Lois Lane: 24-Hour Black Lady

I've been picking through my comic collection for the past couple of weeks because I'm pulling back issues for a presentation I'm doing, and it means that I keep running across hilarious back issues. It also means that, because I have trouble with impulse control, I've been reading a lot of back issues, since stories like the tragic tale of Fortress Lad or David Cassidy #1 never get old, and that's how I happened to stumble over "Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane" #106.



This is one of DC Comics' more famous (famous among comics fans, anyway) attempts at adressing a "serious issue", and like so many of the others it ends up kind of hilariously bad. It's not quite as terrible as when Green Arrow suddenly disovered that his sidekick, Speedy, was addicted to heroin:



but it is way more awful than the time the Legion of Superheroes tried to convince Tyroc that they weren't racists because they had a blue girl and a green guy:



Still, they were trying, so you kind of have to give the writers some kind of credit when they could have just said nothing at all. In some cases, though, you wonder if maybe silence would have been a better choice.

Like a very special episode of "Saved by the Bell" where Jessie takes too many caffeine pills or "90210" where David's friend plays with his parents' handgun and accidentally shoots himself, this issue starts off by immediately finding a way, however forced, to connect Lois to a social issue that she's never dealt with before or since. How do they do that?



Through Lois' all-consuming narcissism, of course. She doesn't want to expose the horrors of racism or help poor, oppressed people. Lois wants a Pulitzer, and if she has to take a taxi down to "Little Africa" (Really, DC? I've heard of cities with a Chinatown or a Little Italy, but I've never heard of a Little Africa where all the black people live) to do it, then she just needs a quick check in her makeup mirror and she's ready to go.

Before we follow her, take a second to notice just how annoyed Clark looks with this whole thing. You can tell that he's positively seething, thinking, "Great. Now I'm going to have to watch Lois all day while she goes downtown and irritates people. Damn it, I wish Titano would show up and start climbing the Daily Planet building before she had time to get a damn cab."

No such luck. Before you can say, "At least it's not a story about black kryptonite" Lois is downtown in Little Africa, and she's already running into trouble:



No one will talk to her. Why not?



She's whitey.

This story is much more hilarious, and actually makes more sense, if you imagine that children and old blind ladies at the bus stop are turning away from Lois not because she's white but because she's Lois Lane.

"Oh, shit. Lois Lane? I gotta get outta here before the whole neighborhood gets turned into witches or fat people or something."

Anyway, Superman checks in on Lois and finds her weeping on a park bench, her Pulitzer dreams shattered by her white skin:



She's drawing a blank, all right. A white blank. She has a plan, though, and I'm incredibly disappointed that they don't actually show her talking Superman into it. As you can see from the panels, she somehow convinces Superman to fly her to the Fortress of Solitude, so that he can use his super-advanced Kryptonian plastic surgery machine to make her a black lady so that she can win a Pulitzer. Again, I have to emphasize that Lois' motives are completely not altruistic. She doesn't want to help anyone but herself, and she somehow convinces Superman to go along with her. Nobody mentions that using kyrptonian super-science to turn yourself black so that you can win the Pulitzer instead of doing actual investigatory journalism for it is pretty much like using super tanning pills to get into Harvard on the Henry Q. Bouchard Memorial Scholarship, but the reader already knows this will be a disaster because, even black, she's still going to be Lois.

It happens pretty much just like on the cover, and there she is:



Lois Lane, 24-hour black lady.

And why does she have to get changed? Because even though all of the people in Little Africa were wearing average, contemporary fashion, Lois is going to be the blackest black lady ever, and puts on the Little Africa equivalent of Josie's first day of school outfit in Never Been Kissed:



She has to take the subway back to Little Africa because taxi cabs wouldn't stop for her now that she's black. I have no idea why everyone on the train is staring at her, though, other than the size of that head wrap. I mean, they live in a major metropolitan city that not only has a Little Africa but has a subway stop there. They must have seen a black lady on the subway before.

Once she returns to Little Africa, Lois goes back to the apartment building where the lady slammed the door in her face before, and immediately puts out a fire under their staircase. The grateful lady explains that the slumlord won't pay for a janitor to clean out the dangerous flammable trash, so it just builds up under the staircase, and then invites Lois in for coffee:



With a scoop of plaster. And a side of rat:



And here's why this irritates me: by placing this in the context of a "race" story, the writer implies that the reason this lady lives in the crumbling rat-infested fire trap tenement is that she's black, not that she's poor. They even back it up with the lady's, "I don't have to tell you about that", as if Lois knows exactly what it's like to live in a run down slum because she's black now. Granted, there's only so much they can cover in ten or twelve pages, and I'm sure someone somewhere could make the argument that she's poor because she's black, but this whole scene tells me way more about how the author thinks black people live than I actually wanted to know. It couldn't possibly be more stereotypical except for the part where the happy, nobly suffering poor black lady calls Lois her sister, just because they're both black:



Lois is, of course, moved to tears by the idea that she's now that much closer to her Pulitzer, and she heads out to find the guy who called her "whitey" earlier. No sooner than she does, though, do they see trouble in a nearby alley:



Man's business? I thought this was a comic about equality.

Lois and Dave follow the kids into the alley where, predictably enough, they interrupt a drug deal, and the drug dealers respond by opening fire:



Dave gets shot, or at least we imagine that he does, since he has no visible wounds:



It's too bad, really, that Lois doesn't have a boyfriend watching her, a boyfriend who's faster than a speeding bullet and could have maybe showed up to intervene before her new friend gets plugged in an alley. Just too bad. Or, possibly worse, it's too bad that maybe Superman let that guy get shot on purpose just to teach Lois a lesson. He was doing stuff like that all the time in the Silver Age.

Anyway, Superman disarms the drug dealers and flies Lois and Dave to the nearest hospital. Of course, since the hospital is also in Little Africa, all of the doctors and nurses are black:



And right there is why I think that Superman is maybe being a dick about this whole thing on purpose. According to the comic, "tense minutes tick by" as they wait for the blood typing information, but here's the problem: Superman has microscopic vision and a super-brain. He can see molecules and read protein chains. It should take him about a second to go, "Hey, doctor, that guy's type A negative," but instead he lets Lois pace the waiting room and twist in the wind for several tense minutes before we find out that she and Dave have the same blood type, and she can save him:



Or maybe he's trying to teach Dave a lesson about not being mean to white people. Who knows, really? It's just clear that Superman could be doing more, and isn't, but again, he was like that a lot in the Silver Age. Lois, also true to form, continues finding a way to make a tragic shooting all about her:



Did she really just accuse Superman of being a racist? She knows that when he was just a Superboy he was friends with a blue girl and a green guy. Sure, he did just let a black guy get all shot up in an alley and then stood around the waiting room uselessly when he could have done something to help, but seriously, Lois, some of his best friends are black. Just ask Tyroc, or Black Lightning, or... some other black people that Superman must have known in the Silver Age. Black Vulcan, maybe?

Anyway, before she can harangue him into proposing, Lois' transformation wears off, to the nurse's great surprise:



Lois seems pretty smug there, but I have to go with the nurse on this one. If I walked into a room and a lady had turned from black to white while I was gone, I'd be pretty damn surprised, too. The nurse isn't the only one who's surprised, though. Dave doesn't say anything when Lois, newly whitened, walks into his room, but he doesn't have to:



Because, really, we all learned something today. We learned that Superman is sometimes a dick, and that there's no length that Lois won't go to for a Pulitzer, even physically transforming her body with alien superscience no matter how risky or foolish that seems.

And also that coffee's not really good with plaster in it.

Arizona Part 2: "That's not really pronounced that way, is it?"

In the previous entry I mentioned that the conference ended earlier than we expected on Wednesday, which left us with an open afternoon and a rental car, so we decided to drive to Sedona. I only know of Sedona as the place where Miranda moved up a shoot after she killed the autumn jackets feature in "The Devil Wears Prada", but Tim stopped by the concierge desk and picked up a map, leaving us slightly better equipped.

On the way there Tim asked if we wanted to stop at Montezuma Castle, and since we had nowhere else to go and no agenda for the day, we readily agreed. I'm so glad that we did, because it was a really interesting little walkaround. Montezuma Castle is a national park in Arizona:



which houses an impressive pre-Columbian cliff dwelling:







I don't know if it looks particularly impressive in any of those photos (especially the middle one, where you can see why it's being restored and you can't actually go up into the structure) but there's such a sense of history in visiting something like this, and also a little bit of awe when you imagine early settlers crossing Arizona, coming around the corner, and seeing a house set into the cliffside. I haven't traveled outside the United States in over a decade, and inside them I rarely see any mostly-intact structure over a few hundred years old. There are artifacts, like the Moon-Eyed People's wall:



that I saw in Georgia that time, or serpent mounds and other earthworks, but people didn't live in those like they did in a cliff dwelling:



It's one thing to look at a pile that used to be a house or a foundation, but to see the house itself is to feel a sense of continuity with the past, and I don't know that our mostly consumerist, disposable culture (which I fully participate in; I'm not lecturing anyone) gets enough of that.

On our way back to the car, I also saw a huge beetle, which was the only native wildlife I saw in the entire trip besides birds:



My fears about scorpions, poisonous spiders, rattlesnakes, vultures, vampire bats, coyotes, and other desert critters proved somewhat unfounded.

Once we were back in the car, we headed for another impressive but significantly more modern building, The Chapel of the Holy Cross on the outskirts of Sedona:



Comissioned by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, the church is designed to blend in with the surrounding countryside, which it does admirably well:



It's a bit of a hike up a twisty path to actually get there:



but when you do the simplicity of the interior is moving even for non-religious people:







It's very quiet and peaceful inside, but that may be due to everyone trying to catch their breath after the climb. Either way, it was another good stop on our day of sightseeing, and we immediately left the church and parked at a Horrhouse:



Grandma Horr's, to be exact. And yes, it really is pronounced the way it sounds.

Also, Grandma Horr makes a delicious dark chocolate coconut haystack.

We didn't spend more than an hour or two in Sedona:



so I didn't really get to see a lot of the town, but it reminded me a lot of Gatlinburg, in that it is a small town in a beautiful setting filled with touristy crap:



and signs with poor grammar:



Not that I don't love touristy crap. When Tim asked if there was anywhere in town specifically that we felt like stopping at, I immediately blurted, "The place with the giant chicken!"



Because, well, giant chicken. If I have to explain why we had to stop there then you really don't know me well enough yet. The place with the giant chicken turned out to be a wonderful store filled with random stuff for everybody, like cat Buddha:



regular Buddha:



and a really bloody Jesus:



Seriously, why are there multiple streams of blood running out from under Jesus' loincloth? What's going on under there? And who looks at that and thinks, "Perfect for the living room!"

Possibly the same people who buy ceramic pumpkins:



or random suns:



but I did find the room of drying peppers somewhat interesting:





mostly because it smelled so good.

We were all starting to get a little sleepy and jet-laggy at that point, so the place with the giant chicken was our last stop in Sedona, but we did get back to Scottsdale in time for me to meet up with Rod for a late dinner where we both ended up ordering the same thing, I guzzled about a gallon of diet Coke, and we debated whether playing "Piano Man" in a jazz restaurant was cliche or de rigueur. We did not come to an agreement, but a lovely time was had by all.

Then in the morning I had a long layover in Chicago:



and was back home and crashing in my bed by the time it was dark.

Arizona Part 1: "A Whole New Nothing"

I spent most of this week in Arizona, which is beautiful but empty:



The emptiness probably contributes in large part to the beauty.

When I was in high school, college, and afterward my parents went to my Aunt Geri and Uncle Mike's house every Saturday night for pizza. Whichever of us kids were around would also go (technically I guess my cousins didn't "go", since it was always at their house and they already lived there) so I happened to be there one night when my aunt was complaining about wanting to get away from upstate New York.

"There's nothing here," Aunt Geri sighed over her pizza, her gestures punctuated with a cigarette. "I want to move."

"To where?" one of us asked. Aunt Geri seemed to think about it for a minute, and then apparently blurted the first state that popped into her head.

"Arizona."

I'm sure I smirked at this, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

"What's in Arizona?" my dad asked, and before Aunt Geri could answer Uncle Mike quipped, "A whole new nothing!"

That quote pops into my head every time I think about Arizona, probably because there are no competing musicals about that state (seriously, why has no one written "Arizona!" or "Tombstone on Ice" yet?) to squeeze it out, and I discovered this week that Arizona is a state full of nothing. Beautiful, desolate nothing:







I'm pretty sure I don't mean it in quite the same way as my uncle did.

We flew into Arizona, connected through Atlanta:



early on Sunday, and landed in Phoenix:



See how most of that picture is brown? Arizona is like that. If something's not irrigated, there's no grass, just some desert vegetation. It was weird to me for the first few days to see houses with lawns that were just bare gravel and cacti, but I guess if you live there you get used to it.

We landed at the oddly decorated Sky Harbor Airport:



and headed for our hotel, which immediately creeped me out. I don't know if you can tell from this picture:



and maybe it was just the western architecture in general, but all of the common spaces in the hotel made me think of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. This impression was only reinforced when I got to my very nice room:



and discovered that it was decorated with what seemed to be alternate cover art from The Gunslinger:



Then, as if I hadn't been horrified enough, I noticed that my balcony doors had a warning label, and should never, ever be opened:



I know that calling them "Desert Critters" is an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the local wildlife, but if you already have an overactive imagination then the first thing that pops into your head is a veritable flood of scorpions, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, vultures, and vampire bats pouring into your room at night.

After I saw that warning label, I never opened the balcony door again.

The hotel was actually really nice, though, with fancy showers:



and a quiet pool area:



where someone brought me a pitcher of ice water as soon as I sat down:



I never made it back out to the pool for the rest of the conference, but that one afternoon after being on planes all day was very nice.

Our dinner out in the desert was also nice.



I made friends:



ate in a barn:





while listening to a band:



and taught a coworker to make a s'more before we headed back to the hotel.

The conference was very informative, and also fun. I have pages of notes saved on my iPad, and also gave a presentation that was very well received. There was enough space between workshops and mealtimes to keep it from feeling like a grind, and the hotel food was great. I never managed to adjust to the time change and am paying for that now, but I had a really good time and got a lot out of it, so I'm glad I went.

And that it ended early enough on Wednesday for us to get in some sightseeing.