I Love Lana (No, Not That One...)

Well, this is embarrassing. Two sketchy Grab Bags, then a day I could have posted but didn't, and now here I am again, still with nothing very much to talk about. That's what'll happen when you spend most of your time tidying up the garden, walking the dog, enjoying some beautiful Spring sunshine and arranging a funeral.

I could actually, finally, really get started on the Zones of Norrath feature I keep dancing around but I've left it a bit late in the day. That might come tomorrow.  

I was thinking of doing something on the new game from my Steam library - the one that seems to have stuck. I've tried several of the new titles I acquired over Christmas and the New Year but it took a while to find one that grabbed me.

All of that sounds like work, though. Enjoyable, satisfying work, sure, but still work. A lot more, for sure, than what I am going to do, which is reprint an article I wrote for a comics fanzine back in the 'eighties. Which one, I can't remember. I know it was published somewhere but if I have a copy, I don't know where it is. I just have the original draft.

Tipa was wondering a while back, what of this shall remain and she was of the opinion that putting stuff on the internet doesn't guarantee anyone's writing the kind of immortality some people used to think it did. Obviously that's true but it's equally true that keeping it in a folder on top of your bookcase doesn't, either. Both rely on someone eventually discovering something you've written and thinking it's worth sharing. I'm guessing that's a tad more likely to happen if you post it where the entire world can see it.

Hmm. But now it occurs to me I don't have the piece digitized yet so now I have to scan it. Damned if that doesn't sound like work after all....and it's done! Turns out it takes literally less than five minutes to do that. God bless technology, eh?. 

I imagine this had a title once but I can't remember what it was so I'm going to call it...

 I Love Lana

I always thought Clark Kent was crazy.

He had the perfect life there in Smallville, didn't he? Ma Kent could have baked apple-pie for America. Pa could have given cracker-barrel lessons to Robert Frost. He had the trust and admiration of everyone in town, from Police Chief Parker down to good ol' Pete Ross. And best of all, the girl-next-door was Lana Lang.
If I'd been Clark, I'd never have left. I'd never have taken a chance on the big city and the glitter of the Pulitzer somewhere in the dim maybe future. And I sure as heck wouldn't have fallen for Lois Lane.

Oh, sure, you can say she's tripwire smart and very, well, metropolitan. And she's good-looking, in an austere kind of way, but after growing up with Lana? No, I never really could believe it.

Clark's boyhood was an American classic. If you strip out all that superheroism, it wasn't so different from Tom Sawyer's - all the world to explore and the next town another country, danger and adventure round the corner of the barn then safe home for supper. And everywhere Clark went, there was his rust-haired shadow, Lana, scarcely a pace behind him.

She was the kind of girl who would have driven you wild. She pried and poked and never let go. She wanted into everything you were doing and if you tried to keep her out she'd want in even more. Clark never seemed to know whether she was his best friend, his girlfriend or some pretty little devilette sent to try him. (He could have used some trying, too).

Clark and Lana grew up with each other. As babies they went on hayrides together and played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in Lana's rec room. They went to the circus and the beach with their fathers, who got on as well together as good neighbors should, despite their different stations in life.

As they grew older, the kids were in and out of each other's houses like cousins. Who knew when Lana might drop round with a cake she'd baked for Ma Kent to taste or Clark pop in to the Langs' to see the witch-doctors' masks from the Professor's latest expedition?

Lana had seen a lot more of the world than Clark, of course. She was the same age, but she'd traveled. Her father was an explorer and archeologist, and he'd often take Lana on field trips. Compared to Clark she was a woman of the world and she made sure he knew about it. As Superboy, Clark had been all over the universe, but he had to keep that to himself, so it didn't count for much.

They didn't just live next door, they were in the same class at school, and whether it was a chemistry experiment or a social event, Clark and Lana always seemed to end up partners. Sometimes it looked as though there was some kind of conspiracy to push them together. You couldn't say they were going steady, but you could tell there was an understanding.

Being Lana's boyfriend could be tough. Any adolescent boy would have had a hard time living up to the image of Professor Lang, Smallville's own Indiana Jones, but Clark had to compete with his peerless other self as well. In the years to come, as Lana's life plaited with Superman's and braided with Clark's, people who didn't understand what they shared would chide and ridicule her, saying she was starstruck or a gold-digger. Yet her friendship with Clark never wavered.

Being Clark's girlfriend had it's downside, too. That scared-of-his-own- shadow routine must have been hard for everyone to take, but at least Ma and Pa Kent and Pete Ross could hug the secret close and feel good. At least they knew why.
If Lana dreamed of marrying Superboy, well, what Smallville girl didn't? But dreams are for dreaming and life is for living, and Clark was as real as real life gets. His timidity was probably the one thing that gave Lana doubts. As she said to the reminiscing wardens of Clark's old orphanage, "He still is cute...whenever he isn't too timid and weak!"

Lana wasn't timid. She had the spirit of a tigress. She was tack-sharp, too, and headstrong. She was a green-eyed redhead and she had all the traits. Truth told, she was almost too much for Clark.

She was definitely too much for Superboy, or so he claimed. When Othar of Thrann, the self-styled Super World, coerced Superboy and a claque of lesser planetary heroes into leaving their homeworlds for ever, Superboy was glad of the rest. "Smallville, where I live, is a nice place", he told Stormboy and the others, "The only thing that bothered me was an inquisitive girl, Lana Lang, who suspected my identity!" The endless procession of crooks and creatures that came to Smallville month in, month out, hellbent on mayhem weren't a problem, then. It was only that pesky girl, who might turn out to be just that bit too smart for him, that he couldn't get out of his mind.

Still, he wouldn't have been without her. More than once Lana caught Clark with his super-shirt untucked, but she never took advantage. Once she actually caught him changing in a phone-booth. Instead of peeking, she turned her back. After all, as she thought to herself, "I'm dying to know his identity, but it wouldn't be right to expose it!"

If you take a moment to think about it, a boy who could fly across galaxies and corkscrew through time shouldn't have had too much trouble finding a bit peace from an interfering girl, even one as sharp as Lana. But then, it was obvious the last thing he really wanted was to get away from her.

He had a club all his own, way up the time-line in the 30th Century. Lana couldn't have followed him there, surely? It would have been easy to keep the Legion to himself, but the Legion had girls, and some of those legionnaires had girlfriends. Superboy could hardly wait to show Lana off.

Lana was up for any challenge. They didn't say feisty then, but that was what she was. She was happy to step up into the super-powered leagues, and she wasn't short of opportunities.

Professor Lang was always bringing home talismans and sacred objects. and he gave as little credence to their possible side-effects as he did to the freedom of worship of their previous owners. He wasn't much more circumspect when it came to alien artifacts. One time he came back from Africa with a 21- inch glowing metal belt which he claimed was "the most amazing discovery I've made in my entire career!" That was saying something given his track record, but he let Lana try it on for size just the same.

The belt was made for "a race of very small, slender people" and Lana was delighted to find it fitted her, if she drew her stomach in a little. More than that, though, it gave her amazing powers.

That was the start of a brief spell as Gravity Girl, who also turned out, luckily, to be invulnerable. ("That's nice to know!" she observed as the first bullets bounced off her chest). In the end Superboy convinced her it wasn't the right career move. He was only too glad to melt the belt with his heat vision but it didn't put an end to Lana's super-heroics.

She established a successful part-time career as Insect Queen, who looked better than you might expect. She had a Bio-ring, a striking yellow-and-black costume and the power to change into any insect she could think of, which was plenty.
When she turned her back on him in the phone booth that time, it was the excuse Superboy had been waiting for. He flew her through the time-barrier to meet the Legion of Super-Heroes as a reward for curbing her natural curiosity.

Lana realized right away that this was a club girls could join. She happened to have brought her Insect Queen regalia on the off chance, but she didn't know that Legionnaires need a natural power to pass the exam and a bio ring wouldn't qualify. She tried out but they told her to go and wait with the other rejects.

Lana didn't get into a pet. She didn't cry or sulk, she called in a favor from Dream Girl and ended up saving four Legionnaires on a mission to Ice City. She was such a hit, they admitted her to the Legion Reserve. They thanked themselves for doing it years later, when they turned up on Lana's doorstep, running down the centuries in fear of Mordru and their lives.

Lana did the right thing then, like she always did when it really mattered. So, she was nosy and sneaky and there was an acid edge to her tongue. So what? She was the best friend Clark ever had or would have. He knew it, too, though he could never resist a gentle joke at her expense.

When Superboy needed someone to help him in his work, it was usually Lana who got the call. Out to break a narcotics ring, he involved Lana in a typically elaborate scheme that required him to pretend to be an imbecile. Lana in turn was required to pretend to take advantage of his disability by tricking him into writing his secret identity in her notebook. "This way", she said, to prove to the audience of dope-pedlars just how far Superboy's wits had dulled "if you ever get amnesia, I'll be able to tell you what your secret identity is!" Ever the wag, Superboy wrote "Clark Kent" in her book and smiled to himself. He'd probably just done Poe in English Lit. At the end, as they laughed together over the private joke, he was thinking to himself, "Even more private than you suspect! The laugh's really on you, Lana, because... I am Clark Kent!"

They had a real rapport, Clark and Lana. They made a good team. In the comic-books they looked the part, perfectly caught by Curt Swan, a master of nuance. The stories they shared were silly, often ludicrous, but Swan and the rest of DC's wonderful artists gave them dignity, while the awkward, naive phrasing of their speech gave them charm.

I grew up with Lana and Clark, while they were growing up with each other. I didn't think so much about it at the time, but the way they were with each other, their mutual respect, helped to legitimize friendships with the opposite sex. Where many comics, especially the British ones, talked up the natural uncertainty and confusion between the sexes that makes girls and boys seem to each other like ambassadors from an alien race, Lana and Clark showed that despite evidence to the contrary it was quite alright to be friends with a girl.

I never lost my affection for Clark, but somewhere along the way I kind of fell in love with Lana. As she grew older and left Smallville I admired her career as a roving TV news reporter for WMET-TV and applauded her graduation to co-anchor on WGBS's Evening News. It seemed so right that after following Clark into journalism, she should end up sitting at the desk beside him, facing the world. "Every station manager in town would give his right arm to have this gal!" Morgan Edge told Clark, and it was no more of a tribute than she deserved.

The WGBS years were my golden-age for the Superman family, and the tart, cosmopolitan Lana, who had to hold the line before a live TV link every time Clark thought of a job for Superman, was the best she was allowed to be. Later came John Byrne and the Reformation. Some of it worked, but babies were being slung out with bathwater everywhere you looked and the real Lana went too. Truthfully, I still care what happens to her, even if I have to do that thing with my mind, eliding the bits of history I don't want in favor of what seems right. Last time I touched base with her she was on the verge of marrying Pete Ross, which seems infinitely sad and plausible.

Whatever happens, Smallville will remain. In the middle of a long, late- summer afternoon where it's always 1959, a dark-haired boy will be walking home a red-headed girl with laughing eyes. She'll let him carry her books. And that's as it should be. 

That was all before the Smallville TV series, of course. That was a very different Lana. But then, over all the years there've been so many...

These days, the whole rickety structure of the superverse is so fatally compromised, only a 12th level intellect like Brainiac 5's could hope to make sense of it. It's far beyond me, now. 

I'll stick with the Bronze and Silver Age Lana. I'm not a big one for nostalgia but sometimes the past does have its allure.