shows, cartoons and movies into account, I reckon it’s a safe bet that in the past eighty-and-a-couple years she’s fallen at least fifty times. Sometimes she falls from cliff-edges, or castle roofs, or aircraft, but most of the time it’s skyscrapers.
*Two gags in one there, folks! “Plane” as in the common abbreviation for aeroplane (or airplane, if you want to get all American about it), and “Plane” in the geometrical sense: a flat or level surface, which is what Lois would be if she hit the ground from high enough.
According to this possibly accurate site, these days the average skyscraper is about 247 metres tall. But back in the early days of Superman comics skyscrapers were shorter (well, obviously: it wasn’t possible to build taller ones until the first lot had scraped away enough of the underside of the sky), plus Lois doesn’t always fall from the roof: sometimes, as we’ve seen above, she gets pegged out a window. Again, we don’t have all the data, so we’re going to have to make some rough guesses…
Lois can’t fall from too low a height because Superman isn’t always in the vicinity: even though he can fly faster than the speed of light when it’s convenient for the story, it’ll still take some time for him to discover that she’s in need of his help.
A fall of five metres takes about a second, which (a) might not be fatal, and (b) is nowhere near long enough for Superman to respond: he might be in the middle of foiling a jewel heist or unmasking the ringleader of a crooked school-bus scam or dealing with a nuisance like Mister Mxyzptlk who only appears in this sentence because I’m showing off that I can still spell his name without looking it up.
Falling twenty metres takes a fraction over two seconds. Still not long enough. (By the way: I’m using the way-more-useful-than-you-might-expect Splat Calculator to get these figures!)
A fall of one hundred metres takes 4.52 seconds, and 100 is a nice round figure, so let’s take that as the average distance Lois falls before Superman catches her. If we multiply that distance by the fifty falls we’ve arbitrarily decided she must have taken so far, then we’re looking at a combined vertical distance of around 5,000 metres, or five kilometres.
That’s over three miles, and it doesn’t even take into account any of the times Lois has been trapped inside a plummeting plane or a space-ship. If I were her, I’d avoid high places entirely, or at the very least start wearing a parachute. Oh, hold on a second…
Well, that’s a bit arrogant coming from someone who if not for Superman would have been hosed down into the drains of Metropolis several dozen times over by now.
Still, just to show that their relationship is not completely one-sided, there was that time in Action Comics #156 (May 1951) when Superman secretly gave Lois super-powers so that she could discover for herself what it’s like having to save reckless civilians all the time:
I’m no relationship expert, but in my opinion that couple needs some pretty intense therapy.
Rusty Staples 