I’m fascinated by the way that Lana and Pete are sometimes written as parallels to Lex in the comics, only they don't make the same choices that made him a villain. There was a silver age comic where Clark had a dream about Lana and Pete turning on him because they resented him rejecting them and were secretly jealous respectively.
Waid notably writes Pete and Lana in his Superboy series in contrast to how he writes Lex in his Birthright/Last Days saga. Clark’s relationship with Lex is that of him being like Clark and them both regretting that he didn't tell him the truth because he could have helped him feel less alone and truly connected with him. Whereas Pete and Lana are the comparatively normal friends who don’t understand Clark/Superboy’s loneliness or outsider status personally, but conclude they have to be allies and let Clark share with them on his own time.
In the bronze age there’s a story where Pete, in a fit of grief and betrayal, turned against Superman and broke into one of Lex's old hideouts to find weapons...
{DC Comics Presents #13, #14}
For the entire story Pete teeters the line of doing something he can’t take back, of letting his desire for revenge take him too far. In short, of becoming like Lex.
(Clark manages to make things right and their friendship survives. But if he’d listened to his other friends over his own better judgement he would've made the wrong decision.)
Another example of juxtaposition between one of them and Lex is the storyline in the post-Infinite Crisis/OYL era where Lana took over LexCorp when Lex was in jail and tried to run it ethically.
I do think this story would have been enriched by a stronger Smallville backstory in canon at the time because as it was I don't think it was truly explained why Lana ended up with control of LexCorp. It ended abruptly with Lex firing her from afar.
There doesn’t need to be a shared Smallville backstory for writers to eventually create a relationship between them either. While Pete and Lex were directly contrasted with each other in silver age stories (another example: Pete taking Lex's place in earth-175), in post-crisis, Lex recruited Pete who began to defend Lex and consider him a friend during the President Lex storyline.
{Adventures of Superman #585, #600, Superman #183}
In the background of this was the very uncomfortable indication that Lana hated Lex and was deeply traumatised by him kidnapping her, but couldn’t share this with her husband because it would compromise Clark’s identity. I need to talk about the mess this version made of both Pete and Lana's backstory, and how detrimental I believe it was for the characters involved, but that’s for another time...
Because when Lex begs Lana to kill him in Whatever Happened... it’s enriched by the fact that she grew up with him too. Silver age Lana knew Lex in Smallville. There were scenes where he helped her with her homework, or he went to the fair with her and Clark. She hated him for what he did to Superman, for the menace and monster he became, but she’s horrified by what happened to him. All that informs this moment.
Pete and Lana parallel Lex, especially in the silver age. They represent the childhood friends from Smallville who stayed loyal... but whom Clark still fears could turn on him because of his mistakes with them. Even stories which try to disavowal this (like Harvests of Youth, which contends that Clark doesn’t need Lex because he has Pete and Lana) ultimately reinforce this parallel.
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