When the New 52 was first announced, and we were getting books like Men of War and Blackhawks and the like focusing on the civilian experience in the DCU, a Lois Lane solo series was one of the first things I wanted to see, especially after the promise of Flashpoint’s Lois Lane & The Resistance faded so quickly. I even mentioned it to Jim Lee as a possibility. While it may not be an ongoing just yet, we do have a Lois Lane #1 to discuss. Oh, sorry. The official title is Superman: Lois Lane #1, but did you really need that modifier? Is Lois Lane not iconic enough on her own after 75 years? That’s the whole point of breaking up her marriage to Clark Kent and giving her a solo adventure – getting her out from behind Superman’s cape. Yeah, sure, it was also so they could have Superman hook up with Wonder Woman, but come on, let Lois shine as a hard-nosed hard-news reporter.
Marguerite Bennett pens this tale about Lois, her sister Lucy, and the strange cartel of monster-drug makers that they get mixed up with them, while a fleet of artists handle the pencils – Emanuela Lupacchino, Meghan Hetrick, Ig Guara and Diogenes Neves. We open with Lois flashing back to old childhood memories of being army brats, following her father Sam Lane’s military career from base to base, country to country. Lois (nicknamed Lola) and Lucy developed a coded language between them hacked together from the various languages they’ve learned in each place, and Lois’ childhood memories of watching her mother slowly die are interspersed with the modern tale of Lucy coming to Lois in a panic when her “roommate” Amanda (actually her partner, but she’s apparently not “out” to Lois yet) is kidnapped by a shadowy group of armed men, admitting that she’d “fallen” by getting involved with a strange new drug. A drug that was supposed to cure a sickness, but wound up being some kind of monster-transformative thing derived from an alien fungus.
It turns out “The Cartel” is actually a group who abducts the drug-monsters to try to cure them, and as Lois investigates, she gets captured by them as well, taken to a ship graveyard outside of Metropolis. With a bit of cleverness while tied to a chair, she manages to get the full scoop from a thankfully expository conversation between two scientists outside her cell, before she does a daring chair-breaking move and sets about freeing the animal-people being treated like lab rats. The mysterious, nameless, masked cartel “agent” seems to be fighting on the side of right, turning against his superiors when they get too ruthless, while Lois makes good with rescuing Amanda, flying away on a giant insect that was once a person, not realizing that that person was Lucy – a result of her abuse of Amanda’s drug.
It’s a sad tale of substance abuse in the realm of superheroes, a family troubled by the loss of their mother, and the bravery of asking for help when you’ve fallen from grace. It doesn’t have the rat-a-tat dialogue you’d want from a Lois saga (although there is a brief bit of goofing around with Jimmy Olsen), but there’s not a lot of opportunity for it in this sea of darker emotions, desperation, shame and nostalgia – Lois can’t spell that word, but she knows the roots – “to return home” and “pain,” which is an interesting revelation about the nature of that concept. I don’t love Bennett’s style – some of her minor plot points and exposition feel forced – but there are imaginative elements to the story and some thought-provoking revelations about identity and “passing” for something you’re not, from Lucy being closeted to the monsters being able to shift back to humans and even for the young Lane girls feeling like they don’t belong anywhere even though they look the parts. Also, the artistic team manages to keep a relatively consistent style and tone throughout, which is not easy to do with that many cooks in the kitchen.
Lois Lane #1 is solid. While it’s not the tone I’d hope for in her own ongoing (should she ever get one), it serves this ambitious story reasonably well.
