MYTHCOMICS: "LOIS LANE'S SUPER-DAUGHTER" (LOIS LANE #20, 1960)

This story was actually the second in a series of two imaginary "what if Lois married Superman" stories, which ran back to back in issues 19 and 20 of the LOIS LANE magazine. I presume from this that editor Mort Weisinger accepted an initial pitch for both stories, instead of choosing-- as he sometimes did-- to wait awhile to gauge audience interest. There may have been a sequel or two that followed, but these two were produced so as to be read back-to-back.

The first story from #19, "Mr. and Mrs. Clark (Superman) Kent," however, is not as symbolically resonant as the second one from #20, though both stories were written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger. "Mr. and Mrs" is not much more than a "beware what you wish for" homily. Superman marries Lois Lane, thus supposedly fulfilling the dream she's cherished since she first met him (at least in Weisinger's universe), finds out her dream isn't all it's cracked up to be, for in public she's simply the wife of the hero's alter ego Clark Kent. The fact that he's Superman is of course kept secret from the populace, so that no one-- especially Lois' longtime rival Lana Lang-- knows that the superhero is off the romantic market. It's a pleasant enough story, but "Lois Lane's Super-Daughter" strikes a deeper chord.

About three years after this story appeared on newstands, Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE was published. Building on material the author had gathered during the late 1950s, Friedan sought to make clear that modern American women had become desperately, symtomatically unahppy due to the imposition of a "mystique" upon their lives; one that kept them from fulfilling themselves as rounded human beings. MYSTIQUE was a major influence upon Second-Wave feninism from that time on. But Jerry Siegel's "Super-Daughter" presciently taps into some of the same discontents, though obviously it does so within a juvenile context, and within the context of a continuing superhero melodrama.

A few fans of Silver Age Superman have wondered why, after Superman's cousin Supergirl appeared on Earth in 1958, he didn't "man up" and adopt her in his identity of Clark Kent. I don't think the question was formally addressed in the actual continuity, and I'm sure that the proximate reason the character did not do so was that his editor and writers didn't want him playing Adoptive Daddy in every story. But there was still a kernel of logic in Clark's reticence, for during this time-period social services personnel generally took a dim view of single men or women adopting children of any age. Given this state of affairs, having the teenaged Kryptonian placed in an orphanage to seek adoption by a bonafide married couple-- which eventually does transpire-- doesn't strain my credulity.

What's interesting from the story's beginning is that the moment Clark and Lois are married, Clark springs it upon her that he'd like them to adopt this teenaged cousin that he's never mentioned before.

Lois looks a little bit poleaxed by this revelation, but she's married "for better or worse," and when the adoption agency complains that she might not be able to handle a new child and a job, Lois does what anyone in the period would deem The Right Thing.

Keep in mind that this Lois is not the fire-eater from the Golden Age. Though it would be absurd to assert that the Lois character was thoroughly consistent, since her moods could fluctuate according to the needs of a given story, it is at least part of Weisinger's conception of Lois that she has an irreducible domestic side to her personality. Mort Weisinger may well have been the sort of man whom Betty Friedan criticized for wanting women to become wholly domestic once they became wives. Nevertheless, for the time, the demands of the adoption agency seems not unusual, and the strength of Siegel's story is that one does see certain disadvantages to the world of domestic bliss.

True, there's almost no trace of mother-daughter bonding in the story, except for minor scenes like this one:

But it probably would have been a little beyond Siegel's skill-set to be THAT attuned to the ways of modern women, and besides, the main thrust of the story is all about Lois's discomfort with this perky intruder who's been thrust into her domestic world before the former lady reporter has even had a chance to get used to her new husband. The problem is only aggravated by the fact that both Lois' husband and her de facto daughter belong to a world of super-powered endeavors to which Lois cannot aspire. Here's one of the tandem "super-feats" to which Supergirl alludes on the cover of #20:

Worse by far, though, is that Supergirl's powers make Lois's function in the household irrelevant.

There's an exquisite irony in this setup that I wonder if Betty Friedan could have appreciated, even without the fantasy-content. Lois sacrifices the "exciting life" she enjoyed as a girl reporter, but her reward is to be marginalized within the household that is supposedly her domain. Yet through it all, Lois masks her pain, a veritable Stella Dallas of the comic books, an icon of maternal martrydom. Yet, where Olive Prouty's character accepts her marginalization, Siegel's Lois manages to manifest her hidden hostility in one of the most roundabout ways ever conceived, even in a Mort Weisinger comic book.

Yes, that's right: not only does Lois "just happen" to whale on the backside of a robot who looks just like Supergirl in her secret ID, a snoopy women from the adoption agency literally invades Lois's private home just in time to catch Lois in the act of unleashing her fury at the (first) unwanted intruder. I particularly enjoy how tearful Lois is in the story's final panel, perhaps revealing just a touch of the schadenfreude she may be experiencing from Supergirl's "unhappy ending." Will Lois ever make things up to Superman? Well, maybe or maybe not, but either way, she won't have a fifth wheel getting in the way.

I should note that though a fair number of stories from this time-period contain hints at some sexual stirrings between the two super-cousins-- particularly "Superman's Super-Courtship"-- "Super-Daughter" actually works just as well without any such elements of sexual transgression as it would with it. I could see the story entering new terrain if it were ALSO about a nubile young adoptive daughter nudging out an older wife from the affections of the adoptive father. But mythically speaking, the story works quite as well as a melodramatic-- as well as comical-- look at the marital disadvantages of a former working woman in the era of the Comic-Book Silver Age.

ANGELS ALSO DIE WHEN LIBERALS INDULGE IN WISHFUL THINKING

This isn't really a sequel proper to this June 2015 essay; I just liked the title enough to use it with slight alterations-- though all the same distinctions between liberal and ultraliberal remain.

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On this CBR Community, I made the following post, to see if anyone there could give me examples of conservative readers misrepresenting comics-stories or characters, to counter the many examples of liberal misrepresentation I've covered on this blog.

Since the days of Frederic Wertham, with his comment on Superman's "S" ("we should be glad, I suppose, that it does not read 'SS'"), there have been any number of dumb readings of comic books by persons with a liberal or quasi-liberal agenda (however you want to define that).
But are there examples of comics that have been actively misread by conservatives-so-called? I'm not thinking so much of reviews that complain about sex and violence-- you get those in liberal quarters too-- but instances where someone says, "X stands for good conservative values" and the artist comes back with, "That was not what I meant at all."
Obviously there have been creators who actively courted conservatives, like the troika of Capp, Caniff and Gould, but that wouldn't be a misreading.

I didn't get too many on-topic responses, but one of the posts deserves some extended rebuttal.

There are not many artists who are conservative, and it seems that conservative readers sometimes grasp at straws to find support in the arts when it really isn't there.
We had a discussion about this on the Green Lantern Corps message board a while back, and I came to the conclusion that the arts tend to be about the opposition to power, which usually doesn't jibe with conservative thinking. 
When conservatives do produce art, it tends to be about righteous revenge or the triumph of a strong leader. Or maybe religious in nature.

Now, keep in mind that if the poster actually read all of the original post, he's just seen me mention three of the leading creators of the Golden Age of Comic Strips-- Al Capp, Milt Caniff, and Chester Gould-- and yet he's prepared to state that "there are not many artists who are conservative."

Further, he and some other posters decided across the  board that "the arts tend to be about the opposition to power, which usually doesn't jibe with conservative thinking."

I've come across a lot of extremely politicized analyses of comics-work, obviously on HOODED UTILITARIAN, in which critics have argued that the only *worthwhile* art is art with an avowed liberal stance. But, amid all of HU's superficial excoriations of talents like Dave Sim and Frank Frazetta, I've never got the sense that any of the pontificators on that site believed that "opposition to power" defined art. On the contrary, HU was a lot like the old TV game-show CAN YOU TOP THIS.
Contestants on the game-show tried to top one another by getting the highest score on a "laugh meter." With HU it was more along the lines of an "indignation meter," with each critic trying to top one another by showing, over and over, the shameful prevalence of Evil Conservative Ideals throughout culture, be it Charlie Hebdo or an unpublished drawing by Frazetta.

I, of course, don't think art is defined by any political stance, or any political program. Capp's creativity is not defined only by his silly, liberal-baiting satire of Joan Baez, but also by his creation of the Schmoos, just as Gould is defined not solely by his parroting of "law and order" rhetoric but also by his gallery of Dick Tracy fiends. Art, as I've noted elsewhere, is first all about play, not converting others to follow the "right" political program. There's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't like Milo Manara's politics," but it's a sign of intellectual laziness to interpret the size of Spider-Woman's butt as an inevitable expression of those politics.

I recently came across a considerably more famous source of wishful thinking, in my first-ever reading of Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE. If I were the conservative that I've been accused of being, I wouldn't be able to say that Friedan's work remains a classic of political insight. Whatever the later abuses of Second-Wave Feminism in later years, there can be no question that Friedan's book drew national attention to an inequitable aspect of American culture. The opening sections of the book are among the strongest, for Friedan had ample experience in the world of women's magazines. I have no difficulty believing her, when she averred that men coming back World War II had in essence usurped early feminism's emphasis on the ideals of "career women," and produced in its place the ideal of a "feminine mystique" that revolved around women finding fulfillment in the home.

But, like many activists on both sides of the political spectrum, Friedan's reach exceeds her grasp. (One of these days I've got to excoriate the legacy of Michael Medved, who may be one of the most famous "conservative misreaders" of all time.) In Chapter 11, entitled "The Sex Seekers," Friedan attempts to prove that the rise of sexy entertainment in the 1950s-- backed up by a study by psychologist Albert Ellis-- was rooted in the marginalization of the career woman. Friedan writes:

But of all the strange sexual phenomena that have appeared in the era of the feminine mystique, the most ironic are these: the frustrated sexual hunger of American women has increased, and their conflicts over femninity have intensified, as they have reverted from independent activity to search for their sole fulfillment through their sexual role in the home.

I wouldn't have objected to the statement that the social changes behind the "feminine mystique" could have CONTRIBUTED to the alleged hyper-sexualization of the 1950s decade (always a matter of degree, since some of Friedan's examples, like the novel "Peyton Place," seemed pretty tame even by the end of the 1960s). But like most activists, Friedan is a monocausalist. She ignores numerous other factors upon the alleged hyper-sexualization-- not least the very thing she mentions in other contexts; the effect of male GIs returning from the war-- because she's trying to flog her concept of the feminine mystique. Further, her jeremiads against the "increased preoccupation with sex" begins to sound like yet another replay of Theodor Adorno's rants against the culture industry, which in their turn very probably influenced the anti-pornography stance of Frederic Wertham.  And that's company that no good liberal should ever "wish" to associate with, even conceptually.