Tagged: Lois Lane

MARTHA THOMASES: Must The World Have A (Mrs.) Superman?

The staff at my regular comic shop wants to know what I think about the DC re-launch. I’ve been shopping there for decades, and I buy DC comics every time I go in there. I don’t only buy DC, but I buy almost everything they publish.

That’s the way it’s been for me for more than 50 years. I’ve liked Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and the Legion of Super-Heroes for that long. As I’ve grown up, I’ve liked other characters, and I’ve learned to follow not just the heroes I like, but also the writers and artists.

So here’s what I tell them when they ask me what I think: “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

Superman has relaunched once in my lifetime. I can’t count how often Wonder Woman has been rebooted. The Legion is so complicated that I have trouble keeping it straight and I’ve been reading it for 50 years!

I predict that, within five years, everything that’s important will be the same in the DC Universe as it is now, or as it was at some time in the past.

In the meantime, DC’s publicist, David Hyde, is kicking ass with his publicity efforts. I hope that enough people sample the new comics to see if they like them. It’s been a very long time since new readers have been courted so aggressively.

Unfortunately, there is one aspect of this I don’t like. Dan Didio and Jim Lee have described their characters as “brands.” This is the way the MBAs who run Warner Bros. talk about their properties, and I understand how, when one wants to appear savvy to one’s boss, one appropriates the bosses’ jargon.

“Brand” is a marketing term. Tide is a brand. Nike is a brand. It’s a corporate identity that promises consumers something they want, whether that something is reliably clean clothes or athletic shoes that let the wearer perform like a superstar.

Superman is not a brand. He’s a character. He’s a character that changes according to the whims of the creative teams making his stories. He may implicitly promise consumers something they want (truth, justice and the American way), but he keeps them as readers because of his human qualities, the details of his life that fascinate us, amuse us and excite us.

As his publicist, I observed these phenomena in the 1990s. When Clark Kent and Lois Lane got engaged, the world went crazy. They didn’t do this because of branding, but because it was a sweet, human story. It’s always been my opinion that the reason the “Death of Superman” story was such a big deal was not because Superman died (he’s died plenty), but because the public had been following his relationship with Lois, and felt the loss along with her.

I’ve enjoyed Superman’s marriage. I enjoy stories of happy couples, whether they are detectives or ghosts or super-heroes. Millions of people watched Smallville to see Clark and Lois get married.

So I’m disappointed that the marriage will no longer be. That said, I trust Grant Morrison to write great stories.

And I’d bet we see another marriage in my lifetime.

Martha Thomases, Dominoed Daredoll, would also like to see The Dibnys’ back.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

Smallville – We Truly Knew Ye

I’ve checked with my cadre of DC contributors, staffers and fans current and past. While it’s impossible to decide on an exact number, the consensus is that in the past ten years the teevee series Smallville painstakingly built a cohesive and linear universe of DC characters while, at the same time, DC Comics reinvented itself in whole or in substance approximately 14 thousand times. Guess which was more entertaining.

And now Smallville’s gone. Pushed out of the way for still another Superman movie that, like the comic books, gets to ignore everything that has gone before it. That’s not entirely bad: Superman Returns was so awful I was thinking of getting rid of the memories by electroshock therapy.

Instead, I watched Smallville. At first I was there out of professional and fanboy curiosity. It was good but not great, and I stuck with it because my wife enjoyed the show. In time, Michael Rosenbaum’s performance as Lex Luthor grabbed me, and when they introduced John Glover as his eviler father, the tension between the two was riveting. When they brought Green Arrow in (using the Grell costume) and started really building their version of the DC universe, I got absorbed.

Then they brought in Erica Durance as Lois Lane. I enjoyed her performance and her character so much I felt like I was betraying my own childhood. More DC characters were introduced, heroes and villains alike. As they moved away from the Kryptonite-villain of the week and developed Zod, Darkseid, and the first interesting Toyman ever, Smallville moved towards the top of my TiVo must-record list. After ten seasons the show had more storylines going on than Soap – but by the time that final episode aired last night, they had resolved or at least tied-up just about everything. It was remarkable; the fact that so many of the actors from earlier seasons returned was even more remarkable.

At its best, Smallville has been about the human drama, and its science-fiction environment rarely mitigated this. It is in this spirit that the two-hour finale was produced. Some might find this to be overbearing; respectfully, I think those people have missed the point. If you take this element out of the story, all you have left is a comic book – in the most clichéd and repellant sense of the term.

The production team also avoided the trap of giving each character their moment to shine. Whereas most had sufficient screen time, this last episode was all about Clark Kent, as it was, by and large, from the very beginning of the series.

This is not to say that there isn’t a kick-ass story here. Two of them, in fact, with enough villains to fill the Justice League’s dance card. Darkseid, Granny Goodness, Lionel Luthor, and of course, his son Lex.

The finale was not flawless. For one thing, everybody showed a lack of respect for how gravity works, not to mention security on Air Force One. The big scene between Lex and Clark was pretty much lifted from The Dark Knight; thankfully, both the characters and the performers make it their own. Technically, this show was at least as proficient as teevee gets. If it were a theatrical movie, it would have been in 3-D, and that would have screwed the pooch.

Teevee is teevee. It’s not comics, and shows come and go all the time. Smallville’s decade was a remarkable achievement, and it set the high-water mark for superhero television.

At the end of the ten-year day, you will believe a man should fly.

 

Smallville Fans can Enjoy Free iTunes Downloads

At long last, CW’s Smallville rings down the curtain tomorrow night with a two-hour finale. As we saw last week, Tom Welling will finally don Brnadon Routh’s cheesy red and blue outfit and fly into the sunset. The incredibly uneven show will see Clark Kent face off against Darkseid, accept his destiny, marry Lois Lane and spar one final time with Lex Luthor. Despite a plethora of costumed heroes now populating that world, I bet we only see Green Arrow at the wedding.

Fans can now relive each heroic moment by downloading the series in HD, now on iTunes.

To celebrate Warner Bros, Digital Distribution is giving fans the chance to get FREE Downloads of all 10 season premieres in HD and discounts on seasons 1-9, now for a limited time on iTunes. Plus, find each episode from Season 10 (The Final Season) now available in HD including the finale after, Friday’s broadcast.

Here’s a clip from the Final Season.

 

Carla Gugino Needs Some Help

Carla Gugino Needs Some Help

The visual stunning Sucker Punch has a top notch line up of female stars, including Carla Gugino who is no stranger to stunning action films, yet she is a little baffled by the social media thing. Carla explains it all right here plus prepare to be ENCHANTED by the newest Lois Lane, right here.

So who do you think would be a better Lois Lane? Drop us a comment below!

Don’t forget – Pop Culture never sleeps (and neither do we). Catch the latest 24/7 on The Point Radio.

Amy Adams Cast As Lois Lane For New ‘Superman’ Movie

Amy Adams Cast As Lois Lane For New ‘Superman’ Movie

Amy Adams at the 81st Academy Awards.

Wasn't Lana Lang the redhead?

This time around, L.L. will be played by A.A.

Three-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams will play Lois Lane in the new Superman movie, according to the LA Times’s Hero Complex blog.

Director Zack Snyder reportedly called Adams yesterday in Paris to congratulate her. Somewhat surprisingly, Snyder did not use any of the actresses from his new film Sucker Punch, a $82-million action flick that made $19-million in its opening this weekend.

Earlier this year, Henry Cavill was announced as the Man of Steel. Kevin Costner and Diane Lane were recently cast as Superman’s adoptive Earth parents, the Kents.

This isn’t Adams’s first time with an on-screen Clark Kent; in 2001, she appeared in the first season of Smallville… because somebody from Smallville should make it into the movie.

Lois Lane has previously been played on screen by such actresses as Phyllis Coates, Noel Neill, Leslie Anne Warren, Margot Kidder, Teri Hatcher, Erica Durance, and Kate Bosworth; and has been voiced by Anne Heche, Christina Hendricks, Dana Delany, Kyra Sedgwick, Ginny McSwain, and Joan Alexander.

Joanne Siegel, the inspiration for Lois Lane and wife of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, passed away last month at age 93.

The Warner Bros. film is scheduled to be released in December 2012.

Lois Lane, Girl Reporter

Lois Lane, Girl Reporter

Lois Lane, Girl Reporter

This may be one of the best proposals I’ve heard in a while– which of course means that DC will have to be shamed into actually doing it.

Here a pitch for Lois Lane, Girl Reporter illustrated young adult novels written by Dean Trippe, with art by Daniel Krall.

Growing up with two younger sisters, I’ve often found myself attracted to cool female leads whose stories I could share with them (Nancy Drew, Veronica Mars, etc.), but while the superhero industry has always done good by me in providing excellent male heroes (chief among them, Batman and Superman), its treatment of their similarly iconic female heroes like Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Batgirl has always been mixed at best. Too often these spandex-clad heroines have been marketed towards post-adolescent men rather than to their own gender. There’s room for this in the spectrum of superhero fiction, of course, but without a positive female role model for me to share with my sisters, that they could see themselves in, they both grew up with only a portion of my comics fandom. (Don’t get me wrong, they both still dig Batman!)

But then I found a secret window into the DCU that I don’t think anyone else knows about: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Lois Lane…at eleven years old.

At eleven years old, Lois has discovered her calling: investigative journalism. She sets out to right wrongs and help out her friends. This series explores Lois’s character, reveals her surprising early influence on the future Man of Steel, and introduces fun new elements into this enduring character’s back story.

In each book, Lois will tackle a problem or mystery affecting the members of the community she finds herself in as she travels around the country. The investigations in this series will not be mystical or supernatural (though some characters may suspect such sources), but real world problems that Lois works to set right.

Read the entire proposal. Then ask why DC isn’t doing this one. Somehow, I don’t think Zack Snyder will find a way to work it into the next movie.

Review: ‘All-Star Superman’

All-Star SupermanDC Comics’ All-Star imprint was intended to bring their top talents together with their top characters to produce stories that followed the core concepts of the iconic heroes and villains so the comics would appeal to mainstream audiences. The two titles that made it out, featuring Batman and Superman utterly failed on that account and their irregular publishing schedules meant the audience the books were aimed at couldn’t get into the needed buying rhythm.

[[[All-Star Superman]]] by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely thrilled the core audience with their retro-futuristic take on the characters and settings, winning acclaim and awards. Now, the 12 issue storyline has been neatly compressed into a 76 minute animated feature, out this week from Warner Home Video. Obviously, every bit and piece, every favorite moment, couldn’t possibly be included in Dwayne McDuffie’s script, but he does a fine job boiling the story down to its essence. In short, Lex Luthor has manipulated events from afar, forcing Superman to save a spacecraft that left him over-saturated with solar energy which has increased his amazing array of powers but is also slowly killing him.

(more…)

Joanne Siegel, R.I.P.

Joanne SiegelJoanne Siegel, the widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and model for the original likeness of Lois Lane and the person who inspired Lois’s middle name, has passed away at 93. Word hit the comics community yesterday through a Tweet from Brad Meltzer and was later confirmed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

CBR quoted Meltzer:

“I got the word from the people at the Siegel and Shuster Society. I met her when I was doing [my novel] ‘The Book of Lies’ because I was researching who killed Jerry Siegel’s father. I met Laura first, who is Jerry and Joanne’s daughter. We became really good friends, and she said to me ‘Of all the people who have ever researched Jerry Siegel, you’re the only one who’s ever called us.’ I became really close with the family, and they seemed really excited that someone was going to tell their story.”

“The crazy part is– of everyone I’ve ever spoken to in my life, there’s nothing like speaking to Lois Lane. When I finally met her at the unveiling of the repaired Siegel and Shuster house, which I flew to because I wanted to meet her face-to-face and see all the work everyone in Cleveland had done, everyone said to me ‘She’s beautiful. You won’t believe how beautiful she is.’ And I was thinking that this is a 90-year-old woman…how beautiful can she be? But she was beautiful. It was the only way to describe her. You saw here, and there was this stunning, elegant, amazing woman that was a spitfire.”It wasn’t like talking to your grandmother. You really saw ‘intrepid reporter’ as part of her personality. I just got a note from her in December talking about everything we’ve been doing on the [History] show and it’s still amazing to see how much she had going even at that age.”

The former Joanne Carter met her future husband and his artist partner Joe Shuster in Cleveland in the late ’30s when she responded to an ad the two had placed looking for local models. The original sketch Shuster did of her grew to become the foundation for fast-talking reporter Lois Lane, and Joanne later married Jerry in 1948. In the years since, she stood by the struggling writer as he saw the financial benefit and artistic credit for Superman pass him by while his publisher pushed the character to wider cultural acceptance, and later took a very public and prolific role in fighting DC owner Warner Bros. for the rights to the character after her husband’s passing in 1996. Along with her family and the family of Shuster, Siegel teamed with well-known intellectual property lawyer Marc Toberoff to push for more rights on the character than Superman’s creators had ever been able to earn in their lifetimes, which led to various reversions and much wrangling over settlements and compensation. The suit has been on hold since October, and it is unknown how Siegel’s death will affect the proceedings.

Here’s a photo from Alan Light of the Siegels (Jerry, Joanne, and daughter Laura) from the 1976 San Diego Comic Con.

Jerry Siegel, Joanne Siegel, Laura Siegel Larson

ComicMix Six: Six word comics biographies

ComicMix Six: Six word comics biographies

If you’ve ever visited Smith magazine, you’ve probably been there for the great comics (A.D.: After the Deluge, The Pekar Project, Next-Door Neighbor, Graphic Therapy,
Shooting War, and My Home Birth) and their innovative Six Word Memoirs. Inspired by the famous anecdote of Ernest Hemingway telling a complete story in only six words (“For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn”) they’ve gotten enough contributions from readers to fill an entire series of Six Word Memoir books.

Amazingly, though, they haven’t really combined the two.*

It works suprisingly well, and a few of them are already made for it– “With great power comes great responsibility”; “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”; “Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot”– and so we’ve decided to jump start the process. So here are our first six:

  1. Reed Richards: Don’t worry, the shielding will hold.
  2. Batman: I promised on my parents’ grave.
  3. Wonder Woman: War’s easy. Compassion’s harder. Peace … inevitable.
  4. Wally West: Dreams can come true so fast.
  5. Cyclops: “Boy Scout”? I kill by looking.
  6. Lois Lane: You think YOU have high standards?

We’ll be adding more via Twitter, using the tag #comicmix6wordbio. Feel free to play along via Twitter, or add your own in the comments.

* Okay, they’ve illustrated a few of the stories as comics, such as this piece from Rick Parker.

The Point Radio: SMALLVILLE Season 9 Blasts Off

The Point Radio: SMALLVILLE Season 9 Blasts Off

SMALLVILLE Season 9 premieres tonight on The CW and before you tune in, hear just where the year will take us direct from writer/producers Kelly Souders and Brain Peterson and Erica Durance shares her plans for Lois and how she got the “seal of approval” from a former Ms Lane. Plus there are details on DC’s direct to DVD plans and the real “secret origin” of the quintessential Batman, Kevin Conroy.

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