Silver Age LOIS LANE comics have taken a lot of heat for making the female protagonist look foolish, often by some contrivance brought about by her supposed boyfriend Superman, seeking to teach the impulsive lady reporter some sort of "lesson." Some commentators have jumped to the conclusion that the LOIS book was some sort of kiddie-level diatribe against the female of the species.
Of course, this doesn't entirely cohere with the fact that girls of middle school age were most likely the audience that made LOIS LANE a successful magazine throughout the sixties, though the title petered out in the early seventies. Certainly the conventional wisdom of the times asserted that boys did not buy comics that starred girls, with the possible exception of the more lubricious titles (SHEENA and the other jungle-girls, for example). I was brought up in that Silver Age culture, and I can remember feeling disdain for "girl comics," even though I have no idea where that perceived taboo came from. So assuming that most of LOIS's readers were young girls, it's hard to see why they would have supported a title that made their gender look bad, even in the days before full-fledged feminism took hold.
Now, LOIS LANE, like its companion spinoff JIMMY OLSEN, varied between showing the protagonist as foolish in some stories but clever in other ones. Thus any girls who consistently read the book would probably have twigged early on that Lois wasn't ALWAYS a goofball. Given that circumstance, it's possible that those contemporaneous readers just didn't subject their comics-characters to intense sociological scrutiny, precisely because "clever Lois" counteracted the influence of "foolish Lois." This meant that at times Lois-- despite being locked in to her permanent status as "Superman's girlfriend"-- was shown as having her own agency.
"Courtship, Kryptonian Style" (whose title was borrowed from at least one of two similarly titled Italian films of the sixties) straddles the "Clever Lois/ Foolish Lois" categories, as well as extending the same largesse to the protagonist's frequent rival/guest-star, Lana Lang. Writer Leo Dorfman and penciler Kurt Schaffenberger jockey back and forth in their depictions of Lois and Lana, who both seek to free themselves from their enthrallment to Superman but still end up competing for his "hand" in the end.
"Courtship" is technically the second half of a two-part story, but the first part, from LOIS #76, is really just a set-up for Part Two. In #76, both Lois and Lana come across what seems to be a magical genie in a bottle. This genie comes complete with Middle Eastern garments and orange-hued skin (maybe brown skin was a bit too suggestive for the time?), and he calls himself Vitar. Lois and Lana both use Vitar to make frivolous wishes designed to gain attention from Superman, and each explicitly wants to trump her rival. However, it turns out that Vitar's origins lay in a totally different type of bottle-- the Bottle City of Kandor, a Kryptonian city preserved as it were "under glass." Vitar, using some sort of cosmic viewscope to follow Superman's exploits, resents the fact that the hero keeps two women on the string (harem envy, anyone?).
Vitar's genie-imposture doesn't make any sense, even for a Silver Age story. But Vitar's apparent sincerity-- that he would like to marry either Lois or Lana if they all get the chance to know one another well-- impresses the women. So, since any woman who married Vitar would have to join him in the Bottle City, both Lois and Lana elect to leave their regular lives behind and emigrate to Kandor. Dorfman, knowing that this is not a permanent change, expends no effort on explaining their mind-set. The only important thing was to show the women making an attempt to distance themselves from the man who repeatedly claims he can't marry any mortal woman, lest she be slain by one of the hero's many enemies.
All that said, Dorfman hedges his bets. No sooner do Lois and Lana begin their new life in Kandor than they start missing Superman, just as he is seen (however briefly) yearning after them. To their consternation, the ladies becomes jealous when they observe (via another cosmic viewscope) one of Superman's heroic deeds. They witness the Man of Steel enjoying the presence of two Kandorian girls who are exact doubles of Lois and Lana, who are allowed to leave Kandor to lend the hero a helping hand. (It's the Kandorian double of Lois that the reader sees on the issue's cover, bouncing bullets off her boobs, and neither she nor Kandor-Lana has any real designs on Superman.)
The only real romance-oriented threat comes from Vitar's ex-girlfriend Serena Vol, who tries to sabotage the ladies' entrance into Kandorian society in a fatal fashion.
The ladies are told that Kandor does not allow "idleness" on the part of its citizens, so Lois and Lana have to have their aptitudes analyzed by an "analyzer beam" in the "psychodrome." The women are told that their real aptitudes are not their actual jobs-- reporter and newscaster-- but rather, that Lois would be best off as a detective and Lana as an archaeologist. This development is the psychological core of the story, for even though the ladies get their talents boosted by Kandorian info-downloads, the change gives readers the chance to see Lois and Lana living lives independent of Superman.
Not for very long, though. Vitar (who no longer has orange skin, BTW) dates both women briefly, but he quickly intuits that they're still batty for the Metropolis Marvel. So he reveals, out of nowhere, that he has an invulnerability serum, but only enough for one of the ladies. It's presented as a given that if one of them becomes immune from harm, Superman will just have to marry the Invulnerable Girl, irrespectively of whether he really loves her better than Non-Invulnerable Girl. Vitar proposes a test-- like Superman, Vitar is big on testing his loved ones-- saying that the woman who can solve a recent crime, the theft of a Kandorian artifact-- will get the serum, and by extension, the Man of Steel. (Does Vitar contemplate making up to the less successful woman? Dorfman does not say so, but it would be a logical conclusion.)
So Detective Lois and Archaeologist Lana begin their separate paths to track down the artifact-thief, and Dorfman is at his most clever in figuring out ways in which both girls' specialties can shine. While they're still separate, both ladies are briefly menaced, and though neither woman sees her assailant clearly, they both assume it's that ex-girlfriend Serena Vol. It's strange that neither Earth-woman suspects the other Earth-woman, given that their history is one of undercutting one another. The two women come together and track down the thief together, though Lois technically wins the contest because she's had Kandorian karate-skills downloaded into her brain, allowing her to beat the guy up. Winning the contest means nothing, though, because Vitar then reveals that his invulnerable serum just wears off in a short time.
And what mysterious women were menacing the lady sleuths? No, not red herring Serena Vol. It was the two Kandorian doubles, with "Kandor-Lois" trying to help "Earth-Lois" win the contest while "Kandor-Lana" did the same for "Earth-Lana." This may have restored the readers' expectations in the tendency of Lois and Lana to trump each other-- even if their doubles do the dirty deeds. But this last bit of craziness turns the Earth-girls off Kandor, and they implore Superman to bring them back to their home, their status quo, and, one assumes, their uninterrupted day-jobs. For a romantic finish, Vitar marries Serena Vol, forgiving her for her rash actions because 'twas all for love, I guess.
Having devoted all this time to the psychological myth of the empowered love-slave, I have to add the non-mythic note that I thought the name "Serena Vol" was unusually resonant for a nothing character who doesn't even have a line of dialogue. I finally recalled that about a year before this story, Leo Dorfman scripted the first Silver Age appearance of The Catwoman for two issues of LOIS LANE. And for one panel, Dorfman does use the canonical real-world cognomen for the Feline Felon-- "Selina Kyle." Perhaps he came up with a similar name because he subconsciously thought of Serena Vol as-- "catty?"
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