In a previous post, I took a good hard look at an issue of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, but I would be remiss in not giving equal time to that other shameful Superman-related artifact of the Silver Age, Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane.

The Lois Lane series was made primarily for girls. Nowadays, there are about thirty females in the entire continental United States who actually read comic books, but once upon a time, comics meant for girls sold just as well as comics meant for boys. In fact, Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane was reportedly the third highest selling comic book of 1965, with a monthly circulation of over half a million copies. (Compare and contrast with the highest selling comic of November 2009, which moved a paltry 144,868 copies.)

As a girlie comic in pre-feminist times, Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane was almost exclusively about Lois Lane’s romance with Superman, and every issue featured one of Lois’s wacky schemes to get Superman to marry her, or one of her many attempts to ferret out his secret identity. The rest of the time, Lois was shamelessly vying with that slut Lana Lang for Superman’s affections. At some point, it seems the writers just plum gave up, and wrote dozens of “imaginary stories” featuring Lois getting married to Superman and having his babies.

By the 1970s, there were attempts to turn Lois Lane into a more serious title focusing on social issues, like the particularly embarrassing issue #106 titled “I Am Curious (Black!)”, where Lois steps into a machine that transforms her into a black woman. (And it only took Sammy Sosa 40 years to figure out how to reverse the process.)