Action Comics #655 (July 1990)
Action Comics #655 (July 1990)
In this issue: Lois Lane jumps on top of trucks and kicks all sorts of ass (with a little help from Superman).
This story picks up from the end of Adventures #468, when Lois stood up Clark Kent and he assumed she was trying to cheat on him with Superman. In this issue Clark immediately goes “Wait, no, that’s stupid” and goes looking for Lois, who’s supposed to be doing a story about some military kooks stealing weapons from the army – naturally, at one point she found their base and got captured. If that sounds familiar that’s because Lois already met this group back in Adventures #439, where the leader of the kooks blew himself up in an explosion. Now his son is trying to continue his mission, which is to prepare the army for Armageddon. They even have a portrait of the guy from the other issue adorning their base.
Oh yeah, and said base is an empty city made of trees outside Metropolis that they just found there. Superman arrives and dismantles the entire operation within minutes, but not before Lois manages to steal some guns and point them at bad guys.
After going through so much trouble for a story, Lois and Perry White are told at the end they can’t run it as it is, because the tree city belongs to Project Cadmus (it’s Habitat, first seen in Adventures Annual #2) and they wanna keep it top secret. Which is why they abandoned it and didn’t even notice when some guys started living there, I guess.
Bonus Story!
Yet another 8-page insert letting us peek into the private life of someone in the Superman universe: this time, it’s Ma Kent’s Family Album (seen briefly in her kitchen in Superman #45), which predictably deals with Clark only, since the Kents were never blessed with another alien baby from space. We get cameos from Dr. Whitney (Clark’s childhood doctor who turned out to be a killer robot), Lana Lang (kissing Clark in her 8th birthday), Pete Ross (murdering Clark with his eyes as Lana kisses him in her 8th birthday) and even Clark’s old college girlfriends: Ruby the waitress from World of Metropolis #3, and Lori Lemaris the secret communist mermaid from Superman #12. Ma even wonders whatever happened to Lori…
…which confirms my theory that she wants Clark to date literally anyone but Lois Lane.
Character-Watch:
I guess this entire issue was done to show Lois being a badass for a while, and it worked. I like the flashbacks throughout the issue showing Lois’ dad being a jerk to her and pushing her to be more boy-like, which explains her strong personality (and also why she hates the guy, as seen in Adventures #424).
Plotline-Watch:
So now we know what those military guys wanted, since their previous appearance didn’t bother to explain it: they were preparing for doomsday, so they holed up in Habitat. The irony is that when Doomsday does come, he’s gonna wreck the shit out of Habitat, of all places.
Jimmy Olsen and Lucy Lane go to Blaze’s, the desecrated church turned discotheque, where Lucy turns out to be slightly overdressed (it was less dinner party, more punk night club). Lucy gets disgusted and leaves, but Jimmy stays behind with Jerry White, who works there. After all, Jerry gave him those free tickets to the satanic shitshow and it would be rude to leave early.
The family album also includes photos from the seldom mentioned time in Clark’s life when he traveled the world before becoming Superman, just like Bruce Wayne did before becoming Batman. In fact, a future special reveals they actually ran into each other for two seconds while backpacking in Asia. If only they’d done as college students do in those cases and gotten drunk together, and we would have been spared 100 issues of superhero rivalry.