While comic books dazzle readers with action-packed stories about superheroes saving the day or invite them into far-flung worlds, amidst all the superpowers and quests for justice there’s a little bit of romance, too. Nearly all of comics biggest and best heroes have love lives, making the heroes a little more relatable and giving fans something to root for beyond the good guys saving the world. Sometimes, those romances end badly but every so often, they thrive and almost 30 years ago, one of the best couples in comics made their love official by tying the knot and delivering on a romance that had been a fan favorite for decades.
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Published 29 years ago during the week of October 6, 1996, Superman: The Wedding Album finally saw the Man of Steel make it official with Lois Lane. The wedding was a major event for DC, one that finally brought together comics’ best couple after almost six decades of adventures together and it remains an important comics moment all these years later.
This Wasn’t Superman and Lois’ First Wedding (But It’s The One That Counts)
Part of what made Lois and Clark’s wedding in Superman: The Wedding Album so special is that this time, the marriage was for real. You see, over nearly 60 years of comics history together, Lois and Clark had been married before. Notably, for the 40th anniversary of Superman’s debut, there was an entire story in Action Comics #484 that saw JSA villain the Wizard use a spell to get rid of the Superman identity, leaving Clark to just be Clark and he ends up marrying Lois. It’s a wild, but charming story but it also is officially set on Earth-2 and that’s the thing about the weddings and marriages of Superman before The Wedding Album. They all either took place on alternate worlds or they were dreams or hoaxes or so-called “imaginary stories.” They didn’t stick and weren’t “real”.
That changed in the 1990s, but the road to The Wedding Album kicked off thanks to television. While a story for comics that would see the couple married was planned, ABC’s popular series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman had a similar story in the works. This led to DC delaying the comics event so the two stories could coincide. Needing to come up with a story to bridge the gap until the television series would get to the nuptials, Jerry Ordway jokingly suggested that they should kill Superman off in comics. And the idea took.
“The Death of Superman” event kicked off in December 1992 and shook DC. Superman died fighting the monstrous Doomsday and sent the DC Universe into mourning. The story arc — which saw Superman return, eventually — began a resurgence in interest in Superman comics as popularity had been waning for some time, but it also bought time for the television show to catch up.
Superman & Lois Have a Surprisingly Normal Wedding (Complete With Drama)
Given that the big wedding was set to be a cultural event thanks to the television series also taking the beloved characters down the aisle, The Wedding Album ended up being a full-on adventure, more akin to a comic book rom com than a standard superhero story. When The Wedding Album begins, Lois and Clark aren’t even together and the two have to rekindle their romance and decide to get marry as soon as possible. That in turn leads to various challenges in planning a major wedding that anyone who has ever tried to do the same thing in real life will recognize. It gives the story a very real-world element that honors the humor and history of the two characters.
The Wedding Album also delivers some classic superhero drama as well, with Superman being powerless thanks to the Final Night event, but still serving as Metropolis’ hero, suiting up and handling smaller threats as he can. Perhaps most importantly, though, the story was made into a community affair that sees the various superheroes from all across DC coming together to support Superman by stepping up to protect Metropolis so that Lois and Clark can celebrate their love (though they’re told it’s for a “secret mission”.) Batman even buys Superman and Lois their apartment as a wedding gift. It showed the impact of not just Superman on all of DC, but really made the comics universe feel like an extended family for readers.
Superman: The Wedding Album Reminds Readers That Love Is An Integral Part of the Superhero Story
While the wedding of Superman and Lois Lane was a landmark event in comics giving one of its most enduring couples a much deserved and long-awaited “happily ever after”, the event was more than just a fun story that established a new status quo. The story serves as a reminder that superhero stories are human stories, even when the characters have incredible and fantastic powers. While on the Marvel side of the industry a beloved couple’s marriage would be erased to make that superhero more relatable (Spider-Man, we’re talking about Spider-Man here), DC’s choice to make its biggest hero and his longtime love official showed that love, romance, and finding one’s partner is an important part of the superhero story.
And the relationship between Superman and Lois continues to be a cornerstone of DC. 29 years after The Wedding Album, Lois and Clark are still going strong with their relationship being one of the constants even with different events, stories, and even reboots. While there have certainly been stories and initiatives that put the two characters in different places in their relationship, they always come back together. They’re the heart of DC as a couple, and they should be for many more decades to come.
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image courtesy of 20th Century Studios
