Paperboy Read Free Page B

with her head in an iron box, too ashamed to go out, because she’d been given the head of a cat. Sometimes all of Lois’s friends were in on these humiliations, but could not tell her because they were
being watched from space
. When Lois finally got to the altar with Superman, it turned out to be a dream caused by her falling off a pier. Sometimes she ended up in a straitjacket, raving, and this too would be revealed as a trick.
    Was adult life going to be like this, I wondered? When I grew up would I have to be on my guard every second of the day in case somebody tried to trick me? Would I wake up to discover it had all been a hoax, a dream, and not real at all?
    I liked Lois Lane because she was a contrary woman with a job to do, like my mother. What I could not see, of course, was that Lois Lane comics were aimed at teenage girls, and since I did not know any girls I was not able to understand the psychology of someone who would spend a week with her head in a metal box in order to get a date.
    In every issue of Lois Lane, Superman did one of three things: he turned bad, died or got married. And it always turned out to be a hoax. 2 The Man of Steel required his girlfriend to pass an endless series of tests; she would have to go without sleep, or remain silent, or be turned into an old hag or a baby in order to prove her loyalty. Superman demanded such terrible sacrifices from his friends that you wondered whether it was worth knowing him. He was good, so he could do no wrong. He was invulnerable, so nothing would ever hurt him. And only the people with whom he surrounded himself, ordinary flawed human beings, could ever get hurt, which is why he refused to become intimately involved with anyone. He was the opposite of Jesus: everyone else had to suffer for him.
    Superman also played tricks on his pal Jimmy Olsen to punish him for using his signal watch too often, making him undergo strange transformations, like becoming a human porcupine, Elastic Lad or a giant turtle boy. I loved Superman because he was a stern finger-wagging patrician who told everyone what to do and hated anyone having fun, and was therefore unconsciously homoerotic. I wanted Superman to be my father because you always knew where you were with him. A man’s most attractive quality is the ability to make a firm decision. Strictness was something my father had never managed to master.
    When I got home, the ritual of comic-book reading had to be carefully organized. I would clear the small oak table in the kitchen, and place a cup of tea to my right, with a chocolate bar just below it, a Fry’s Mint Cream 3 or Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. I would lay the first comic before me and open it, solemnly reading from cover to cover (including all the advertisements for 100 magnets or an entire civil war army) so that its world entirely enveloped me, and I could no longer hear my parents arguing. Comics provided solace and protection. Their panels were windows into a happier, safer, brighter place.
    When you’re a kid you only really read comics for about five years before real life intrudes upon your imagination, and your teenage years arrive. DC’s storylines really began to flounder after the liberation movement of the sixties, and the Lois Lane comic got discontinued, even though she continued to crop up in Superman comics, falling off piers or out of office windows, into his waiting arms. What was wrong with the woman? Did she have some kind of balance problem? Had she thought about removing her high heels before leaning over rooftops?
    DC’s stern fundamentalist superheroes could only ever be on the side of the establishment. Like good Christians, they tried to win back some ground by expanding their family, but by the time they had taken on a super cat, a super horse and even Beppo the Super Monkey, I knew it was time to switch to Marvel Comics. I put up with Marvel’s overwrought writing style because the lurid artwork was like a rainbow being sick