Comics' most famous girlfriend (with the possible exception
of Olive Oyl), Lois Lane
is also the first superhero love interest to earn her own
montly book, starting in March, 1958.
First envisioned as a hard-nosed reporter ala Rosalind
Russell's Hildy Jonson character in His Girl
Friday (1940), Lois evolved over time into a reckless
trouble-magnet, persistent snoop and habitual hostage. Obsessed
with the twin goals of exposing Superman's secret identity
and becoming his wife, Lois for some reason never caught
on that the first goal was seriously undermining the second.
Through the fifties and sixties, Lois was, at best, a sort
of brunette Lucy Ricardo, bumbling into
one hare-brained misadventure after another. At worst, she
was the embodiment of every negative stereotype little boys
held about females; manipulative, deceitful, vindictive
and forever scheming. With her in the picture, shackles
of Green Kryptonite were less fearsome than the bonds of
matrimony.
In short, I'm not a fan. However, Lois' adventures were
often among the wildest and most far-fetched of the era,
and benefited from amazing artwork by Kurt Schaffenberger
and sometimes Curt Swan, and just by virtue of being at
the epicenter of all the bizarre and unhealthy emotional
game-playing the Silver Age Superman mythos was famous for,
Lois definitely deserves her own little corner of this site.
