Valentine's Day Lois Lanesanity

People celebrate Valentine's Day in a number of different ways.

Some people have Single Awareness Day parties, and celebrate (or commiserate) being single. Some people do something romantic with a loved one. Some people drink alone and watch movies where Bette Davis runs down an innocent man in a stolen motorcar. Some people beat St. Valentine with clubs and then behead him. Some people don't consider it a holiday at all, and do nothing out of the ordinary. And some people blog.

Last year, I celebrated Valentine's Day by sharing a a heartwarming love story of a girl, a boy, supervillain, an incestuous cousin, a secret husband, amnesia, a love robot, deadly radiation, sleepwalking, more amnesia, and tragic death. I wasn't sure how to follow that up this year, and considered a number of stories: the time Lana Lang blackmailed Star Boy into being her boyfriend, the time the girls of the Legion of Superheroes decided to kill the boys (possibly as revenge for the time the girls all had crimson plague and the boys decided that they were unclean), or the time that Invisible Kid was revealed to be heterosexual and then immediately crushed to death by Validus, the time displaced and hideously mutated child of Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad. None of those stories seemed quite right, though, and then I remembered the perfect story for Valentine's Day, a story of unrequited love, sudden friendship, danger, mystery, and madness.

I give you:



"Lois Lane's Love Trap", from "Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane" #52.

Our story opens with Lois Lane and Clark Kent getting off the train in a logging town in no specific state or country:



It's been several years since I was involved with a newspaper, but I don't really see why they need gender-specific viewpoints about a bank robbery. Shouldn't that be a little more straigtforward? "Guy walks into a bank to rob it, gets caught by the cops, and goes to jail" doesn't really seem that multifaceted to me, but I guess I'm wrong, because the trial opens with a shocking twist:



There are two Lois Lanes.

Just get back on the train, Clark. Do it now. Save yourself.

Blonde Lois is, as she said, a nurse at the local hospital, a simple country nurse harboring a dark secret:



She's in love with the Brawny Paper Towel man, and she's so crazy in love that she's begging for help from the mascot and reigning poster girl for love-crazed women: Lois Lane. And even though she's never managed to actually land her man, Lois wants to help, and decides to share her experience for the greater good:



And, because she is crazy and always picks the least logical course of action in any given situation, Lois immediately puts Blonde Lois' life in mortal peril by pushing her into a pool of quicksand:



Faster than you can say, "Brawny absorbs twice as much liquid as the leading paper towel!" Rafe springs into action:



but loses an entire day of work:



Great work, Lois and Blonde Lois. He's sure to love you when he's broke and homeless from loss of employment.

Undeterred by this disaster, Lois spirals further into madness, just like she eventually does in every issue of "Lois Lane". Inspiration hits her:



and immediately turns homicidal:



No, Blonde Lois, no. This is not a good plan AT ALL.

You cannot win a man's heart by sending him into anaphalactic shock.

That doesn't stop Crazy and Blonde Crazy from trying:



and they succeed in sending Rafe into respiratory distress:



but there's a tiny problem:



No antidote.

Whoopsie?

Thank God they decided to take him to the hospital rather than give him a tracheotomy with that axe. Unfortunately, he regains consciousness a little too quickly:



and, now that he knows she tried to murder him into loving her, Rafe tells Blonde Lois that he'll never love her. Heartbroken, Blonde Lois returns to her room in the nurses' quarters and reveals to Lois that there's a reason why they get along so well:



She's as crazy as regular Lois.

There's a difference between having an album full of photos of Superman, a well known public figure and celebrity, and secretly following a lumberjack through the woods to take photos of him without his knowledge before you destroy his livelihood and then poison him. One is fan worship, and one is a felony. Possibly two or three felonies.

Blonde Lois is ready to give up, but Lois isn't, and decides that their last chance is to corner Rafe at the town's cowboy masquerade hoedown. This annual tradition in their town (and only their town; I've never heard of a masked cowboy hoedown before, ever, anywhere) is marked by a second tradition: the names of all the men in town are placed in one barrel and the names of all the women in town in another. Then, a name is drawn out of each by a man who may be wearing a raccoon skin cap or who may have the most awesomely dyed mullet and pony in history:



and those two must dance together, in this case potentially to the death. Terrified of letting this doomed relationship die, Lois takes matters into her own hands:



and for the first time since this merry-go-round of feminine insanity started to spin, something goes right:



except for one small problem:

Rafe isn't Rafe.



He's Clark.

Rafe decided that he loved Blonde Lois after all, but was (justifiably) afraid to dance with her after the ugly scene at the hospital, so Clark offers to help. We never find out why Clark was carrying around a fake beard, but really, did we expect things to make sense at this point in the story?

No.

We know Lois, so we know better.

Once they sneak off to switch back, Rafe and Blonde Lois are together:



and Lois and Clark remain blissfully unaware of how close they came to accidentally ending up together:



They'll never know the truth, but we will.

The truth is that sometimes love, or in this case felony stalking and attempted murder, really does conquer all.

Happy Valentine's Day.