Lois Lane #18

In the first story, Lois finds herself playing second banana to The Star Reporter of Metropolis. Mary Kenyon, a young college graduate, applies for a job at the Daily Planet. Perry's unimpressed with her clippings and tied up with plans for a major motion picture on the newspaper, so he turns the youngster down.

But Lois demonstrates her occasional admirable side:

Well, you can probably guess how that turns out; in short order Mary Kenyon, aided quite a bit by Superman, has a frequent byline on the front page of the Planet:

And when she coaxes a deaf man down from a ledge using sign language, it looks like Lois is headed for the features section. Then she gets a tip on the location of the most wanted man in the country. You've got to admire her courage, while questioning her common sense:

But Superman shows up in the nick of time to save her. And it turns out that Mary Kenyon's actually:

Yep, it was all a scheme so that Dolly could enact her role as Lois in the Daily Planet movie believably. Incidentally, the cast for the movie included Clark Gable as Perry, Rock Hudson as Clark, and Dwayne (Dobie Gillis) Hickman as Jimmy Olsen.

The second story is The Sleeping Doom. Superman makes his all-too-frequent mistake of giving a friend something from outer space:

Perry drops the jewel a little later and it breaks into three pieces. No problem, now Jimmy and Lois can each have their own fragment. That night, as they are sleeping, Perry and Jimmy are taken over by aliens within the jewel. Lois only escapes because she has to pull an all-nighter in order to finish an article for the paper. The next morning, Perry suggests that she reward herself with a nap, but she overhears him and Jimmy conferring:

So she decides to stay awake until Superman returns from a mission to outer space. Unfortunately, that won't be for ten more days, so she's forced to drink lots of coffee and other desperate measures:

Fortunately Superman returns just as she's about to fall asleep, and foils the alien plot.

The third story is the cover feature. An alien ship lands on Earth and Lois climbs aboard and meets Astounding Man. He's worshiped her from afar for years, in a rather creepy fashion:

We see some of the wonders of his home world:

As it happens, the New York Times reported just the other day on a prototype of just such a vehicle that Google is working on. Eventually Lois agrees to wed Astounding Man, even though he warns her that he has a secret. When she insists she loves him for the inner man, not his outward appearance, he does the big reveal:

Yep, Astounding Man was just an android being controlled by Oogamooga. Since she has given her word, she goes through with the wedding, but it turns out that the Lois who gets married is also an android. Cute ending:

Overall comments: This issue illustrates perfectly many of the continuing themes of the Silver Age Superman: the occasional selflessness of Lois, Superman's frequent mistakes involving objects from space, and the wonders of future technology. Very entertaining!