Rapid Review - Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #72

When I saw it on eBay, for a meager $4, I couldn't resist. It was a copy of Lois Lane that I'd never seen, but had a mention of my favorite hero in it. I suspected, and I was right, that Aquaman didn't appear at all in the tale. But it was a lot of fun anyway, so I'm going to give you a little review of it.

This is a solid Silver Age book, from February 1967. The full title of the series was "Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane", and this is issue #72. According to the GCD, the series ran for 137 issues starting in 1958. This issue has two Lois Lane stories, one of them a reprint from Lois Lane #37.

The title story is "Lois Lane's Aquaman Tricks!" which is what got me interested. And, sure enough, Lois gets to pull an Aquaman in the story, but it takes awhile to get around to it. The story starts on the campus of Pacific University, where a taxi has pulled up delivering guest lecturer Lois Lane. The students are extremely interested in Lois' lovelife, and one of them goes so far as to "play campus cupid", setting her up with Professor Thorne, and icthyologist who is in a wheelchair because of injuries he got from a landmine in Vietnam. As the students planned, she falls for him hard. The Aquaman bit comes in when he reveals that he can control fish with a device he's created. He later saves her life with the device, and ... well, that would be telling, wouldn't it? The ending was a bit annoying, in a Silver Age kind of way, but it was nice to see a person in a wheelchair portrayed as a very sympathetic character. And, hey, Lois got to play at Aquaman. That's something.

The second story, "The Forbidden Box!" was first published in 1962 and has a completely different flavor to it. The artwork appears to be Curt Swan, and is noticably different from Kurt Schaffenberger's work on the first story. In the story, Superman challenges Lois to not be such a snoop, giving her a box that she can't open. To add to the challenge, the box has some... strange qualities. Namely, it flies around begging Lois to open it. There are some really nice touches in this one, including Jimmy pointing out to Lois that she's shaking the box to try to see what's in it, even while she was protesting that she wasn't at all curious. At one point Lois also takes sleeping pills to keep herself from opening the box.

Anyway, this is a fun little book, the kind you just don't see much of anymore. Yeah, there's a lot of silliness in the Silver Age, but sometimes silly just works. And in this book, it's just what's needed.