Supergirl meets Bilbo & Frodo Baggins

Lana Lang was reading a book. Mind you she was in her civvies and not that blue, yellow and red all too short of material supergirl jump suit that turns some people like David on. And while read the book she was thinking of somebody too much. She should have liked to listen to Frankie baby but she did not. Lana referred Mahler to Mr Sinatra by far. So she was already damaged in her mind hein?

She was also reading a book within a book too. Lana was reading the second book of ‘The Lord of the Rings’. So she was a perfect girl only in body and not in mind. In truth she was not really a girl as we know them at all in fact as we all know she was not even human. But she nevertheless Lana was outwardly at least, an almost perfect example of a cutsey bobbysoxer who dreamed of a single fellow far too much Lana was reading a very famous book She was reading a book within a book. The book was the second book of ‘The Lord Of The Rings.’ As she read it she really identified with the struggles of poor Frodo. While it is most probably superfluous for you to understand the matter I will do my best to attempt to explain the relationship between supergirl of Smallville and the young superman.

First and foremost, they both hailed from the planet Krypton. They were too close in age to be siblings unless they were twins and I am going to eliminate that possibility as from now. As we all know, the planet Krypton was destroyed only minutes after Superman was dispatched away by his Dad Jor El. He was sent away in a capsule placed inside a rocket. Lana was similarly a being from Krypton. course this means that the young girl who was to become Lana Lang was similarly dispatched by another Kryptonian.

Of course Jor El was a scientist on this doomed planet and the odds of another Kryptonian scientist having a workable rocket system at his disposal does seem unlikely. But hey man, anything goes in old comic books eh. It must be conceded that Jor El could have conceivably been responsible for dispatching supergirl from the collapsing planet as well. Either way, we can be sure that they were of the same race or ilk. But it seems most unlikely that they were closely related. I mean it is possible that they just may have been cousins or something but in all reality they were probably not.

Perhaps it behooves me here to insert an explanation of how this rather madly conceived article sprang into being. I did receive a private note from Ye Olde Editor of our beloved Tilkal. Now Tikal is the name of the online magazine of our Tol Harndor group. This note from my public and private editor David, rounded on me for not including more stuff (err I mean my own writing that is) on Tolkien related matters. We are a Tolkien group after all is said and not done. So even though I am normally such a serious minded man, I found a voice inside me which wrote almost automatically back to David in Sydney. Ok how about Bilbo meets Supergirl then? David did not need much time to pass until he gave out this rejoinder. That’s fine, as long as it’s not too raunchy. Ah these Sydney-siders, just how do they think and how do they manage to cope? No raunch eh!

Now it seems to me, that for all Toller’s own private world, I cannot conceive of any reason at all that Ye Olde Ed would place the ‘raunchy’ imprimatur upon me here. Oh he has read quite a deal of my work I suppose, but my own hunch is that David nurses quite a few fantasies about the subject of the blue and yellow girly with the tight stuff on all over her body and who sports a flapping cape and leaves almost nought to the imagination. After all, I suppose superman is a very sexy figure too if you think of him from somebody else’s point of view. In ya dreams that is Davy boy. Some editor eh you are saying huh? An editor who has the temerity to impose limits on a writer’s sublime imagination simply because he suffers his own subliminal thoughts on a subject. I do not blame him of course but after all that is simply not the point at all now is it? So get ready and if you are still game boys and girls, read on.

Now it is really pounds to peanuts that Lana had borrowed her book from the Smallsville town library at the town Hall. Naturally the town hall was a Neo Classic building on Jeffersonian lines and it had six Doric order columns standing at its façade. Well you might just have guessed at that. The year was 1956 and that means that Miss Kavanagh was the librarian at the time. Of course Daisy Kavanagh was both a spinster and a book worm. But then you certainly did know that! Miss Kavanagh also knew Lana so very well. Well it could be said that Miss Kavanagh looked upon Lana Lang as just a little more than a normal friend could it not? Ah mate, and after all this is a very small town we speak of and we do not wish to go there do we? Lana, as we have already commented was a straight A student, and already a bloody deeply engrained book worm too.

So we can readily appreciate that Miss Kavanagh was something of a mentor to our young female heroine or hero. Please feel free to take your pick of the gender bender considerations. Do anything you bloody well like about that subject too, as long as you do not upset my own Aussie hero (or heroine) Miss Germaine Greer now of Queensland Australia. Young superboy’s Kent foster family was situated out of town on a farm, while Lana was townie. Mr Kent grew fine and fat corn, and was considered lucky if a little queer by his fellow farmers to have such a fine young boy as superboy certainly was. All his neighbours knew full well that young Clark had not been conceived by his missus. Ah but these things can and do happen folks. Even in the Mid West in can de temps entempts.

And both our super heroes attended the same high school and they were classmates. Were they attracted to each other you are instantly asking me? Hey how in the hell do I know. I just invent half of this bullshit here, but I am not responsible for teenage crushes in the fifties or even James Dean like Rebel with or without a cause problems. I’ve had enough of that I can tell you that quickly for nothing. But then the answer is a definite yes. Lana does fancy Clark but he is such a ninny about these things ain’t he? He would rather go around lifting tractors off farmers, stopping trains or going for a burn around the planet in the stratosphere or higher or some such nonsense.

Well there she is. It’s Lana Lang reading a famous book on a couch. Lana who was most probably invented by Jerry Seigle and probably first sketched by Joe Shuster, is lying there relaxed for the most. Even if she does squirm her lusciously firm body on the red couch from time to time in between paragraphs. She is reading the famous book for the third time. It was released in the United States just recently, and Miss Kavanagh has, as is usual, been right on the ball here. She has skillfully guided Lana to another fine book or three. This book is bound a big hit with this most attractive sixteen year old ex Kryptonian.

Hey does this mean that I think Miss Kavanagh was a party to Lana’s dire secret then? Certainly she was and no doubt about that at all either. Of course she had to be. How can such a girl survive emotionally and mentally if she does not have a trusted female confidante in a town like Smallville. Hey I almost said ‘another sincere and understanding fellow human’ here before I had second thoughts on that subject. Like I said it is the year 1957 and Unwin and Unwin of Great Britain, have just published TLOTR in the United States. Few people on the planet comprehend what a buzz this book created wherever it is read on this spinning blue article of ours.

But of course Lana knows a thing or two, and she reckons that it’s a gasser alright Also it’s plain to see that Bilbo Baggins is having a few problems in this the second book of the mighty trilogy. Lana feels strongly about Bilbo and is inclined to identify with his somewhat messianic tendencies from time to time. She occasionally thinks of Clark between odd paragraphs too a she lies there in the sunshine. She, like the majority of her fellow female classmates, spends a deal of time dreaming and planning tactics to attract their particular guys. The guys are interested in the abstract mostly, but when push comes to shove they are more than likely to pike out on the matter. So was Lana panting for some boy just a little? And was that boy’s name Clark Kent? You bet your socks she was.

Now we must examine the history of superman as seen through the comics. Here I am mostly concerned with his emotional and sexual life as it can be discerned in either comic book form or in the films which have interpreted the tales. Superman is always shown as being very cool to another LL figure. I speak of Lois Lane of course. She is occasionally shown to be more than interested in the Clark Kent/ Superman character. The main reason given for his own rebuffs of any advances is naturally the protection of Superman’s alias. In the more recent Hollywood movie versions in fact superman’s relationship with Lois is undoubtedly ‘sexed up.’

But the comic book facts are being largely ignored here and the bare truth is that superman doesn’t seem to be all that interested in the opposite sex. Tis’ the 1950’s by now of course. In America the ‘Hayes Code’ comes to dominate Hollywood. If you dared to show a man and a woman on a bed one of their (two pairs of feet) must be shown to be touching the floor. Europeans thought this most weird and it was just that. The awful Senator McCarthy was running around in his drunken state with lawyer Richard Nixon in looking for Reds under everybody’s beds. When he thought he had found them he set out to sexiewillfully and ruthlessly to destroy their jobs and lives. Mr Richard Nixon however escaped almost unnoticed from the disastrous train wreck of Senator Joe’s career. But that is another tale I am beginning to weave about me and must now hurriedly leave it behind me for some time at least.

When Margot Kidder played Lois to Steve Reeves (the second) at first she was shown to be demure enough and only a small love interest was apparent, but all that soon changed. Flying at night above the New York landscape with Lois in his arms was tantamount to sex in the sexiest boudoir to be found in gay Paris. But again it is not the real superman of the comic book histories. The fact is obvious but Hollywood would not sell that fact. Superman was just not interested in ordinary women one little bit. This leads us to the question of whether superman and supergirl were indeed human at all? This is a very difficult question indeed to answer properly. We can’t be certain where Krypton lay in the universe. And we are not even sure if we humans are the only species of say ‘intelligent beings’ either. So it doesn’t provide us with many clues as to whether Lana Lang was a human being or nay.

Even if we accept that she is human, we can’t be sure of what her strange and unique condition has done to her. Emotionally is she similar to most of ‘us’ then? And what of her own sexuality as well? Does she respond in any ‘normal sense’ to sexual contact from another human at all? It’s really not all that easy to give any answers to these questions is it? However, I reckon that I have arrived at a logical conclusion to some of these tricky problems. It would seem to me that the young supergirl and superboy would seek solace in each other after coming to some sort of an understanding of their most lonely and almost unique condition. They were both made orphans at such a tender age. They both were given these terrible powers by a biological freak of nature. They were still only teenagers in a very small town and with little or no back up at all. Of course they were extremely vulnerable at best.

They may just have been a little emotionally damaged if they were ‘normal humans.’ But they were not human at all were they. No they were something other than normal human beings. This can never be denied. Did they respond to sexual advances from humans then? No almost never and the reason is that they were different enough from humans not to be excited by ‘normal’ sexual advances as we know them. But did they ‘use’ or require sex at all then? I think they did and they were both turned on by the other. I mean it seems obvious to me that only your own kind could give you the frisson needed to establish some kind of lasting sexual relationship. Supergirl and superboy were most certainly an item! Later on, when they matured it became trickier. There is the real possibility, that their sexual practices were quite alien to us too.

But I just do not want to go there thank you very much. And as there were only the pair of them on this planet and thus the sexual urges might have waned somewhat along normal lines of familiarity might they have not? Also they moved out of that small town and their paths are not shown as to have not often crossed. But this just might have been a good thing too. This may have saved their relationship. Perhaps they met infrequently and this kept them pumping hard. All of this cannot be proven of course so it lies there like truth or lies as yet untold or unknown.

And so a couple of hours from now Clark Kent’s foster father’s battered old pickup truck will be seen from this same bay window. Likely as not, it will be Lana who sees him coming as well. He will take Lana out on another date and it may just be that they will end up cuddling and snogging down around the time honoured tail light areas around the Lake Forebegonne in Pop Kents 1948 ford Roadster pickup. With super powers as well eh? Pity any ordinary bobbysoxer with the young model of superman folks. But do not go there David and shame on you for raising that matter at all Ye Editor. And if they are not even human we do not have a clue at all what they got up to in Pop Kents pickup back then do we. No doubt too, that the Indians of the old Ohio forest tribes would have done much the same back then. I mean be snogging away on their old bearskins down at the lake’s edge. Without the aid of motor vehicles that is. And Lana is just beginning to understand that Frodo and Bilbo Baggins and herself and superboy too, have a fair bit in common about their sexuality.

How is that so then you say? Both Frodo and Bilbo never married partly because of the hard nature of their adventures, and partly because they had been very damaged by the bloody ring. Too much power will do it every single time my friend. You only have to think on all those terribly famous fruitloops that we all know do we not? At least those crazies who are rich and or famous whom we think we know but don’t. Well doesn’t this seem to be just as we were saying above about our two comic book heroes too? Yep it does, and what’s more I am sure of it. They also have too much power, and they were always set apart from their (putative but unlikely) fellow humans. They have each other and that is certainly better than what was allotted to the Baggins boys.

But superman and superwoman that they became later were always going to be lonely. They did not need any French baguettes and too much cheap red wine to go with their existential philosophy too tell them that were very different from every other being on our medium sized blue planet. Always alone too, in so many ways they would be. Always, they were bound to feel ‘alien’ and so different to the earthlings around them. Just as Bilbo and Frodo were after they had been badly damaged by the ring. Pity them then. For supergirl and her counterpart superboy, are different enough to allow their minds to ask that same old awful question that other young humans often ask. Oh why me, oh why me then? After all they were still both teenagers. They always say, oh why, oh why could I not have been just like all the bloody others then?

By Jeff (rauncho) Lynch

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