LOIS LANE

Noel Neill as Lois looks skeptically at Clark, Kirk Alyn, whom she suspects is Superman. From the Columbia serial Superman, 1948.

Lois first appears in Action Comics #1 in 1938. Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster based her on a 1930s woman reporter in a series of movies, Torchy Blaine. For decades, Lois is Superman's focus of romantic attention, and in the current DC Mythology, his wife. She is also, as with Superman's secret identity, Clark Kent, a reporter for the Metropolis newspaper, The Daily Planet. "That Lane dame has more spunk," remarks a helicopter pilot in the November 1963 issue of Superman, "than a squad of marines!" In 1942 Clark Kent thinks to himself, "I can't get to sleep, worrying about Lois...she has a better aptitude for getting into trouble than anyone I've ever known."