Well, you couldn’t have googled it very hard, Amazing Magic-Gro Monster. I just went there and used the search terms “Jor-El” and “mother” and five of the first ten (out of 914 total) have the name Lara just in the link description.
That other one could be Lori Lemaris, a “mermaid from the lost continent of Atlantis.” Clark met her while a senior at the University of Metropolis and actually proposed (she was in a wheelchair with her “legs” covered.) She appeared in the storyline off and on for several years.
Or Lena Luthor, daughter of Lex Luthor and the Contessa.
Story is available here
Seriously though can someone explain to me the source of Superman’s powers’? In the movie (I think) it was explained that he could fly and have super strength because of the gravity ratio between Krypton and Earth.
However in the comic books is goes on to explain the he gets his power from our yellow sun.
Which one is it?
The comic books have a variety of explainations, depending on which era you read. I believe Burne did the most drastic revamp, making Supes powers come from the psychic realm, didn’t he?
But I think they later went back to the Yellow Sun thing. Heck, in his first appearances he couldn’t fly, so the gravity thing might have made more sense. But once you add flying that goes out the window.
Now, since Supes died and was resurected, who knows where his powers come from.
Heh…my grandparents were both L.L.s themselves, and so was my mom (until she got married), her sister, and one of her brothers. I’m not sure how my uncle Dave escaped being named something like Leonard…
(My initials are LLF. If I ever have kids none of them will have names beginning with L… :D)
Superman’s mom was named Camilla. Sometimes, Jor-El would tease her by calling her “Cam-El”, but she would get mad and super-kick him in the rear, so the whole “Cam-El” thing stopped pretty fast.
Well, there was a Phantom Zone villain called Kru-El. They indicated that he wasn’t a relative. For awhile, the letters columns of the magazines were overrun with people sending in various other “relatives” – the puns aren’t worth repeating.
There was also a member of the Legion of the Superheroes called Mon-El. He first showed up in Smallville with amnesia and Supes thought he was his brother; hence the -El. “Mon” was for “Monday,” the day they met. It turned out that Mon-El was vulnerable to lead, so Supes sent him into the Phantom Zone for a thousand years until Braniac 5 concocted an antidote.
Other trivia – at first, Supes’s father was called Jor-L. Later his uncle was introduced: Zor-El. Zor-El’s daughter, who later became Supergirl, was Kara.
The origins of Superman’s powers has changed from time to time. The original concept was that he was just more highly evolved than humans. He also had different powers – he couldn’t fly, but rather jumped from place to place like a giant grasshopper. There were also stories from that era that gave him telepathy and the ability to change his appearance, but they were quietly dropped.
Later the rationale was it was because of Earth’s lower gravity (for flying, super strength) and due to the rays of Earth’s yellow sun (just about everything else). Byrne changed it so that it was entirely due to the yellow sun, and that Supes stored energy over his childhood like a battery; this is what powers him. (In Byrne’s continuity, there was no younger version of Superman – Superboy, Superbaby – because his powers didn’t become apparant until he reached his teens.)
The LL thing was a big deal in 60s Superman continuity. Various villains and friends would show up with those initials, and sometimes with just a couple of L’s somewhere in their name. Lois Lane came first, then Luthor (he originally had bright red hair and no first name). Eventually Lex was tacked on.
Lana Lang came later, when DC started Superboy. They needed a “Lois Lane”-type character, so created Lana as the Smallville equivalent. Later they began to run with the LL thing (that may have been when Luthor got his first name).
As for Supes’s adopted parents, they were Sarah and Jonathan Kent. Sarah’s maiden name was Clark. In the TV George Reeves show, however, their names were given as Sarah and Eben Kent. Original Superboy continuity portrayed them as old and gray-haired and dead from a tropical disease they caught on an around-the-world trip Superman was taking them on. The comics once decided to make them younger, so concocted a plot that people from the future turned them younger to improve demographics. Byrne made them younger and kept them alive.
Kryptonian women used their father’s full name as their last name before marriage, and their husband’s full name after marriage. Superman’s mother’s name was Lara Kal-El, and his cousin’s name was Kara Zor-El.