Review by Frank Plowright
Right from the start Sarah Kuhn delivers a very driven Lois Lane who at eighteen has a lifeplan that culminates with her winning Pulitzer Prizes as a Daily Planet journalist in Metropolis. She’s just aced all her school exams and now has an internship in National City.
Everything is going swimmingly until Lois discovers her mother has colluded with the mother of the former best friend she fell out with, and she’s going to be spending the summer sharing an apartment with Miki Mahara. Their mothers felt it was time they worked out their problems. That’s not the only spanner thrown in the works as when Lois arrives for her first day at work it’s the final day for the woman who hired her.
In this young adult incarnation Lois has an Asian-American heritage, although the way she’s drawn by Arielle Jovellanos doesn’t make this clear, which is somewhat the fudge. It plays into her personality, though, with frequent phone calls from her mother resurrecting the past. However, it’s not enough to dispel the idea of Girl Taking Over being a box-ticking concession to diversity. Why couldn’t the story be built around a driven Asian-American girl who looks more like an Asian-American girl and who isn’t Lois Lane? Because DC wanted to trade on whatever prestige her name has.
Leave that to one side, and this is a spirited playing out of someone making the best of the cards they’ve been dealt, stopping off to discuss racial stereotyping and infused with clever ideas. One is Lois being so driven that when she’s asked to write a youth-oriented article she has no idea where to start as she’s been too busy working to be a youth. The warning is, though, that no matter how hard she may have worked in school, Lois still occupies a world of privilege where she can walk into an internship and has a relative willing to donate a spare apartment for the summer.
Jovellanos takes Archie Comics for the starting point of her lively, personality rich art, given a vibrant polish by Olivia Pecini’s colours. However, unlike the Archie material of old Girl Taking Over supplies decorative full page pin-ups, creative montage spreads and other spreads all thoughtfully constructed.
In the end this is a coming of age story confronting Lois with some of the world’s unfortunate truths and building to a natural crisis point. Will Lois see her way through and put the world to rights?
