Hey everybody, meet Douglas Giddings, Superman’s lawyer.

I’m not going to pretend that Douglas Giddings is an important part of the Superman Mythos and that his not being in the supporting cast is hurting things and he must be brought back, but I think he’s a neat idea and I could probably get a quick Superman Thoughts thing out of him.

Giddings made only one appearance, in the pre-Crisis era when it felt like the books were trying to use up their spare ideas before the 80s reboot of Superman. A backup story in Action Comics #581 gives us a day in the life of Superman’s lawyer. Like Jimmy Olsen, Giddings has been given a special watch by Superman. While Jimmy’s watch allows the kid to get in touch with Superman, Giddings’s watch tells him when Superman is coming to meet about legal matters. They talk about things like television stations using the rights to Superman’s image, to advertisers trying to mooch off his reputation. Then crimes happen and Superman races away to save the day, with Giddings riding his motorcycle there to capture footage of the events. The story implies that Giddings has been working behind the scenes with Superman for a long time, even if we never heard about it and never will again.

I like the idea that, when Clark made the move from vigilante to respectable superhero, he lawyered up to keep everything above board. Maybe there’s some story in which Superman saved Giddings, who then volunteered to help the hero out. We’ll never know, but I think there’s some ground that could be covered there, if someone ever wanted to.

(Fact: Nobody but me wants to.)

If there are any two members of Superman’s supporting cast who I don’t think need a lot of thinking to make them work, it’s Lois Lane and Perry White. I think that, though they are underused by the comics, at least the place they occupy is the place where they ought to be. Lois Lane is an intrepid reporter who cares more about truth and justice than her own safety. Perry White, editor of the Daily Planet newspaper is a stubborn crusader for justice who seethes with anger towards injustice. These two are the reason that Clark Kent, who could easily have a job basically anywhere he wants, wants to work for the Daily Planet.

A common take these days is that Perry is more of a father figure to Lois than her own father. I consider this the correct take. I’ll get more into General Sam Lane and the rest of the Lane family in some future post, but Perry definitely sees a lot of himself in Lois Lane and nurtures her career for that reason. I have not read a lot of YA fiction just yet, so I can’t be sure how they stack up to the usual fare, but I will unequivocally recommend the Lois Lane novels by Gwenda Bond as a great look into the dynamics of Lois’s relationship with her father versus that with Perry. I think they should be required reading for people writing those characters.

Now, Perry definitely wants his paper to be doing the right thing, to go after the bad guys and make the world better, but he also has to worry about sales and advertisers and whatnot (I think it’s best for his character if this pressure is forced upon him by higher-ups like Franklin Stern or Morgan Edge, characters I will cover in the future). He’s an idealist, but is upset by the realities of his job.

Then Superman and Clark Kent come along. Clark gives Perry a second Lois, basically. Yet another reporter doing the kind of work that Perry wants to do. Superman gives Perry something even better: sales. When Superman gives exclusive interviews to the Planet staff, I read that as his way of helping out the paper that puts so much focus on investigative reporting in Metropolis. If an audience wants to read about Superman, Superman is going to direct that audience to the paper that most deserves it.

And Lois Lane is absolutely the only acceptable romantic interest for Clark. Anyone who prefers Wonder Woman or some other even dumber choice just needs to give up.

I admit that, even though I want Superman to be about more than just confrontations with supervillains, I’m jealous of the superhero franchises with better rogues galleries.

Sure, Superman’s got some big name villains. Lex Luthor is pretty much known to even the common folk as an classic example of an arch-nemesis. Brainiac has had an impact on the culture at large, though I’m confident that not everyone who calls someone a “brainiac” realizes they’re invoking a Superman villain (and a similar situation exists with Bizarro, if we’re counting him as a villain). General Zod probably just juts into the public consciousness, coming second only to Luthor for villains in the Superman movies. Any Superman villains beyond that point, I’d say, are not known to the public. That’s not to say that there aren’t some more good ones, just that Average Joe Aversageson will not be familiar with them.

When I look at other heroes, especially Batman and Spider-Man, I see casts of villains that are much more esteemed. And I’m jealous. Superman deserves that.

Why does Batman have better villains than Superman? I credit one specific reason: The 60s Batman show with Adam West. Even if there was a reaction against the campiness of that show, it managed to bring an awful lot of Batman’s villains into the public consciousness, which cycled back into the comics by making writers explore those famous villains and really flesh them out. Compare that with the 50s Adventures of Superman show, which brought none of Superman’s villains to the screen. 90% of the antagonists on that show were generic mobsters and got no characterization at all that would make them memorable. There were no repeating villains either. Even when they’d reuse an actor to play a villain, they’d be playing some new generic mobster, instead of the one they’d played before. This show, which had many things I enjoyed, and which ran in syndication for an eternity, did zero work towards introducing Superman’s villains to the world. And that is why Superman’s villains aren’t up to snuff today. I have spoken.

And so, in addition to discussing Superman’s supporting cast, I will be taking frequent looks at his villains and discussing how to make them work. One simple rule is that I will only work with existing villains. I don’t think creating new Superman villains is necessary, and it only further dilutes the existing ones, especially when writers make the mistake of trying to inflate the importance of the new villains. That’s a thing that, even to this very day, is still working against my goals.

Anyway, tune in next week for discussion of a villain, same Pat-Time, same Pat-Website.

One of the things I want from Superman stories, and superhero stuff in general, is for them to not always be about beating up the bad guys. Honestly, that can happen. You can use superheroes for interesting sci-fi premises that are about ideas other than violence and villainy. The Silver Age Superman books for were great for that stuff. We can have that again. We need to have that again.

I’m not just saying that we need stories where the heroes resort to non-violent means to bring down the villains. We do need that, of course, Lois and Clark should be bringing down as many criminals with their writing as they do with their punches. But also, I want stories that aren’t about villains who need to be stopped by violence or otherwise. I know we all like to blame people, but sometimes bad things happen that aren’t directly caused by people who we then need to punish.

I think that comics writers hear that kind of thing and assume that with no villain, there is no conflict, but there’s a lot to learn from watching things like the Twilight Zone or better episodes of Star Trek. Superhero comics, I think, would do well to move into that kind of conceptual space, instead of everything being a punching contest. I don’t know that I have more to say on the topic than that.

Anyway. With that said, I will now proceed to make myself look like a hypocrite by spending a lot of time in future weeks talking about how we can improve the villains in Superman comics. Oh well.

Buckle in, because this is a long one. I am about to introduce a long-running group of supporting characters from the Superman franchise that are so obscure that even the people who wrote their appearances probably don’t realize that they are long-running supporting characters from the Superman franchise.

The Lee Family first appeared on the Superman radio show in the 40s. Specifically, they are the focus of the Clan of the Fiery Cross story. Here we met Tommy Lee, a friend of Jimmy Olsen who was recently promoted to pitcher on their baseball team because he was better than the guy they had before him. Tommy’s father, Dr. Wan Lee, was similarly recently made Metropolis’s head bacteriologist. In both cases, there are people who don’t like that Chinese immigrants were chosen over “real American” white men for those roles. And so, the racist secret society called the Clan of the Fiery Cross target the family, tries to scare them away or even kill them. It’s a decent Superman story that I have avowed for years ought to be retold. Admittedly, the Lees didn’t do much in the story, reacting more to things happening to them than acting of their own accord, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are characters who had an important role in a classic Superman story. That alone might not have caught my interest, if that had been all we had to go on.

The comics are still seen as the “real” version of Superman by most people, which is strange given that so much that is considered important to the mythos came from the radio show or the cartoons or the movies. But still, for me to claim the Lees were important to the franchise, they’d need to have shown up in the comics. Luckily, it happened. Granted, it wasn’t for nearly four decades. In the pre-Crisis 80s, DC did some stories called “the In-Between Years” which filled in a gap in Clark’s history, between his time growing up in Smallville and his time working at the Daily Planet. Mostly, these stories were about Clark’s time in university. It turns out that Clark’s roommate at Metropolis University was one Tommy Lee.

In this iteration Tommy is Clark’s friend rather than Jimmy’s, but otherwise he is very similar to the Tommy of the 40s. He is Chinese, the son of immigrants, lives in Metropolis, and likes baseball. His father is named John Lee here, but that is an easy Anglicization of “Wan Lee” and John Lee is still a doctor, albeit helping out abroad in war-torn Vietnam (his wife Susie along with him) rather than living in Metropolis. There is enough similarity here that if the writers didn’t do it intentionally, I am forced to think some magical cosmic force was trying to make the characters reappear. Tommy gets a bit more to do as Clark’s roommate, and Dr. Lee’s bravery in standing up to the racists Clan is amplified when he goes to war zones to help people.

Still, the 80s appearances of Tom total nine issues (his parents only in two of those) and the radio story lasted eighteen episodes. In a franchise that has run for fifty years at that point, that doesn’t amount to much, does it? Do I have anything else that proves this family is important to Superman? Of course I do.

For one, there’s an episode of Smallville with a character named Tommy Lee. Granted, this Tommy is a bad guy, white, and has super powers. But I can still cite him as proof that the name keeps cropping up in the franchise. And really, characters have been changed more than that when adapted across media.

But there’s one more piece that really solidified it for me. In the Clan storyline, there is mention of another member of the Lee family, a sister to Tommy, who is never named. I latched onto that and it paid off. In the 90s comics, there was a rookie cop who joined Maggie Sawyer’s Special Crimes Unit (that’s the special police task force that Metropolis had to form to deal with supervillains and such). This Lee, an Asian woman, appeared in only three issues that I know of and was never given a personality or history beyond being nervous about living up to her new job. She never even got a first name. She’d be utterly forgotten by anyone who isn’t me. But it turns out I am me, so I’m gonna make the claim that this young police officer is the post-Crisis incarnation of Dr. and Mrs. Lee’s daughter, sister of Tommy. Incidentally, I am in favour of calling her Betty, which is the most tenuous connection I will make here today: in Superman #108, way back in the 50s, there was a story in which Clark had to defend his secret identity from the smartest “Girl Cops” in Metropolis (being a woman police officer was enough of a novelty to merit a story in those days, I guess). One of those Girl Cops was named Betty, and while she was not coloured with the yellow palate that would usually have denoted an Asian woman in comics in those days (I mean, good, right?) she did have black hair and was not given a last name. Tying Betty and Lee into Betty Lee is just one more stitch to strengthen the tapestry I weave here today. (EDIT FROM LATE 2019: The Superman Smashes the Klan book has given Tommy’s sister the name Roberta, which maybe isn’t what I wanted, but the very existence of that book is far better for the characters than my tying it to some obscure silver age book would have been.)

“Okay,” my non-existant reader asks, “but what does it matter? Even if they existed, what good would it be to bring these characters back?” Well, I’ve made it clear that I think rich supporting casts are something that all superhero comics need, and the Lees have plenty to offer the Super-franchise:

First and foremost: Diversity. There’s an annoyingly large (or at least vocal) subset of fandom that complain about “shoehorning” diversity into comics these days. I don’t agree with their complaints in the least, I say shoehorn away, but right here we have four whole characters who they can’t claim were made up out of nowhere just to be “PC” or whatever, because these characters have existed longer than those complainers have been alive. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that a family made up of immigrants and children of immigrants fits right into the franchise’s themes about that stuff, which begin with Clark himself.

And the characters have individual roles that can make them useful in stories as well:

Betty Lee is the easiest. As a police officer, she can show up any time the police do. This actually gives her the opportunity to show up in action scenes, which some writers feel is the only important thing for characters in superhero comics to do. But it gives her chances to interact with villains and heroes alike.

John and Susie Lee would likely be prominent figures among Metropolis’s high society. I could see them as the types who show up at ritzy galas thrown by Lex Luthor, or get targetted by criminals looking to rob someone rich. John’s medical career means Superman could consult him the next time some alien virus is causing problems, and Susie, as a blank slate, could be used in any way the writer sees fit.

Tom offers a more direct connection to the main cast. I think he’d be a good choice to give a friend to Clark, Lois, and Jimmy who doesn’t work at the Daily Planet. The Superman cast can get a little bit claustrophobic in that newspaper, so it would humanize the cast a bit if they had one guy who offered a different perspective. (Also, I bet Tom likes the Planet’s macho idiot sports writer Steve Lombard and fun could be had with that.) And, I wouldn’t do it, but if some hack writer wanted to take inspiration from Smallville, they could have him become a supervillain too.

Okay, I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. These characters deserve to be brought back on purpose for once. Meanwhile, just rest assured that as I continue to consume Superman-related media, I’ll be on the lookout for any more appearances of the Lees that nobody else has noticed.