Lana Lang
36 years ago - Lana Lang is born in Smallville, the daughter of farmers. She is the fourth child and the only girl.
29 years ago - 7-year-old Lana first meets Clark Kent & Pete Ross when they start school a grade below her.
22 years ago - 14-year-old Lana starts Smallville High School's journalism club, becoming the anchor for their news program.
20 years ago - 16-year-old Lana Lang starts giving assignments to Clark Kent when he joins the journalism club.
19 years ago - 17-year-old Lana Lang is trapped outside on her families farm during a tornado, and Clark Kent flies for the first time to save her. She kisses him, and his heatvision is nearly triggered. They start to work together to understand his powers, growing closer.
18 years ago - 18-year-old Lana Lang & Clark Kent go to prom. They confess their feelings for each other, but come to understand that Clark's powers represent a greater calling, and that he will have to leave Smallville one day. She graduates, but is unable to attend college.
17 years ago - 19-year-old Lana Lang kisses Clark Kent goodbye when he leaves Smallville, and her world suddenly feel much smaller. She saves up money to move to Manhattan, Kansas where Pete Ross is attending Kansas State University, finding work in a local television station as a page.
16 years ago - 20-year-old Lana Lang starts Journalism classes at Kansas State University and becomes a copywriter at Channel 3.
14 years ago - 22-year-old Lana Lang gets her first job as a remote correspondent for Channel 3.
13 years ago - 23-year-old Lana Lang reads about the first appearance of Superman in the Daily Planet. She returns to Smallville, where she reconnects with Clark Kent and tells him how proud of him she is.
12 years ago - 24-year-old Lana Lang first meets Doug Parker, a student at the KU School of Law.
11 years ago - 25-year-old Lana Lang graduates with a degree in Journalism. She becomes one of the anchors of the Channel 3 News.
9 years ago - 27-year-old Lana accepts Doug Parker's proposal. They travel to Metropolis to introduce him to Clark Kent. Lana meets Lois Lane for the first time. She tells Clark that Lois is bringing out an openness and willingness to connect to the world in him that he has always needed.
7 years ago - 29-year-old Lana & Doug Parker are married in Smallville. She tells Clark Kent that she can tell he's changed for the better because of Lois Lane, and that maybe his need to be alone doesn't apply to her. When Bizarro appears at her wedding to kidnap Lois Lane he somehow recognizes that "Bizarro also hate Lana!" and takes them both. She learns that Clark has revealed his secret to her and she is furious at the deception. Lana helps her understand why Clark needed to do it, and how huge it is that he's finally able to open up to her. Clark saves them from Bizarro. Lana & Doug are married.
5 years ago - 31-year-old Lana takes a leave of absence from work and stays with Pete Ross in Smallville after the death of Clark Kent, comforting Ma & Pa Kent and Lois Lane. She returns to work when Clark is reveal to be alive, and tells her husband she wants to think about moving to Metropolis.
3 years ago - 33-year-old Lana gives birth to her son Andrew.
2 years ago - 34-year-old Lana becomes the new anchor of Metropolis News 8. She and Doug Parker move to Metropolis where he begins his own small firm. Lana befriends Kara Zor-El as she starts college.
There are so many takes on Lana Lang. Given that Smallville was a very prominent television series in a time when Superheroes on television just weren't as common, a lot of people today will likely remember Lana from that show. The reality is that Lana has had an unbelievably prominent role in Superman's lore, but that role has shifted dramatically a number of times for a variety of reasons. Lana has weathered some incredible changes that have actually rendered the original versions of the character largely obsolete, and yet she has remained a big part of Superman's story. The challenge then is to make sure that the adaptation of the character we create manages to fulfill those original versions of the character while still feeling like she belongs in the modern lore.
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Lana Lang's Comic HistoryLana appeared for the first time in Superboy #10 in 1950, in a story called "The Girl in Superboy's Life" where Lana's family moves in next door to the Kents (whose home is on a suburban street instead of a farm), where Lana is constantly trying to reveal that Clark is actually Superboy. It's hard to imagine, but for much of the 50s, Superboy was just as popular as Superman. Half the comics featuring Clark Kent were actually Superboy, and a lot of the lore that we now recognize as part of the Superman mythology was actually established in the pages of Superboy. So for a good long while, Superman's relationship with Lana & Pete was at least just as prominent and important as Lois & Jimmy.
In fact, in 1952, Lana actually showed up in the world of the adult Superman as well in Superman #78, establishing herself in Metropolis as a rival reporter and a rival love interest for Superman. She and Lois even lived together for quite a while, getting into a lot of Laverne & Shirley-style antics. All of this was happening while Lana continued to be the LONE love interest over in the pages of Superboy. Even as those stories started to get taken over by the Legion of Superheroes, Lana weathered that transition by actually getting some of the weirdest powers you've ever seen and joining their ranks as Insect Queen. |
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With the rise of the Legion of Superheroes, however, the prominence of the flashback stories of Superboy and his adventures in Smallville slowly diminished. The characters from that era became a little more vestigial to the lore of Superman. Lana's role in the stories of adult Superman persisted however, and in the seventies and eighties, her role as the rival to Lois continued, particularly when Clark left print news to become a TV reporter, where Lana was actually his co-anchor. Lana's role in Superman's world was so big that in 1986, when Alan Moore wrote "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?", a story intended as a sort of bookend to the classic Superman continuity before it was rebooted post-crisis, one of the questions he clearly had to answer was 'who does Superman finally wind up with, Lois or Lana?'.
When John Byrne rebooted the whole Superman continuity, one big change was the removal of the adventures of Superboy, but he also kept the world of Smallville more or less intact, something that had not been the case previously. Clark could now go home to the Kent farm to visit his still-alive parents... and while he was there he could talk to Lana, who was still there in Smallville. This depiction of Lana suffers from John Byrne's now infamous undermining of female characters, with her just sort of lingering in the past, pining for Clark in some sort of holding pattern... but it also established that she knew Clark's secret, and was a prominent part in his growing up and learning about his powers. |
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The Post-Crisis version of Lana did of course continue to evolve long after Byrne's reinvention, of course. Eventually, it was revealed that she actually married Clark's boyhood best friend Pete Ross, although evidently the relationship was pretty strained given how unbelievably obvious everyone's status as second prize clearly was. They had a child named Clark (really?) Pete became a US Senator, then Vice President under Lex Luthor, and then PRESIDENT after Lex went crazy. Eventually, in Kurt Busiek's run on the book in the mid 2000s Lana & Pete divorced, and Lana was actually chosen as the new CEO of Lexcorp in the aftermath of his arrest.
Lana does of course show up again in the New 52, where she grew up to become an electrical engineer working in Metropolis. Then, in the 2016 series Superwoman, Lana actually became empowered herself with powers similar to the electrical Superman of the '90s and became the new titular Superwoman, starring in a surprisingly good ongoing series. While it was fun to see Lana actually star in her own comic, perhaps the most innovative part of the series was the friendship that grew between Lana and Supergirl, and the romance between Lana and John Henry Irons. |
Our Lana Lang StoryThis was actually a much harder timeline to build than you might think. We all sort of inherently understand the role Lana plays in the development of teenage Clark, in how he learns about himself and his powers and the role he wants to play in the world. We also all recognize the idea of their friendship growing into something more as they get closer, only for Clark to realize that for him to become what he wants to become, to fulfill the destiny he feels calling to him, they can't really be together. We understand how Lana, even understanding all of that, would feel her world be so much smaller in the aftermath of being a part of something so big.
The hard part then is to understand what her role is going forward. There have been so many versions of Lana that have attempted to give her a place in the world, but we really wanted to try to understand who Lana would be just on her own if we weren't trying to squeeze her into Clark's world, and the answer, as it turned out, was that she was someone working very, very hard to achieve a dream of her own. She wanted to be a reporter even before Clark did; in a lot of ways, she's the reason Clark equates being a reporter with someone who strives to help people. She doesn't come from a family with a lot of money, which means she would have to work twice as hard to achieve that dream. Perhaps most importantly, we wanted her to have her own life. To get married, to have a child. Lana Lang's character, it turns out, is all about exploring all the ways you can remember and love the people from every part of your life, while still looking to your own future. |
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